The Five of Cups — Healing What Still Hurts

We’ve all had those moments — standing in the ruins of what used to be, staring at what spilled out, feeling like the world tilted and forgot to put us back together.

That’s the energy of the Five of Cups. It’s grief, disappointment, and regret all sitting at your kitchen table, waiting for you to notice them.

But the Five of Cups isn’t just about loss.

It’s about what happens after — when you realize that healing doesn’t come from pretending you’re fine, but from honoring what’s still left standing.

When Grief Becomes a Teacher

Loss cracks us open in ways joy never could.

It forces us to look at what really mattered, who really cared, and what within us still refuses to give up.

You don’t have to rush your healing. You don’t have to “get over it.” You just have to let grief sit beside you long enough to hear what it’s trying to say.

Because grief, as heavy as it feels, is really love with nowhere to go

.When you start listening to that ache instead of fighting it, something beautiful happens — it starts teaching you.

It teaches patience.

It teaches compassion.It teaches that your heart is strong enough to break and still love again.

So don’t curse your pain. Bless it. It’s the proof that you cared deeply enough to hurt this much.

The Green Cup — The Hidden Symbol of Healing

Most people miss it — one of the spilled cups in this card isn’t red. It’s green.

The red cups hold passion, love, blood, and pain.

But that green one?

That’s life. That’s renewal.

Even in the middle of heartbreak, your soul is already trying to regrow something new.

That green cup says, “Healing has already started — you just haven’t noticed yet.”

It’s okay to feel broken for a while.

The cracks are where the light sneaks back in.

That’s how growth begins — quiet, tender, often unnoticed until suddenly you realize: you don’t hurt quite as much as you did before.

Turning Toward Hope

In the Five of Cups, the spilled cups are on the left — the past. The standing cups are on the right — the future.

Healing happens in that tiny turn of the body, that moment you finally look away from what’s gone and toward what’s still standing.

You can’t control the past, but you can choose where you face next.

The bridge behind the figure in the card is your path forward — your permission to walk back into life, one slow, honest step at a time.

Working with the Five of Cups Energy

If this energy has been showing up for you lately, here’s a simple witchy ritual to help shift it:

1. Gather three small cups or bowls, a little salt, a few drops of water, and one green leaf or sprig.

2. Pour a tiny bit of water into two of the cups and whisper what you’re letting go of — the people, fears, or dreams that no longer serve you.

3. Add the leaf to the third cup, and whisper, “This is what still grows in me.”

4. Sprinkle salt into the spilled cups to neutralize their energy, and keep the green one near your altar or window overnight.

This little act helps you symbolically bless the endings while nurturing the beginnings.

It’s your way of saying, “I accept what’s gone, and I’m ready for what remains.”

Turning Pain into Power

If the Five of Cups has found its way into your life, don’t see it as punishment — see it as an initiation.

You’re learning how to alchemize sorrow into wisdom, heartbreak into strength, and endings into sacred space for new joy to enter.

You are not what you’ve lost.

You are what survived it.