Gift ⭐️ Justice Rx
You don't have to be good. You don't have to be fair to everyone. You don't have to meet everyone else's expectations. In fact, your primary job is to take care of yourself. We are conditioned to think that meeting other people's expectations and taking care of their needs is the only way to survive. And that may be true to a certain extent when we are children. We avoid punishment and get our needs met by first meeting our parents needs. If they want us to be quiet, we strive to be quiet. If they want us to be perfect, we strive to be perfect. If they have unreasonable expectations, we learn that we are never enough. And even if their expectations are reasonable, they may not be aligned with our true selves, and so we are always acting *for* someone else, rather than from a place of authenticity and joy. By taking care of yourself, by setting healthy boundaries and not looking to others to validate your existence, you may let someone else down. But if you do, it is a necessary part of the process of becoming your truest self and finding self-acceptance.
Challenge ⭐️ Hierophant Rx
The challenge in this is that we live in a society with many layers of institutions, each of which have their own expectations for us. Our relationship to our parents is the first in a long succession of hierarchical structures which we must contend with throughout our lives. And that is why it is so vital to learn how to protect ourselves within those structures. Ultimately, it will be necessary to work within them at least some of the time, but it doesn't mean that they define us or that we have to subscribe to everything they stand for. Especially when the institutions themselves are corrupt or unfair. It is vital that we maintain our own sense of identity and our own value system, so that we can fight against the abuses of power thatconflict with our own best interests and the best interests of those with even less power than ourselves.
Advice ⭐️ The Chariot Rx
This week, the advice is to slow your roll, especially when you find yourself operating within someone else's agenda. Take some time to be sure that you agree with the direction it is taking you. And if not, you may want to hop off or, if you see a real injustice at work, you may want to do what you can to throw a stick into those spokes and stop the wheel from turning. I'm talking about resistance in the sense of political activism, but also in regards to our own personal lives. Too often we let ourselves be carried along by others' desires or by systems that have no real connection to us, simply because we don't want to make the effort to remove ourselves and say we want to go a different way. Don't let anyone else dictate the direction of your life. 🏼
Tarot deck used: Pagan Otherworlds Tarot
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