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[0:13] Introduction to Episode
Aloha and welcome to Your Heart magic and illuminating space where psychology spirituality and heart wisdom meet. Here's your host, Dr. BethAnne Kapansky. Wright, the clinical psychologist with a mystic mind.
Aloha, everyone, welcome to your heart magic. This is Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright. And today we are talking about growing grace and gratitude in our lives. Lots of Geez and today's episode. And the reason that I wanted to tap into this topic is because I really believe that when it comes to cultivating qualities like presence, joy, gratitude, Grace, inner peace, well being that oftentimes this is something that we need to apply ourselves to a little bit, it's not always our natural setpoint.
Or, as I like to think of it, it's not always our natural temperature. I think a lot of times our nervous system and our emotional centers, sort of develop what I call a thermometer based on what we're taught, what the conditioning of the world is, how we might have been raised what we're surrounded with. And so I like to think of this as a metaphor of the different thermometers that we have inside of us, where we kind of have these comfort zones and the set points.
And I think if we want to change our setpoint, and teach our nervous system, how to be more peaceful, teach our mindset how to be more joyful, teach our heart, how to be more grateful, actually, the heart naturally knows how to be grateful, it's really more of the mind that needs to be reminded of that. But if we want those to become more automatic, it's something that we need to cultivate and develop and grow inside of ourselves.
So today, we are looking at the qualities of grace and gratitude and how to grow those and our lives. And first, I just wanted to start with What do each of those things mean? I was kind of writing down some ideas off the cuff for what grace means. And it's my first thought was unmerited favor. It's something that we don't earn, we don't deserve it.
There's just sort of this sense of blessing or protection or unconditional love from spirit, some kind of protective covering that softens us. And that brings a little bit more compassion, a little bit more mercy, a little bit more beneficence into our path. And again, it's unmerited because we can't earn it spirits, grace is available to all equally everybody has a seat at that table.
And so when we're talking about the concept of grace, what we're really looking at today is how do we develop that in ourselves? And how do we develop that quality so that we become a more gracious person, so that we are able to learn to see the world through the eyes of grace and learn to see situations and relationships and our life? Through the Eyes of grace? How do we point that towards ourself and learn to create self grace and cultivate that as a quality inside of us.
So all of those things are how we can glean inspiration from the grace from the universe, Grace from spirit, Grace, from energy and the divine, and just everything that is bigger than us, and learn to bring it into our ecosystem of self. So we are able to move about our lives with a little bit more grace applied to ourselves and to others. And then of course, gratitude is really it's the art of appreciation for gratitude. I wrote down my off the cuff idea was that it is a state of appreciation.
[4:43] Cultivating Gratitude and Grace in Daily Life
It is developing this quality where we are appreciative we are thankful. We are grateful for the things that we have and I think it's really easy to dismiss these concepts of like well, obviously We shouldn't be these things. Of course, I'm grateful. Of course I'm this. And I always think it's helpful to come back to it and just kind of play with it a little bit and challenge it and ask ourselves, Am I actively cultivating this? Like, am I truly embodying this? Or do I just think I am, because I'm a spiritual person. And again, I always tell everybody on this podcast, this isn't about right or wrong. Nothing that we talk about on here is intended to create this bar that you have to measure yourself up to.
And if you fall short, you blew it. It's not created to be self critical or judgmental. Just as a reflection point, I certainly know there's times in my life where I would say, Oh, I'm a really grateful person, and I can present is really positive. And then maybe I'll really tune into where my mental chatter that and it's like, ooh, girlfriend, do you not being grateful? I can definitely think of a few periods over the last few years where I wandered away from that as a practice, and had to actively bring myself back to it, and rewild and reseed and riegert grow these qualities inside of myself. And again, for many of us, they don't necessarily happen naturally, they are a natural condition of our heart, I think they are a natural condition of the soul.
They are a natural language and energy that we have as spiritual beings. But this earthly existence, it's a hard one. And the human journey is a challenging one. And it's not a journey of comfort, and E so much as surrender, and grace, and really learning to walk and trusting ourselves to the palm of the universe, the palm of life, the palm of God. And so because of that, and because of those human elements, and just the conditions here on the planet, and our world at this time, we have to be mindful, and I think a little bit relentless, and like staking our claim, to grace and gratitude. So we're just going to look at a few ideas today for how to cultivate these qualities and our lives, and how can we grow them.
