A lot to unpack here.  Our friend seems to be beaten down by life, on his hands and knees, devastated by loss, despondent, and tired.  Bogged down by disappointment and life in general, maybe even ready to give up on his dreams and hopes.

In front of him are 3 spilled cups, and his focus and attention is on them, mourning what he sees as loss and failure.

Very often when we visualise and focus on what we want in our lives, we have a certain picture or image of what that would look like, when it looks different to what we expected, we believe we have failed.

A simple example of this – many people are very concerned by the environmental pollution in our cities etc and spend much of their energy on protesting and focussing on fixing that and brow-beating others to do the same.

So, in 2020, the universe goes – ok, the best and simplest way of sorting out the pollution in cities is to empty them – presenting universal lockdown – ta da! The air in our cities cleared up as requested – not quite what you were looking for? Oops!

When we focus on manifestation, we very rarely think about what it would mean practically. It is all well and good dancing among the daises and blowing rainbows out your arse, but at some point, you are going to need to “come down to earth” so to speak.

We are physically manifested in a physical reality, and while the spiritual reality, or what some may consider the “ideal” appears to be much more pleasant, this is the reality we are in, and we cannot discount the physical laws of this reality.

We can work with them, we can look at them in a different way, perceive them differently, sure, but we cannot break them because breaking them is ALWAYS temporary, and ALWAYS causes destruction.

The Earth and our reality are living things, and just like us, constantly striving for balance, so when the balance is damaged, the “blueprint” kicks in to rebalance things.

I often look around at the world and the insanity reigning at the moment and wonder how the hell we got here.  If you think about it though, it is quite simple.

For many, many years “spiritual types” have been raising the light, creating “christ consciousness grids”, sacrificing themselves for the “greater good” etc.. 

The energy of the earth is one of polarity, it is what makes our reality so powerful and grows our souls, (the hermetic principles of polarity and gender are worth exploring here), and everything is designed to be in balance.

The energy of our reality is now so focussed on “being right”, “doing the right thing”, “being a good person”, “fixing the bad stuff in us”, “fixing the world” etc. that our reality is out of balance, and will naturally tend towards “darker” aspects, criminal activity, anger, aggression, domination, tyranny etc, to re-balance the integrity of our reality.

These activities are also often practiced by the very people “doing good” for “the greater good”, or like South Africa, fighting racism, by becoming even more racist, just focussed differently. Victims of narcissistic abuse, becoming narcissists themselves, and many other things.

To us, this looks like a total failure of our spirituality and religions, so we fight harder to “do good”, unbalancing the energy even further.

What we have failed to realise is that, from our physical manifestation perspective, light and dark need to be experienced separately for them to have any meaning. You cannot experience love if you don’t know fear, you couldn’t experience the beauty of a sunrise, or sunset, if there was no night.

From a more “aware” perspective, we can understand that dark does not exist, it is merely the absence of light; but in our physical experience they must exist in opposition for us to have the experience of them.

So, by fighting “darkness” as “evil” and making it our life mission to destroy “evil” within ourselves and the world, we are farting against thunder and destroying our reality.

Not only are we fighting something that, in truth, does not actually exist, we are wasting energy on external change, rather than embracing and accepting ourselves exactly as we are, loving ourselves as we are and living in the fullness of who we really are, an aspect of the divine, manifest in physical reality to experience and embrace all aspects of this reality, and grow the universal consciousness.

This is the process of the Shadow – Yes Madam J, I know, I know, I am getting it sorted – the course will be re-released soon – this year – promise!

This is only half the story of the card though, it is the five of cups and we have only highlighted three, where are the others? They are behind him, still full, still upright and glistening in the sun. On a firm foundation and in front of a beautiful cityscape.

So, what’s that about? This brings the true message of the card, behind the apparent despair and devastation, there is a new life.  It may look very different to what you expect, but it has been part of your manifestation too.

We will always get exactly what we give energy too.  If what you are experiencing does not appear to be matching what you are focussing on, or is not what you expected, see if you can look at things differently, from a different angle maybe, and maybe you will see that it is there, just in a way you did not expect, or maybe something has manifested that you thought was your ideal, but now it is here, doesn’t work for you – back to the drawing board then.

Feel your way through, maybe some of your fears impacted the manifestation, maybe by rejecting something, you actually energised it?

Take a breath and look around, you might amaze yourself.