We Accept the Good We Think We Deserve

Or, what the Nine of Cups can teach us about self-sabotage

Rather listen to this newsletter than read it? Scroll to the end for the audio! This special feature is available to paid subscribers only. Thank you for your support!

My husband and I have been searching - sometimes with casual curiosity and other times with desperate urgency (mostly just my desperate urgency) - for a new place to live.

It’s not that I have grown to despise the two roosters next door, or the daily roulette game we like to call “Will the remote control actually open the gate so I can get to work on time or will I have to throw another fit?” or anything like that.

It’s just that after a decade here, I feel ready for an upgrade.

(At this point, the Armenian in me would like to interrupt this regular programming to knock on wood, bite my palm, spit over both shoulders, and clutch my evil eye necklace in an attempt to protect the writer in me who insists on telling the world her business and inviting all sorts of energy into her life. Hopefully she is appeased by this parenthetical aside. On we go.)

Today, we actually saw an apartment that didn’t make me cry in the car afterwards because it was asking for the first born son I don’t even have for what is basically a kitchen connected to a toilet via a hallway some real estate investor has the audacity to call a living room.

It was spacious. Filled with light. Updated even.

We asked the agent if we could check out the yard (there’s a yard!) one more time, which really was an excuse to get away from her long enough to have our now well rehearsed huddle about how to bring up the fact that we have a dog, and no it’s unfortunately not the size of a hamster, and why do you even have an outdoor area if you’re not going to allow dogs anyway, so really who’s the guilty party here?

We decided to be completely up front with her and say we have a dog and that no he is not tiny but he is old and has lived in a 600-square foot upstairs apartment for most of his life and we really just want to give him a place to nap in the sun and watch the birds before he fucking dies, is that too much to ask? (I’m paraphrasing.)

And then we braced ourselves for the inevitable line we have heard a dozen times now: “I’m sorry, there’s a strict weight restriction. But thank you for coming by.”

But you know what this agent said instead?

“Your dog would love it here. In fact, the woman next door has an old dog too. They could be old man friends!”

And before I could burst into tears, she went on:

“The neighbors here are lovely. The woman next door is a professor.”

“That’s so funny, I’m a professor!” I replied.

“Are you? How nice. She’s a writer.”

“I’m a writer!”

“Wait, really!? I mean, that’s what she teaches. She’s an English professor. What do you teach?”

And right as I keeled over from shock, she handed us the keys and we lived happily ever after.

Just kidding.

That’s not the point of today’s newsletter or tarot card pull.

The point of today’s tarot newsletter is this:

It was the first time my husband and I were equally excited about a home we had seen, little synchronicities like the exchange above were happening for the first time since we had started this godforsaken apartment search, and nonetheless, I found myself looking around at the hardwood floors and the panoramic view of the mountains around me and saying to myself:

This place is too nice. I don’t get to live in a place like this. This is not the type of place people like me get to call home. Do I even work hard enough for this home? Like, do I deserve to live here?

And let me tell you, friends. I pull this shit all. the. time.

Do you ever catch yourself doing this?

It’s energetic self-sabotage. We can only receive the good we think we deserve, so if we start doubting our worthiness, we are telling the Universe, “No thanks, I’m fine".”

We see this lesson in the Nine of Cups.

The figure in this tarot card sits proudly and confidently before his nine cups. He has embraced all nine of those cups because he feels worthy of them and can fathom not only the thought of receiving them from the Universe, but also the thought of accepting them as his new reality.

The Nine of Cups tarot card is often referred to as the wish fulfillment card. It’s also deemed one of the luckiest cards in the tarot deck to draw! Your wish is my command, says the genie.

(In fact, if you’re old enough to get this reference, the way the figure in the Nine of Cups card places his arms over one another in front of his chest even reminds me of Barbara Eden’s famous wish-granting pose in I Dream of Jeannie!)

But the promise of the Nine of Cups is a double-edged sword. “Your wish is my command” is a double-edged sword. What it really means is “Your wish - as you are ready to receive and accept it at this time, and nothing more - is my command.”

Doesn’t the figure in the Nine of Cups seem perfectly pleased with his loot though? So what’s the problem?

Well, what if he asked for nine cups because he’s only ever had nine, and his parents only ever had nine, and their parents only ever had nine, and he doesn’t believe that he is capable or deserving of more than nine? What if his dream was actually ten cups? Or twenty for that matter? But when it came down to it he started doing what I caught myself doing at today’s open house?

What if he’s selling himself short?

The Nine of Cups is one of the cards Pamela Colman Smith, the illustrator of the Rider Waite Smith tarot deck, modeled after a Shakespeare character. In this case, the tarot card is said to depict Falstaff from Henry IV.

(Fun fact: Just this morning, I received a mildly threatening email from the campus bookstore notifying me that my spring semester textbook order is late and the reason for this - I kid you not - is that I’m still deciding between two different editions of Henry IV!)

We meet Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1 as Prince Hal’s heavy-drinking, happy-go-lucky, and utterly ambitionless sidekick slash mentor who is arguably distracting Hal from taking his rightful place in his father’s court as the future king and dreaming of something more for himself than partying all night and sleeping all day. Falstaff, having given up on any possibility of purpose and honor, has mastered the art of accepting his lot in life and settling for easy pleasures where he can get them. He’s done dreaming and is content with what little he deems possible for himself.

Many of us (okay, me) look to our present and past conditions as evidence of what is possible for us. We may complain and fantasize and dream about having more or better, but when it ultimately comes down to it, we can’t actually accept as a possibility anything that we have not already seen in our reality. And if we can’t spiritually and energetically and wholeheartedly accept it as a reality that we deserve, how can we attain it?

In The Science of Mind, Ernest Holmes asserts:

How much can we see, how much can we accept, how much can we find in our consciousness that is no longer repudiated by our own denials? Whatever that is, that much we can have.

. . .

If we can conceive only a little good, that is as much as we can experience. We must instill into the mind the fundamental proposition that good is without bounds. . . .

Let us begin to accept today more good than we experienced yesterday.

I don’t think drawing the Nine of Cups in a tarot reading necessarily tells us whether a wish we have will be granted. Rather, I think it presents us with a choice: Do we choose to limit ourselves to what we have already experienced? Or do we choose to accept even more good today than we experienced yesterday?

If you similarly find yourself wishing for change but then resisting it when it starts to become a possibility in your life, here’s a tarot spread that can help!