“we accept the love we think we deserve.”
– Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
I’m working through the Valentine Tarot reading requests I have received and I thought I’d take a quick break and jot down a few of my thoughts on how we accept the love we think we deserve.
When we ask the tarot a question about our love lives, about our relationships, our dreams and our desires we ask from a place of hope and a place of fear. Our hopes and fears are so closely bound up that sometimes I wonder if they aren’t just the same thing. In fact, in a Celtic Cross Tarot Reading, the ninth card in the spread represents our hopes and fears. We hope we will find someone to love and for someone to love us, and even when we do, we hope that our happiness will last; we fear being alone. Every single person has experienced this to a certain degree at some point in their life.
I believe it is these hopes and fears that sometimes get us caught up in painful situations in our love lives. We can end up with people that are not good for us, develop unhealthy fixations with people who will never be anything more than they are, be scared to love or to ask for love and the list could go on and on. It can be so easy to get stuck but there is something I would ask everyone, myself included, to remember; we accept the love we think we deserve. So the question we must ask ourselves is what do we deserve? The answer to this depends on how much you love yourself to begin with.
For that is the true beginning of every love story; the love we feel for ourselves. This is not vanity, or self-obsession or anything negative, it is pure love; we must love ourselves the way we are and know that we deserve the very best that life and love has to give. It doesn’t matter how many times we’ve been hurt in the past, we know we deserve love and keep looking forward to the future, hopeful and confident that we will encounter the love that we deserve and when we do we will accept it.
My sister got married in September 2011, and I was asked to perform a reading at the ceremony. I was nervous about choosing something that wouldn’t ruin her big day and went through many different poems and written pieces before I came across ‘Love Monkey’. It is a short, yet beautiful story that is timeless in its wisdom. It tells the story of the Love Monkey and his quest for his perfect Dream Monkey. I doubt there is a person out there who cannot relate to the hardships he and his heart face on their quest. I won’t tell you the ending, but rest assured, my loved up sister and her new husband found it a perfect one.
What do you deserve? Love yourself and answer that question honestly and you too can find your Dream Monkey.
Buy ‘Love Monkey’ by Edward Monkton from Amazon.com
Buy ‘Love Monkey’ by Edward Monkton from Amazon.co.uk