[7:25] Developing a Mindset of Grace & Gratitude
And the first thing that I think we need to do is to develop a mindset of grace and gratitude. Like I said earlier, if we can get into our hearts, that actually is much easier for the heart to find those qualities and those attributes, because it's part of the hearts language, it's part of our heart wisdom. But our mind is often not tuned in to the frequency of grace, and it's not tuned into the frequency of gratitude.
Our mind is often paying attention to what's not right to what unfinished business, we have what's left undone, it's easy for our mind to tune into our fears, our regrets, our anxieties. Right now, there is a lot of challenge and sadness and grief and tragedy that's happening in the world around us. And so it is easy for our mind to tune in to those things. And certainly, there is a lot of space as conscious minded humans, to tune into what's happening around us so that we can be aware, and we can take action when we're able to.
And we can lift others up in prayer and do the things that we know to do to try and do our small part to contribute to a better world. But if we're focusing on that all the time, then we are always external and our focus. And we're not really coming back to that place of soul nourishment, where we feed and fill ourselves with good things. So we have energy to give. And we have a desire to help or to serve or to contribute in a positive way. If we're not filled up, we become depleted really quickly, or we be do these empty acts of service because we think they're good things to do.
But they're not really embodied. And we feel very disconnected from those acts of service. And we're just doing them and more this dogmatic sense because this is what a good person should do. And so if we really want to bring this like sparkly, juicy quality to our inner well and ignite our inner passion and our soul, we have to find that things that feed us and so we have to teach our mind how to be grateful we have to teach our mind how To find grace for something.
So one of my favorite exercises to do with this is to look at situations happening around me and see if I can see them through the eyes of spirit. Or sometimes I'll say, the eyes of the heart. And I'll ask myself the question, what might Spirit say about this? What might your wiser self say about this? If you don't know what spirit would say, then let's make it really personal. What would your why self, your spirit self, your intuitive self, your soulful self, the part of you that holds your spiritual wisdom and your unique wisdom that you are walking around carrying on your journey, as a human?
What would that part of you say about something that part of you might urge you in a situation to take a step back or to be careful before you speak, it might help you shift your focus and say, Hey, yep, all this stuff is going wrong. But guess what you're okay. In this moment, you are taken care of, there is nothing that you can't figure out or that you can't solve something that I'll often do for myself, if I find myself cycling, on fears, or something that I'm worried about is I will flip it into an affirmation, and it can take me a little while to get there. I don't always do this right away.
It's more like if I noticing if I'm like spinning out or something like that, and I'll have this moment of awareness, where I'll be like, Oh, wow, like you spent the last, you know, 20 minutes and of spin cycle just kind of drifting off into space, worrying about these things going on right now. And so a lot of times, I'll flip it into some kind of affirmation, where I will say something like, I'm resilient, I'm clever. I've made it this far in life, I'm supported and figuring this out. That is seeing myself through the eyes of grace, grace, will look at everything that is best in me, everything that I'm doing, right?
[12:11] Finding Grace & Gratitude in Life's Challenges
Grace has a way of taking things that feel like flaws inside of us and helping us find the golden them. Grace is able to look at a situation in our life and just say, Wow, I made a lot of mistakes and not. And a lot of times our mind is tempted to beat ourselves up for something. And grace might ask the question, what did you learn from this? How have you grown? What can you be grateful for? You don't have to ever repeat this experience again, because you meet those mistakes. And so you've had the growth now and you're going to integrate that? How can you be grateful for that grace is really a gateway to gratitude, it helps us find the things that we can appreciate in a situation.
And another thing that I like to do with this with our mindset is to look for the hidden gems. Look for the qualities and the situations in our life that are not evident from the surface view, we have to dig for them a little bit. It's interesting, the Akashic Record said that the month of November. Collectively, the energy of the month was all about hidden lights and searching for buried treasure. And I do a monthly message called Akashic magic, where I go into the records prior to the beginning of every new month, and ask questions about collective energies that we can all expect to experience in our own unique ways.
