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Five of Cups – Disappointment

The Five of Cups stands for an emotional crisis. It might be that unconscious fears come true, it could tell that feelings are disrupted or wasting away, the soul is empty and unfulfilled.

In the sequence of the cups, the Five is the logical consequence of the Four.  The grey that was lurking behind the luxury’s glamour is now exposed.   The truth is now out.

The Five of Cups can suggest you are stuck in the past and can’t let go. Old wounds and bitter memories fill your mind as you think about what happened. You may blame yourself or believe you’re a victim of life’s circumstances. These negative emotions are holding you back from your fullest potential – release them so you can move on and create positive change.

The Five of Cups also implies the loss of illusion, the realization of a deception. It hurts, but is necessary when we don’t want to spend the rest of our life’s with our heads in the sand.

To put it plain: we have to learn how to crawl before we can learn to walk.

It’s important to realize that, whilst our disappointments often come from outside sources, the reason that we experience them is because of internal beliefs and expectations. We are disappointed when the company refuses to offer us that job we wanted and hoped for so much. We are disappointed when friends, lovers, family let us down and fail to treat us in a fashion we had believed they should. We are disappointed when something does not work out the way we had hoped.

Yet we cannot go through life without expectations. And we cannot protect ourselves by holding negative expectations. Hope is a fighter.  No matter how much we try to squash it down, it pops back up again.

So, perhaps we simply have to be brave enough to hope, honest enough to assess our expectations realistically, and courageous enough to accept that sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we are going to be hurt by disappointment. Maybe we have to make the choice to risk ourselves, and accept that, sometimes, we will get let down.

On a day that is ruled by the 5 of cups, don’t go looking for disappointment but rather, spend some time assessing your expectations. Look for imbalance, or lack of realism, in your expectations of people and situations. If you find any, then be true to yourself, and adjust those expectations till they serve you better.

Look for negative expectations (nothing good ever happens to me; I am always going to be lonely… miserable… unhappy; I am too weak… inadequate…. uninformed to achieve what I need) and tackle these with gusto for they create darkness in your life, and serve no earthly purpose.  Drive them out of your head with determined use of the affirmation, and agree to go after them every single time they surface.

Drive: Disillusion, pain, loss, sadness

Light: Sobering, realization, separation as a consequence

Shadow: Bitterness, emptiness, treachery, deceit, detraction

Reversed: Five of Cups encourages you to forgive yourself and move on. Know that you did the best you could.

Keywords: Mars in Scorpio, unfulfilled hopes, lost sense of balance, problematic relationships, old wounds

Advice: Either some of your over-ambitious hopes have collapsed, or your fear of disappointment lies deep within you. It’s time to learn the lesson.

Questions: In what areas of your life do you fear disappointment? What have you learned from the disappointments that you have experienced so far? How can you prevent disappointment?

Suggestion: Draw one card for each of the above questions.

Revelation: By seeing where I trick myself, where I deny my inner voice, I begin to know my own inner reality.