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What Does Your Inner Child Need?

The Six of Cups from The Wildwood Tarot and The Gateway to the Divine Tarot

Are you feeling overwhelmed these days? Maybe you’re keeping track of baseball schedules, music lessons, your job, meals, volunteer work, etc… and then there are the errands. You’ve got emails to return, permission slips to sign, and every time you see one of your family members they remind you of something they need you to do. There aren’t enough hours in the day to get it all done and everything feels too important to let go. You drop into bed exhausted and have trouble falling asleep because now your head is filled with the bills you need to pay and the little things you forgot to do…. you’re exhausted and finally fall asleep (or not) knowing that you’ll get up tomorrow and do it all again. It’s exhausting just writing about it, much more, living it.

If this, or some version of it closely resembles your life on a consistent basis, then The Six of Cups is really speaking to you and here’s the message: You need to hit the “reset button” by giving your Inner Adult a break and entertaining your Inner Child. Of course, your Inner Adult may be reading this and saying, “Absolutely impossible,” but that’s what our Inner Adults do – especially when they are in high gear. The Six of Cups reminds us that a healthy person needs to maintain a balance between both Inner Child and Inner Adult. Our Inner Adults help us stay grounded, make good decisions, and work towards goals. Our Inner Children keep us inspired, playful, and content. We can be irresponsible, ungrounded and chaotic if our Inner Children are constantly in charge, and our lives can get equally messy, colorless, and uninspiring when our Inner Adults are running the show. It’s like the Von Trapp children from “The Sound of Music” – if your life feels a little bit like those marching kids in their uniforms answering to the Captain’s whistle, then you need a little music, creativity and fun to reunite you with your heart – home to your absolutely adorable and loveable Inner Child. You need your version of Fraulein Maria to come in and spice things up a bit…. and if you’re not familiar with these “Sound of Music” references you might start by watching this classic movie (singing about your “Favorite Things” is guaranteed to make you feel sillier, freer, and a lot better : )

This is really the message of The Six of Cups…. to reconnect with your heart and transform your Inner Adult from a cold task master back into a loving parent. The first step is doing something that feels good to your starved Inner Child. This might mean that you need to take a break and completely change the channel for a few hours or it might mean that you need to approach what you’re already doing with fresh eyes and a lighter step. For example, this weekend my Adult felt that we needed to clean out the barn/garage. It was overdue and had grown into a huge task. As we began the process my partner, Joel, was anxious. He knows that when I go into “high gear” things can get pretty tense, but I had already been reminded during the week that I needed to slow down, pace myself and find the fun in the process. Keeping this in mind…when I found the old hula hoop I took a few minutes to try it out. I let my creative spirit enjoy the treasure hunt aspect of going through old things that I had forgotten about. We talked about ideas for our yard as we worked side by side and played music the whole time. We stopped at regular intervals, got drinks of water, admired our handy work and had snacks. We let our Inner Adults take good care of us while we worked, and we let our Inner Children have some fun. All in all, we got through the whole process without bickering and the task was complete by the end of the weekend. Suddenly a huge weight was lifted.

I’ve tackled jobs like this many times over the years and they haven’t gone anything like this, so I’m not trying to paint a picture of perfection here… we were grateful and surprised by the experience! What I do want to point out is that sometimes our Adults go overboard. We become so fixated on goals and checking things off our lists that our Children get stifled and starved. We forget to take care of ourselves, we push ourselves to exhaustion and every action is something we are rushing through to get to the next “have to” on our list. When our Inner Adult has declared martial law in our lives and our Inner Child is neglected or exhausted… we may not know why, but we feel awful. It can show up as stress, anxiety, or even a numb, listless feeling, and it’s a clue that something is off. This is where your spirit comes in and suggests that you take a little time to reset, do something relaxing, fun, or simply do nothing for a little while – daydream. Don’t be surprised if you meet up with some resistance from your militant Adult and your whiny Child at first. Just do something different and break the cycle. If you can play along with your spirit for a little while you’ll see that your wound up Adult transforms into a good parent and your irritable, bratty child becomes a happy, well-tended cherub. Take a deep breath, center your awareness in your heart and quietly ask your spirit what will bring “music” back into your world right now. Pay attention to the first thing that pops into your head. This is intuitive guidance! Give your Inner Adult a break and hit the “reset button” in your life. When you allow for the pause, you allow bright ideas, clarity and magic to enter your life. xo