The Page of Cups
Symbolism
This page stands in front of a backdrop of a wavey ocean. She is destined to experience some ups and downs. She is dressed elegantly with tulips showing her caring loving nature.
She holds and gazes at her cup with fascination and wonder with a fish coming out of it. The fish represents the active part of her awareness swimming in her waters of subconscious imagination.
She is discovering the importance of her subconscious mind and more importantly the gift of feelings that give her direct daily connection to that inner creativity. She looks to the fish as if she is going to start a conversation.
This is a conversation with herself.
Keywords
Upright: Imagination, dreamer, sensitive, inner child, innocence, playful, inspiration, empathy, subconscious connection, light-hearted, awe, caring and loving, intuition.
Reversed: Selfishness, moody, sad, afraid, childhood trauma, immaturity, promiscuity, self-doubt, lacking empathy, creativity, and imagination.
Upright meaning
Our inner youthful nature represented by this Page is the part of us who is young enough at heart to dream, to love, and to dare desire more of life in more ways than she has ever experienced before. She connects to our imagination and the subconscious part of ourselves in new ways, which opens her up to receive messages from her intuitive feelings, her empathy and her dreams.
The childlike energy of the pages mixed with this emotional gift is potentially expansive. We are called to step out of our adult mindset and become the playful openhearted child once more. This page in us believes in magic and love. She is the part of us who still trusts in life and consequently is open to new experiences and new feelings.
This is the suit of emotions and with new emotions come new highs and lows. Expect a few ups and downs and allow the flow of the pendulum to swing more in both directions. It is a time to try something new. If we open to new relationships with interesting people, we may learn something about ourselves and experience more feelings than we normally allow in.
This page is the most malleable part of our personality and she flows well with life so it is good to be attentive to gifts and opportunities that come up and it is a great time to share our desires and feelings as much as possible. Dreaming big is recommended. It is a good time to do some inner-child work to bring out more of our joyful loving playfulness into our lives. Dreams will bring messages and desires may well grow bigger!
Reversed meaning
As children, we surely had emotional outbursts that our parents and caregivers could deal with at one time or other. Whether we had anger tantrums or mood swings, we weren’t old enough to know how to deal with our feelings and our parents or peers often weren’t either. Instead of validation from our loved ones we would maybe receive harsh reactions to meet our anger, sadness, fear or shame.
With even the slightest rejection of our emotional expression as children, we learn that it wasn’t always safe to share our feelings and we began to repress those feelings to avoid any negative reactions. This Shadow Page is the child in us who is still suppressing her feelings. Our inner child desperately wants us to reconnect and encourage her to feel again.
Our parents or caregivers no doubt hid from some of their own feelings and we learned to do the same, copying them. It might not have felt right on one level of consciousness to do the same as them but feeling the connection to them was important so mirroring them became part of that connection.
Our emotions are strongly dualistic. One moment we feel sadness and fear and the next moment, love and joy. In our cup, there is a mixed bag. We cant reject some of our feelings without pushing away the ones we want. And we can’t look for positive emotions without opening the door to the darker ones. We have one relationship to the cup and suppression for self-protection is an old habit, one that we are old enough to change now.
This repression will also suppress our creativity, our imagination and our desires. Part of our work, when this card comes up is to dare to connect again with our inner child, to dream, create and share openly what we want, love and appreciate. Finding a trusted friend to share with can be very healing.
This Shadow Page can also experience negative empathy where the child inside is like a sponge for negative emotions as well as positive ones. There is important work to do around boundaries and when to interact and share and when not to. The innocence of a child has to learn to discern what energy is helpful to be around. This is a huge lesson.