MINOR ARCANA

Ten of Cups Tarot Meanings

With the Ten of Cups, we reach the end of the cups cycle, the completion within the realm of emotion, spirituality, and intuition. From here we go back into the Ace of Cups or we jump over into another suit to explore a new path within a new realm of life. For now though, we get to enjoy the pure joy that the Ten of Cups brings.

We finally feel aligned with our situation and we feel completely settled in the here and now. Whatever it is we need to feel happy and secure, we have it, and now is the time to sit back and just enjoy it.

Ten of Cups Upright Meanings

In the upright position, the Ten of Cups gives us an abundance of love, whether that is for others, for ourselves, or even for our setting. We feel fully connected with our lives and that connection brings joy and contentment. Some of the key meanings of the Ten of Cups are:

Completion
Alignment
Love
Settled
Goals achieved

Where in the Nine of Cups we were about to see our wishes and goals fulfilled, in the Ten of Cups we are finally enjoying what it feels like to have succeeded in getting what we’ve always wanted.

Ten of Cups Reversed Meanings

In the reversed position, the Ten of Cups suggests a lack of the qualities we see in the upright position. Instead of being aligned with where we are, we feel disconnected and misaligned with what we’ve entered into. Some of the main reversed meanings of the Ten of Cups are:

Dysfunctional
Homesick
Despair
Conflict
Misalignment

The Ten of Cups reversed, put in the simplest way possible, is the feeling of being unhappy with the path you are currently on. You may not know exactly why, especially if it’s a path you thought would bring you happiness, but there is something that is stopping you from finding that joy that you thought would be on offer to you.

Reading Ten of Cups in a Tarot Spread

The Ten of Cups is usually a very happy, positive card. I always get a milder version of The Sun card energy whenever it pops up in my spreads. Where The Sun card is feeling joyous about your life and situation overall, the Ten of Cups is more about those small moments of happiness. Those times when you’re surrounded by amazing people having the best time, or you’re enjoying a project you’ve always wanted to work on. It may not last for 24 hours a day, but it brings a shining light to your life nonetheless.

Ten of Cups as An Invitation

As an invitation, the Ten of Cups often invites us to think about those smaller moments where we felt truly content. It invites us to look at our emotional selves and pinpoint the things that have offered us pure joy so that we can introduce more of them to our routines.

For Ten of Cups, this invitation could be the following:

An invitation to think about how aligned you feel with your current situation and make adjustments where necessary
An invitation to enjoy the small moments of happiness that life throws at us all the time, but we rarely ever give credit to
An invitation to think about the goals you’ve achieved and what you might want to look towards next

Ten of Cups as Sage Advice

The Ten of Cups can teach us a lot about what smaller things in life make us happy. For example, I love driving down a motorway at dusk on a warm day and blasting out 70’s rock songs. I love dappled light and the shadows that are created off gently rippling water. It sounds like poetic nonsense at first, but when you put all these tiny joyous moments together, you’re more likely to embrace the bigger wins of The Sun card.

Some advice Ten of Cups may offer is:

Make daily happiness lists that help you to identify the more subtle things in life that lift your mood
Always check in to make sure you are aligned with your intentions
Happiness, just like sadness, can’t be sustained at a high level for long periods of time, so when you’re riding that wave, allow yourself to be present in it before it settles back down
When you achieve something, give yourself time to celebrate it before rushing off to the next thing

Ten of Cups as a Lesson

Ten of Cups can teach us a lot about gratitude and re-wild what we see as abundance. In modern times, material possessions are most commonly associated with abundance, having a lot of stuff surrounding you to keep you company. However, how can we break that belief down and how is that belief living in you already?

Some lessons that Ten of Cups may offer you are:

A lesson in recognising what abundance means to u
A lesson in seeing the smaller moments of happiness in a regular day
A lesson in finding out what we really need in order to be truly happy
A lesson in what it feels like to be aligned with what we’re doing and how to make adjustments when we’re not

Ten of Cups as a Redirection

When the Ten of Cups appears as a redirection it usually means we’ve been rushing through life without mindfulness. We’ve not allowed ourselves to just live in the moment because we’ve been too busy trying to achieve as much as possible in a short space of time.

As a redirection, Ten of Cups could symbolise a need to:

Allow yourself a day off to just do what brings you joy
Reconnect with the people that you feel emotionally and spiritually connected with
Rethink what it is you want to achieve
Allow yourself a moment of vulnerability and allow the joy to flow organically

Cups

When we see the Cups come up in a Tarot reading we know that we are looking at our emotional and compassionate selves. Imagine you split yourself into four key personalities, your emotional and vulnerable self, your passionate self, your level-headed self and your intellectual self. The cups represents your emotional self.

With this in mind, the Ten of Cups represents a completion within the emotional self. This is the feeling or reaction after you have crossed the finish line.

Water

The element of water corresponds with the Tarot suit of cups, it perfectly represents the easy flow of our emotional selves. A way to look at it is when we have an emotional block, it is like having an internal dam.

Emotion may be kept at bay making it easier to face in the moment, but if not dealt with over time, the dam will burst and the aftermath will be harder to process than it would have been initially.

Tens

The number 10 in numerology is the first time we start to combine two digits to give us meaning. We can do this in two ways. We can see the relationship between the two digits e.g. how does the numerological meaning of one interact with the meaning of zero. In this case, we have the creative spark of the number one and the infinite possibility of zero.

Another way is to add the two digits together to get the single number of one, allowing us to use the meanings of one on its own.