The Empress is a card, in so many ways, of love: sometimes it’s about how we show it to others, but more often it’s about how we show it to ourselves, and how we allow ourselves to receive it from others. The Empress asks us to wrestle with our ideas of worth, and whether we fundamentally believe that love is something that we have to earn or if we are worthy of love simply for existing, for being here, as we are. I like to teach cards 1-7 of the Major Arcana as an act of reparenting the self, and when we reach the Empress this is essentially what I say: If you had just had a baby—a baby that you wanted and anticipated and longed for, you would love that baby from the moment it was born. It wouldn’t have to DO anything to win your love or earn your affection. This baby doesn’t have to prove itself. You love it simply because it has arrived, and its existence is a kind of miracle. You love it because love is what makes babies grow and thrive. The Empress has many connections with creativity, with what we nurture, with fertility, and with motherhood (though keep in mind that no card in the Tarot is truly gendered). Often when it comes up in our readings it’s asking us love ourselves as we would this child, to remember that just as we’re intuitively aware that children require love and acceptance in order to blossom, so do we. We can’t wait to love ourselves *until*……until we meet some entirely arbitrary standard or metric that, let’s be honest, will always be a moving target. We must love ourselves now, because we are worthy of love right now. Right now.