And I'll always get a theme for each month and November of 2023 was all about the hidden lights, the buried treasures. It was all about looking at situations in our life and shifting our perspective, shifting our mindset. So we could see, where's the hidden gift in this? What might be where might the growth be? What might I be learning from this that I might not learn any other way? What can I be grateful for and the situation? Even if it's something that's challenging me, if I'm looking at something happening in the world right now? Can I hold grief and my heart over some of this sorrow and hardship and struggle that we're seeing? And can I also see the grace and the opportunity for how human beings can be so resilient and come together and support one another? When in need?
Can I see the opportunity that when our hearts break, or we don't know what to do when we feel overwhelmed, that it's also a beautiful invitation to turn her palms up and surrender to a higher power and say, oh my gosh, I am beyond myself here and I really need spirit support in the I really need to breathe and life and breathe in something bigger than just myself. There is a gift in that when we come to the limitations of ourselves. There is a gift and the messes in our life. There's a gift and the flaws and the imperfection, it's often how we find new strength.
It's often how we find creativity, or resilience or some form of reinvention, we think everything is going to go in one direction, and then it gets flipped upside down entirely. And in order to navigate that we have to learn new skills, and maybe they're really uncomfortable. And it's hard for us we don't like where we are on the journey at the time. And yet, there is a gift there. If we can look for the hidden gems, if we can search for the treasure. And see, I am learning how to work with the darkness constructively. So I can transmute things that might feel stressful or challenging, and find the light in them. And that is really what developing a mindset of grace and gratitude is all about. It is turning the lights on in spaces and our life where we don't naturally think about turning the lights on.
[16:19] Growing Gratitude In Challenge
It's really easy to be grateful if you're on vacation, or something amazing happens. Or it's a beautiful bluebird day, and maybe it's your day off and you get to do something fantastic and nature or just something that you really love to do. And if you find yourself in that situation, be grateful, of course, be grateful. But it's harder to be grateful on a I'm going to call it a moody Tuesday, where maybe it's the work week and stuff is going wrong and like the cat spit up a hairball on the carpet and it has to be cleaned up and you missed a deadline or forgot about something and it's due that day and you're stressed out. And nobody took anything out to defrost for dinner and there's no food in the fridge.
How can we be grateful then? How can we find grace then, remembering that grace really is the catalyst for more gratitude. So Grace might say, Yep, this is a Tuesday blues day and everything that went wrong on just sort of a small stress scale did. And grace might encourage us to laugh because sometimes life is ridiculous, and things go wrong, and nothing lines up and it just feels like Mercury's in some kind of eternal retrograde, it's never gonna come out.
Grace helps us find the humor, or find forgiveness for the situation. It helps us take a step back and say, Yeah, I missed the deadline. And I'm just gonna have to own up to it, do what I can to catch up and hope that it's going to be okay, I'm certainly not the first person in the world to miss a deadline happens all the time. And that allows us to open up to maybe be thankful that we can find the humor in a situation maybe be thankful that everything went wrong. And maybe because we were having a bad day we ended up going out to dinner or something like that, and maybe ends up being super fun. And is like the perfect ending to a bad day.
But it was really unexpected. It helps us find those things that lift us up into a more lighter frequency, a lightness of heart, a lightness of being it helps us declutter and defragment some of the energy and the stress from the day and take us to a place of being more peaceable, more calm inside and more appreciative of our existence. And just able to laugh at how messy being human can be.
Something else that I think is really helpful to do, is listening to our heart on the matter when it comes to grace and gratitude. So if we need to teach our mind, how to develop a perspective shift, so we can look for grace, so we can look for gratitude. And we do that through our thoughts. We do that through kind of thinking about how can I be grateful? How can I find the hidden light? How could I give grace to this person? How can I extend grace to myself that comes more easily to our heart, it comes much more naturally to our heart.
