Getting Smart With Your Choices - The Lovers

 Choice can be a  real difficult thing, especially when it comes to making the right decision.
 The Lovers, a Major Arcana card, is about making a choice, as Paris needs to decide who is the most fair and beautiful, Hera, Aphrodite or Athena.

Learning to make the right choices with honesty, and self-assurance or assertiveness can be a life long lesson. Many of us don't learn how to make assertive choices based on love, especially when we don't feel like being very loving after someone has done something to hurt us, or been very disrespectful. We either react in a passive manner avoiding the whole situation, or we lash out in aggression, and not with assertiveness.

 I know myself well enough to understand that it is unhealthy to let feelings fester, when I know I need to be assertive and to have faith in myself. At the same time I do not want anger and bad feelings to dictate negative behaviour toward myself or toward another. I have a choice to make choice to stand up for my own rights while not infringing on another's rights.

How I choose to stand up for myself is what will make all the difference for me, especially because I need to be loving, and at the same time get my message across, that what has happened is not appropriate or acceptable.to me. Then I need to let the situation, and what has happened, go, and not carry around a resentment, that I stick in my gunny sack.

" The problem of choice in love, which reflects one’s values because those choices are a mirror of the kind of person we wish to become. " The Mythic Tarot

Queen of Swords - Idealism

Today's card from the Minor Arcana, the Queen of Swords is a strong independent woman. In the Mythic Tarot the Queen is Atalanta who was abandoned but her father who was disappointed that he had no male heir. He left her on a hill, but she was rescued and nursed by a bear, sent by the moon-goddess Artemis- Hecate.

Crescent Moon Bear - Catherine Meyers

The Queen appears aloof and cool, but don't be fooled, she has a soft underbelly after experiencing  great losses, and many difficulties in her life. This Queen is very familiar with hard times and suffering, but continues to thrive, not just in spite of them, but because of these burdens she has had to bare, this has given her an inner strength.
She has a vehement sense of justice, and benevolently upholds and champions the rights of others, perhaps as a result of her own loss and brokenness.

 Quick witted with a sharp tongue, she can cut to the quick, being very intelligent and passionate about her high ideals. Not willing to settle in love she can cut her nose off to spite her face because of this idealism, which in the extreme, is an expectation of perfectionism in others; an expectation that was placed upon herself as well at a young age.

The Queen is a woman possessing a strong sense of integrity and pride, but she is also lonely, and isolated as a result of these high ideals. She may be unconscious of her perfectionist expectations, however it does have a positive aspect, in that others are inspired by her, to improve upon themselves.

Being too idealistic prevents us from ever measuring up to a perfectionist ideal. It does not exist in reality, and is an image. This state occurs because this individual is fearful of being human, and leaves us vulnerable to being hurt.

Many of us have been hurt in early life or in the past, which manifests into our adult life, especially if we lack self-awareness, and choose not seek help to resolve these issues. Serious problems arise in our relationships with others, as a result of clinging to an unmovable faith in high ideals, leading to an addiction perfectionism.