The DAB reading this morning was about the story of Balaam and how he compromised his integrity for personal gain. I think this may have influenced my choice of love doves as the theme for the Tarot of the Wyld Godde Lovers card. When I was doing a lot of love and relationship readings on my old Love Dove Tarot site, I often compromised my integrity by doing readings that made me feel psychically unclean.
It wasn’t so much for the money. Heck, I would have been better off on income support. But I wanted my clients to like and accept me. So I often said yes to reading requests that my gut told me to say no to.
The Lovers is about love relationships, sure. But it is also very much about making the morally correct choice. In the Marseille-style Tarot decks, we see this clearly. A man stands between two potential partners. Does he go for the older woman with the laurel wreath of virtue on her head? Or will he choose his younger, less virtuous paramour?
In very few circumstances in life are our boundaries tested the way they are in love relationships. And it is only when we truly love and honour ourselves that we don’t sell out or compromise our boundaries. This is a remnant of RTS that I still have to repair in my psyche. No matter how Christianity frames it, from a religious perspective, I am pure filth and only worthy to be in the presence of the Spirit once I have been washed by the blood of Christ.
Unlovable
In other words, there is nothing inherently worthy of love in me. God, the Father, only accepts and tolerates me because of what his blameless son, Jesus Christ, did for me. God may have ‘so loved the world’ as a project to redeem but through the lens of Christianity, I never got the feeling that he actually loved or even tolerated me. In that, he was much like my own father. I guess that made it easy for me to buy the package deal.
This feeling of being inherently unlovable made it as easy for me to compromise my boundaries with lovers as it did with clients. Though, to be fair, I did turn down clients who wanted me to use the cards to figure out clever ways to cheat on their spouses etc. And I must have done some inner healing work to manage to stay happily married for the past almost eight years. But yes, there is still work to be done.
Manipulation
So what does this have to do with the story of Balaam? The story of Balaam is about how we create wiggle room to try to manipulate God into getting our own way. In my career as a tarot reader specialising for many years in relationship readings, I have seen this aplenty. And I also admit to doing this myself.
But I did it all for love, not for gold. And I did it out of hurt because I couldn’t see myself as deserving of true love. Hurt people hurt people as the saying goes. I tapped on resistance to self-love this morning. It was tough and I cried my way through the session. But I know I have to tap into self-love (pardon the pun) in order to love others better. The constant fear of rejection has to stop, as does the self-isolation.
“Perfect love casts out fear”
In 1 John 4:18, we learn that perfect love casts out fear. What I love about that sentence is the present tense of the verb. It alerts me to the fact that this is a process and not something done once and for all in the past. I find that EFT/tapping really helps with this process. So I have started incorporating EFT with my prayer time. My body simply isn’t getting the message of love in the Gospel. And there is plenty of trauma stored in there, blocking/resisting the love from getting in and flowing through me.
But I know that love wins.
7 Questions from the Wyld Godde Tarot Lovers
- What is your most recent relationship lesson?
- What in your past does this lesson relate to?
- How have you manipulated others in past relationships?
- What are your personal boundaries like and when did you last compromise them?
- What are your self-acceptance and trust levels like?
- Where in your body is any trauma relating to manipulation in relationships stored?
- What habit can you establish as part of your daily routine to nurture self-compassion?
