Welcome back to The Daily Pulse!

There are a lot of tangents that I want to get into for today's message but for the sake of brevity, I will cover the central theme around feelings of worthiness to be unconditionally loved and receive said love, while navigating through this liberation from limited definitions of gender and care.

Remember Amitabh Bachchan's dialogue from the film Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham wherein his word is the the final word in is family, even if that meant that both he and his wife had to give up on their older son in the name of these rules that the patriarch considered above love?

Today's pulse touches on an aspect of this sensitive part of our emotional make up as people who were once children and hopefully, felt loved - the art of feeling able, respected and loved enough to ask for what we want or need, and receiving it gracefully, while looking at the very real humans that parents or parent figures in our lives can be.

Often the subject of parent-child relationships is utterly sensitive and private because of a gap between the popular cultural norms of "parents are equivalent to gods" and the experience of being parented / cared for by parents who are real human beings. Unless it is very starkly /tangibly unjust, the subtle unhealthy (and honestly, human) aspects of the parent-child relationship get painted a shade of rose pink, as we grow up, to not only match up to the norm but also to satiate our inner child's desire to want to believe that at the end of the day, we were loved unconditionally.

Since today's pulse is represented by The Empress in the tarot, symbolic of the feminine within us all (again, not gender identity. Identifying as male does not mean you do not have a feminine aspect to yourself. If that repulses you, you probably ought to read this and reconsider your relationship with your own femininity.), I am called to speak more on the terms of the norms and ideas around motherhood and the act of nurturing, that originate outside of the intimacy of the individual relationship.

The most important message with this card is that being a nurturer, mother or mother figure is not about sacrificing the individual needs and personality of the person (not limited to female identifying people) considered in those roles. The other side of it of course, is to also find within oneself enough love to not let our parents' stories and their own struggles of adulthood become rigid definitions of our sense of self-worth when it comes to feeling free to ask for love and respect.

The art of nurturing and mothering is often understood as an unseen, intangible act, labelled as "feminine" and using the limited economic lens of life to further keep it dubiously undefined and devalued. I don't say that we need to put a price on mothering or nurturing. In fact, that to me, speaks of the limited scope of the economic measurement of life. However, what I share here is the need to expand the definition of care and nurturance and spread it into the very tangible physical measure of life as well.

The Empress is the tangible expression of the feminine energy within us all, working with us to develop an unflinching sense of lovability and worth to accept our desires and needs; especially, when it comes to our experience of abundance or even luxury in terms of material possessions. In a world of hyper-masculine individualism, she asks you to identify your personal relationship with feeling free to receive responsibly, and if that somehow shows up in your relationship with giving.

The energy of the Empress here says that "ask and you shall receive". The question however is, do you dare to transcend your feelings of discomfort, guilt, shame, judgment or fear, and really ask for what your heart's truest desire is?

Until tomorrow!

*Note: Asking for what you need or want here is not about you feeling entitled to do that at the cost of another. That is counter-intuitive to the message. What is useful is asking for what you want and that allowing you enough compassion to not shame or judge another for asking for their worth. Just needed to add this in case there's any doubt.