Hi, I’m Coach Rahti of Creative Call and Coaching.

I do these little Tarot Tuesday readings over on Instagram and TikTok, but I realized: why not share the love here on Substack, too? I hardly ever do, and I want to change that.

I’m an ADHD coach for adults, and I use tarot as a way to get past some of the typical mental programming and familiar patterns so we can look more closely at what might actually be going on underneath.

I’ve also written a book, The Five Emotions That Stop Success, about five emotions that can get in the way of our ability to move forward: shame, grandiosity, envy, boredom, and fear.

Lately, I’ve been drawing some interesting correlations between those emotions and the tarot.

This week, I want to look at shame through the lens of the Five of Cups.

The Five of Cups and Shame

Look at this figure.

Shrouded. Head down. Staring at the three spilled cups.

Three cups gone: spilled aspirations, lost love, disappointment, bad faith, all the things that didn’t work out.

And here’s the thing:

He can’t turn around.

He can’t see the two cups that are still standing behind him.

That, to me, is the embodiment of shame.

Shame has a way of narrowing our field of vision until the only things we can see are what we did wrong, what we lost, what we screwed up, what we should have done differently.

And that kind of rumination can be especially familiar to those of us with ADHD brains.

When you don’t approach things the way other people do, it’s very easy to accumulate stories about yourself:

You’re lazy.

You’re a quitter.

You’re irresponsible.

You’re not living up to your potential.

You should be able to do this.

Why can’t you just...?

After you’ve heard those messages enough times, they can become internal programming. And then shame doesn’t just come from something that happened. It starts telling you who you are.

That’s why shame is such a big kahuna.

It’s worth keeping an eye on.

If You Pull the Five of Cups...

If you’re doing a tarot spread and you pull the Five of Cups, you might ask yourself:

Where am I stuck because of shame?

What am I continuing to ruminate over?

What options am I not seeing because I don’t believe I’m worthy of them?

What is still standing that I’m currently unable—or unwilling—to turn around and see?

Because the Five of Cups isn’t saying that the spilled cups don’t matter.

They do.

The loss is real. The disappointment is real. You don’t have to pretend otherwise.

But shame can convince you that the loss is the whole story.

It isn’t.

There are still two cups standing.

And sometimes the first step out of shame isn’t fixing everything.

Sometimes it’s simply turning around.

That’s one of the things I love about tarot: it gives us a different lens through which to look at the stories we’re telling ourselves.

And sometimes a different lens is enough to help us see something that was there all along.

If you enjoyed this little Tarot Tuesday, give it a thumbs-up, share it with someone who might find it useful, and consider becoming a paid subscriber. There are some nice perks, including a monthly tarot pull that I do for you and send your way.

Thanks for listening.

Talk to you next week.

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