What does The Sun tarot card mean?
Ahhh, The Sun card of tarot. I once saw an Instagram tarot reader, who I will allow to remain nameless here, pull this card and light up with performative shock and glee. “You light up their world!! Literally, they think your whole life is better with you in it! Whoa!” I rolled my eyes and unfollowed.
I have not, in any of my readings where The Sun card stood out as a very significant card to feel into, ever shrieked in joy or interpreted the card this way. Like any reader with space holding or support work training, holding a somewhat neutral space is fairly important, even though I think as a tarot teacher I let myself really bring a part of me into what I share. But then, I’m a relational creature by nature. At the end of the day, aren’t we here to know each other?
As for the card interpretation, The Sun has far bigger lessons to offer you than to worry if someone is happy with you or not. People-pleasing beliefs disguised as tarot isn’t really useful to any of us.
Instead, The Sun is a return of some much needed energy. The Sun, in astrology, can sometimes be linked to our life force energy, our inner fire (which has both a connection to our physical energy and the purer essence of our nature), and our instinctual, almost naively innocent, actions. So when it comes up in one of my tarot card readings, I know the querent (the one getting the reading) is about to come out of, or has come out of, a really dark period of struggle happening internally, since The Sun card is preceded by The Moon. If the reading is about a relationship, that usually means a period of some pretty intense realizations about themselves that they had been suppressing for a really long time.
Of course, The Sun is the dawning of light, of really accepting (rather than struggling) with these new realizations. And when we accept, we often shed a some jadedness, fear or biases you didn’t know where running under a lot of your perceptions, decisions or actions.
I once had a friend, who loved Star Wars like me, pull The Sun card in a significant way and watched her come alive with “A New Hope” (sorry, a little pun there. IYKYK). But truly, after a season of seeing her husband, and herself, in all the ways she didn’t want to accept before, she had faced her fears, separated, moved closer to family and was about to get a new apartment. What followed the next 6 months was a rebirth… not of her personality, but of the way she was able to move through life and the aftermath of that marriage with new buoyancy, new hope, a return to some openness of what a successful life for her could be.
Notice how this was over months. The Sun is a major arcana, so don’t think, if it feels really important to your reading, this acceptance and brighter possibility is going to arrive overnight. Like a dawn, it will come on over months instead of hours. But rise it will. And so will you.
If your tarot reading is for a relationship, as a lot of readings are with the people who seem to find me, then what you need to know is your joy, your playfulness, your literally life force & inner fire energy is beginning to come back online again. And that if that feels impossible, then the invite is acceptance work. Not accepting an intolerable relationship, or tolerating what is unacceptable. No, not that.
This is about accepting the REALITY of the relationship. The reality of what they are like, what you are like, what the relationships is like. Until you accept what and why you have been doing, choosing or behaving the way you have been, what you actually fear, the realization and the new energy you crave (either for you or the relationship) won’t be able to rise up. Love, it is what it is. And you are as you are. And they are as they are.
When you really exhale and stop struggling or fighting mentally against admitting this, the child-like energy in you? The dancing flame in you? The sun within you? It comes out of hiding (The Moon) and learns to play around with life or love or each other again.
If the reading overall has a tone of the relationship staying intact, then you need to accept one another and admit to one another that you both have patterns that are stemming from fear. Naming it and accepting it (not fixing it) let’s the light back in.
If the reading, though, has more of a tone of going your own way, then like my story about my friend, accept that that’s where this dark, uncertain road you walked (or may still need to walk) is going: to you coming back into a more full & new aliveness… probably separately from the relationship.