So if we can get out of our head and get into our heart and take a little bit of space, and I always recommend doing a very simple meditation where maybe you put your hand on your heart, and maybe you just focus on your breath and do very simple breath work where you are like I'm going to exhale the stress from the day. And I'm going to inhale Grace, I'm going to exhale stress. And I'm going to inhale spirit. I always call that breathing and something bigger than ourselves. When we breathe, we are literally breathing in the biosphere, we're breathing and oxygen, I feel that it's a beautiful invitation to the elements of air to spirit energy to say, come on in and fill me back up, because I am tired of doing all of this on my own. And so we can use breath work to take us into our heart.
And oftentimes, if we just say to our heart, what do you want me to know? Right now? You don't even have to ask how do I have grace right now? How do I have gratitude, you don't have to do the exercises with your heart that you might to train your mind to the heart is just gonna get it. And so if you can get into your heart, and just say to your heart, what do I need to know right now, your heart is going to give you whatever your next step is. And that next step is sure to be supported by the qualities of grace and gratitude, peace, joy, well, being trust and spirit, the hearts language is really about knowing that we are connected to all things through the heart, we are connected to spirit through the heart, we connect to our intuition through the heart, the heart always knows that it's going to be okay, if we can get into the voice of the heart and listen to it.
One of my other favorite meditations to do I teach this a lot. And I do this a lot, in my own practice, is putting my hand on my heart, and doing a little bit of breathing to come into my heart, and then just asking my heart, what color you today. And I love colors. I'm creative, I'm artistic, so colors really worked for me, and just seeing what color comes through in my heart that day. And a lot of times, I'll picture that color just kind of radiating out for me and my life, almost like energy medicine, it's the medicine of color. And I'm just going to send a very peaceful blue to all areas of my life.
Or maybe I'll see Sunshine Yellow. And I will just picture Sunshine Yellow surrounding me, or maybe it will be a really soft, gentle pink. And again, it's like the grace of color, it sort of softens things. And when I do this exercise, I can't help but feel a little bit better, a little bit more uplifted, a little bit more connected to my wife self, and to the truth of my heart that reminds me that we can always find grace in the situations in our life. And we can always find something to be thankful for.
[22:52] Cultivating Grace & Gratitude Through Spiritual Practice
When we do that, we are so much more able to clearly hear the guidance from our heart from Spirit. If we are praying and we're seeking guidance or sign, we are so much more likely to be able to hear that or to be an open hearted place where we notice if we receive a sign, we are more able to move about the rest of our day in a kinder space. It helps reduce our stress level and helps bring us into a place of more balance. It is a way of grounding into our heart wisdom. It is something that helps anchor our energy so we can get out of the anxiety mind and travel into the truth of our heart, which is a much more grounded space of trust and surrender and interconnection.
So learning to listen to the voice of the heart is a really beautiful and important step for developing the qualities of grace and gratitude. And it's fun, because we access our heart through things like meditation, through imagination, through creativity, through color, through nature, through poetry and self expression, anything artistic, the language of the heart is accessed in such a different way than the language of the mind, which is much more linear and cerebral and rational.
The heart is really a much more metaphorical language filled with symbolism and feelings and intuition. And so when we get into that language, and we're learning to listen to the voice of our heart, it's just so much more fun. And it invites us to experience ourselves and experience our wisdom. It's experiential language, as opposed to a more logical base cerebral type language. And so we're in an experience now of just being in grace and gratitude Because the heart naturally has those attributes.
The last thing that I wanted to say today is that I think that if we want to keep growing grace and gratitude in our lives, we can also create an intention to do so. And treat it like a spiritual practice. We can ask Spirit helped me grow these qualities helped me be more graceful to myself helped me to practice self grace and learning self Grace helped me to give grace to others helped me to be a more grateful person, help catch my attention, if I'm not being grateful, and I'm slipping back into negative feeling states and old spend cycles.
And this old story of focusing on what's wrong, helped me to bring my attention back to the new story that I'm trying to cultivate appreciation, we can make this a beautiful spiritual practice. And something that I love to talk about on the your heart magic podcast is the idea that our spiritual practice does not have to look a certain way. It doesn't even have to be something that is typical, spiritual spirituality. A lot of times when I talk about a spiritual practice, it's interesting what that brings up for people. Oftentimes, they feel like there's something more that they should be doing.
