accept love

When we think about love, quite often we think about going into our heart centre and sharing love with others. There is an exercise that I do regularly where I'll fall into my heart centre, I open my heart, and I see love from my heart traveling to my friends and family, traveling then to my community, traveling through the country I live in, and then eventually throughout the whole world. I'm giving and sending love out.

However, this card says, "accept love", not give love, accept love. And if you think about accepting love, quite often we're so used to giving and sharing love that sometimes it can be difficult and challenging for us to accept somebody's love. Perhaps we may think that love comes to us with ties, that there may be a reason behind somebody giving love to us. Maybe we've been burnt in the past and we put the blocks up, we find it hard to accept love. The angels are here today focusing on accepting love and encouraging us to accept love.

So, what does the card reveal to us?

I think you can clearly see on the card that there's a plethora of hearts. They're rising out of her cauldron and, if you look closely, they make a heart-shape around her. Some of the hearts are very obvious and very clear; the lovely pinks and reds, the pinks of compassion, love for yourself, the reds for following your passion, doing something that you love as well. So, again, caring about yourself, putting yourself first and doing what you love.

But then the heart that is created from the steam, or whatever it is that's rising from the cauldron, it isn't, at first, so obvious. So it's kind of a message within a message to say that, whenever it comes to love, sometimes accepting love and loving yourself isn't always the obvious choice, it's not necessarily what we've been growing up and learned from our parents and from society. Because it's always been about being kind to some other person or showing love and tenderness to another, whenever, actually, the number one person in our life is ourselves. So, not every idea and concept of love is obvious. And that's another message that we're getting from this card.

What I love about this card is the plethora of hearts. Hearts are reminding us of our heart and our heart chakra. The hearts are in colours of pink and red. Pink being the colour of compassion; show yourself some love and some compassion. The colours of red, all about passion; follow your passion, do things that you love. It doesn't have to be things that loved ones or friends also want to do, but things that you love. Look after yourself and care for yourself. And there are so many hearts coming out of this bubbling cauldron.

If we look at the cauldron underneath, our love is being ignited by this strong fire. And sometimes passion and fire, they can burn us. So at some time in your past you may have been hurt by love, someone may have let you down, either a romantic partner or a friend or family member; someone that you loved dearly and they hurt you, you got burned from that love, they let you down and you've put up blocks as a result. However, because she is burning this lovely potion of love, fire is actually there to re-ignite the love so that you can accept love again. Let those barriers come down because you will be blocking love from people who genuinely want you to receive it, no strings attached. They give their love to you freely and you want to learn to accept that love. So you want to re-ignite your ability to accept love.

The other thing I find interesting on the card is the little cat. The cat is helping himself to a heart-shaped box of chocolates. If we think about cats, sometimes we think of curiosity. And this is an encouragement for you to be curious about love, not just giving love all the time but also receiving and accepting it. How do you feel when you accept love? When love is given to you, unconditionally, freely, no strings attached, how does it make you feel inside? When you express love for yourself to yourself, self-love, how do you feel inside? You're being encouraged to investigate that because sometimes, when you're talking about self-love, maybe you feel a little bit uncomfortable expressing love to yourself and love about yourself. You want to explore that a little bit further. Why is that making me feel uncomfortable? What can I do, how can I change, how can I make things better? Be curious.

And, yes, he is helping himself to a box of chocolates. He hasn't eaten any yet but he is helping himself to this box of chocolates. This is also saying, fill yourself up with love. You know, sometimes we see chocolate as a luxury or a treat or a naughty indulgence and rarely would most people sit down to  and a full box of chocolates and eat everything in one go because they'd probably feel sick afterwards. But it doesn't mean to say you can't eat every chocolate in that box. It doesn't mean to say you're obliged to share that box of chocolates with other people. If that box of chocolates was bought for you or by you for yourself, don't feel guilty about eating it all. In other words, don't feel guilty accepting love and giving yourself love. Open your heart to it. Be joyful of it. Enjoy it when you receive it. But work on accepting it.

Look at her chest, on her robe there's a big heart right over her heart centre. And, again, we're being asked to check in with our heart centre. Is our heart centre, our heart chakra, is it, perhaps, blocked? Is it closed off? Because we have been hurt in the past, maybe we have a block that we need to clear, that we need to release, that we need to let go. The past does not signify what's going to happen in the future. But if you hang on to the past and block yourself from receiving love and accepting love, you're only hurting yourself because people will leave and move away who have been offering love to you, if you can't accept it. They may walk on and pass you by and it's you who's lost out.

So, there's encouragement here to also check in with your heart centre and heart chakra. Check in to see if the energy is flowing up and down through it, smoothly and unhindered, or is it a little bit blocked?

The final thing I want to touch on is the triangle on the cauldron. Triangles can mean so many things but the two meaninngs I'm going to pull for a triangle in this instance are enlightenment and strength.

If you think of a triangle. The point is really strong. If you had a a flat weight lying on it, all the weight lies on that top point, everything diverges into that top point. And that is showing strength because you're coming to a point. Accepting love, givng love to yourself makes you really strong and brings you great strength so much so that you can then send out love to other people, because you know what it's like to accept love, truly, you know how other people will experience it whenever you send it out to them.

We also talked about enlightenment. Enlightenment is the highest vibration that we can experience as human beings. And love is one step closer to enlightenment, it raises our vibration and keeps it high, it keeps us in a place of love, it keeps us in a place of happiness. And whenever we are in that place we start to attract similar vibrations to us. So it's taking us up towards the highest vibration of enlightenment. And, in itself, it is enlightening because whenever you learn how to accept and how to open yourself up to love, it's almost like an enlightening experience because it really does raise your vibration. Whereas, whenever you are blocked to love, your vibration will be lower because you're not open to accept such a beautiful sensation.

So this card, and the angels through this card, are very much encouraging you to be curious about whether you can or cannot accept love. No judgement, just be curious. And then work on learning how to accept love, learning how to accept yourself and love yourself, learning how to accept free love that is given freely and unconditionally from people around you, learning to check into your heart and your heart chakra to see if the energy is flowing or if it's blocked. Just be curious. And let love surround you.

Love is such a beautiful emotion. We come from love and we should enjoy love. It's nothing to feel guilty about, it's nothing to be prevented in our life, even if we may have had a bad experience; you would have grown from that experience, you would have changed as a result of that experience. But don't let it stop you blocking love in the future.

Learn to accept love, learn to open yourself up to love, learn to love yourself as well, and raise your vibration as a result.

Reference: This beautiful card is from Everyday Witch Oracle Deck by Deborah Blake, artwork by Elisabeth Alba