Oftentimes, it's like meditating, like they should be meditating and praying for 20 minutes or something like that. And, you know, have like this big ol list of things that they should meditate on, or they should clear their mind. Just a little check in with yourself to kind of get a sense of where you're at on that. What do you think of when you hear the world word spiritual practice? And I've told this story before that years ago, I was the recipient of an Akashic reading. And I remember asking the question, I feel like a lot of spiritual growth is happening right now. And I want to continue to spiritually develop, what should I be doing in order to do that, and the feedback from the Akashic Records was, if it's a should, then you probably shouldn't do it.
[27:13] Spiritual Practices for Personal Growth & Connection to Heart
If it's something you feel like you have to do, that just takes the joy out, it's not really fun anymore. Sometimes I will do things because I know they're good for me to do I know if I sit down in my journal. And if I do some prayers and meditation work, I'm going to feel better. But I have been a long term practitioner of these things. And so now I've just learned from experience that I like how I feel afterwards.
So a lot of times, like exercising, I'm just gonna make myself do it. And I know, I'll feel great afterwards. So there can be for me a little bit of discipline involved. But as I was growing spiritual practices, even now I have a tendency to mix it up. And to keep it really fun so that it doesn't feel repetitive. So it doesn't feel boring. I'm always working with different decks of oracle cards. I try out different ways to pray different protection, you know, meditations, different prayers, different blessings, I do different stuff all the time, I need that. So it feels fun and engaging and interesting, and never begins to feel like I'm going through the motion.
So if a spiritual practice feels like a should for you, without really gaining anything from it, and it just feels like boring, or like it's not fun, or you dread it, then maybe rethink your relationship to your spiritual practice. And a spiritual practice could be a creativity practice, it could be writing a poem, it could be drawing something in an art journal, it could be a walk in nature, it could be taking 15, mindful minutes outside and observing the world around you. It's not about what you do. It's about the intention that you bring to it.
So you can make it a spiritual practice to say my spiritual practice this month is gratitude. And that's going to be my, my, like my key word, my focal point for the month, grace and gratitude, and I am going to, every day make a little list about how did I see Grace exhibited in my life today? How did I give grace to others? How did I experience it? And or, I'm going to do a little list of three things I'm grateful for, or three things I appreciated about today. Those might be interchangeable, they might be separate. Your list could have two things on it, it could have 10 things. We're being fluid and adaptable here. But that's a beautiful way to rewild and re cultivate these qualities in your life through making it a spiritual practice and then bringing spirit in and saying, Hey, I really want to grow this in my life helped me to do so. Really well. Powerful.
And never, ever underestimate the power of asking spirit of asking your guides and your angels and your team of light and whatever you connect with and relate to in terms of spirituality. Never underestimate the power of simply asking for help and saying, This is my intention, can you help me up, level it and truly grow this so that I don't forget it. And I really am having my attention drawn back to this.
So beautiful, beautiful way to grow those energies and our lives and to help ourselves connect with more heart based frequencies that allow us to listen to our heart with more ease, connect with our spirit with our spiritual connection with more ease, find a little bit more grace for a process and a little bit more grace for the world around us. And lap a little bit more, find a little bit more joy and play and lightness in this life that oftentimes can feel very heavy and stressful.
[31:11] Coming Up On Your Heart Magic
So with that we are going to wrap up here for today. We have some really fun things coming up for the rest of November into December. And we are going to be talking about all sorts of topics before the years and we are going to continue our archetypes of the Tarot series we have strength and the hermit both on deck. Over the next few weeks, we are going to be talking about more heart based qualities and how to cultivate them. So there's going to be an episode coming out on July. sometime in the near future. I will be doing an Akashic Energy Update before we exit the year 2023 and enter 2024. So we will be looking at a year review from the perspective of the records and what are some of the themes that will be coming up. And I will be continuing my top storytime series where I will be sharing stories and poetry from some of my books and some personal reflections and ideas around some of those writings. So I'm really excited for our upcoming I will say like the final segment of this season before we go into the year 2024 New episodes are released every Thursday at 6pm Hawaii Standard Time on whatever podcast is available to you. Thank you so much for listening. Have an amazing week. Be well. Be Love, be you and be Nadja.
You've been listening to your heart magic with Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright. Tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your life