The Power of Intention: Laying the Energetic Gridwork

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[0:13] The Power of Intentions in Heart Wisdom

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.

Hello, hi, everybody. This is Dr. BethAnne Kapansky. Wright, and welcome to Your Heart magic. Today we are talking about the power of intentions. And there is so much to say on this topic that I decided to break it up into a multi part mini series. So part one that we are going to be exploring today is laying the energy grid work. And talking about how the energy of an intention is the foundational piece that we build an intention on, and talking about why that's so important.

And a really good illustration of this is when I sit down to do these podcast, I always know that no matter what we're talking about, like what topic it is, whether it is an archetype of the Tarot series, whether we're talking something like really spiritual, and we're gonna do the Akashic records, whether we're doing psychology, and we're talking about well being or self care or inner peace, or whether it's a talk story episode, and I'm sharing stories and reflections from my books.

No matter what we do, the intention of your heart magic is that this is a space, a podcast that is focused on helping others tap into their heart wisdom, we talk about how do we live by the heart? What does it mean to learn to listen to our heart wisdom? And how does that help guide us on our paths? And how does that help us find both psychological well being and spiritual well being.

And heart wisdom is a really big umbrella topic. But I know if nothing else, we will be talking about something that sits under the umbrella of the intention of it has to do with heart wisdom.

And then my personal intentions for this podcast are that I want it to feel fun to make, I have enough things in my life that are adult kind of responsibilities that are not always as joyful. And so if I'm going to be creating this podcast, and I do it on my spare time, one of my qualifications part of my energetic grid work for it is I want it to feel fun.

And I want it to feel kind of delightful that when I'm sitting down and making these, I imagine people listening to it. And I feel like I'm engaging in a dialogue, even if it's not being broadcast live, it's like I can feel the energy there of those who are going to receive it. And so I want it to feel warm and connected, and I want it to feel authentic. And those are some of my energy qualities that I want to bring to it.

And then I have some intentions for listeners, I always hope that listeners receive something good for their heart. It is not up to me to decide what that is. If you have followed any of my Akashic magic work, whenever I do a monthly message, I always begin it with just take whatever you need for your heart at this point in time and feel free to leave the rest. So that is one of my intentions for this podcast that the listener receives something good for their heart.

And I also put the intention out there that the ones that are meant to connect to these words, whether it's for a one time episode, or they only listen to half of it, but somehow something that we're talking about on here strikes something in them, or whether it is individuals who really love what we're talking about on your heart magic and listen regularly.

I'm always putting the intention out that those who are meant to find this, stumble across it, they hear about it somehow they're led or guided to find it and those that it's not meant for don't and then they just keep on going and find whatever they need for their journey at this time.

[4:53] Intentions and Their Role in Shaping our Lives

So those are examples of intentions. And when I think about the energy that I want To create, those are some of the things that I have sewn into the energy grid work of your heart magic. And grid work is just a fun and fancy word for foundation. For some reason, when I think about intentions, I think about this idea that we are kind of mapping out the direction that we would like energy to go, we're giving it a grid to work upon, and we're giving it a landing place.

So somehow, that translates to this idea of grid work. And we are creating this foundation. So that as we think about what we're intending, and we build on those intentions, there's this like, super awesome landing, not for it to come to. And that landing mat has aligned itself with the kinds of things that we really want to attract into our life. So if we say, I really want to create, again, we'll go with the podcast, right? We're coming up on a year of your heart magic turning one.

So if somebody says, I really want to create a podcast, well, it's really helpful for them to think about like, why do you want to do that? Who might you want to connect with in the listenership? What intentions? Might you have behind what you want this for? Is there a specific purpose for it? Is it part of your business? Are you doing it just for fun?

Do you want to do like, do it yourself crafting stuff and create or connect to other people who love that kind of thing? Are you doing it to promote something? Are you doing it as part of a sense of service or sharing or your spiritual path. And there's no right or wrong to any of those things, it is the intention of the person who's going to be creating it.

And our intentions, that grid work is part of what helps shape the path for how we might go about intending and creating something. So that is what I mean when I talk about laying the energy grid work. And as we talk about that today, I thought it would be important just to explore a little bit around like how important our intentions? And this is a really good question. Because certainly we can move through life without a sense of intentionality.

Sometimes we wake up one day, and we're super fuzzy. And maybe we don't have time to think about the kind of day we want to have the person that we want to be in the world. We're just happy to put one foot in front of another and make sure that we're showered and caffeinated and are wherever we need to be at the appropriate time. And we can shout that out when there are days that we might not feel quite as consciously intentional as others.

And that's okay, this is not about making you feel like you need to think about what intention are you creating every single second and every single moment, the pressure of that feels really soul crushing to me and so dogmatic and so not fun and the complete opposite of following our heart and listening to its wisdom. But it is important to think about the intentions that we do want to create in our lives. And I think it is nice for each of us to find a system for when we're checking in on those intentions.

And that system needs to be something that works for us. So if you are somebody who loves intention setting and it actually works for you at the beginning of every day to think about like a word of the day, or here's what I want to create, go for it. If you are somebody where that feels like a lot and once your week gets going, there's not a lot of time for that.

Maybe you take time once a week to do something like that. Maybe somebody does it around the full moon and the new moon. And they use the moon cycles to work with intentions and check in on what are my personal intentions, you know, maybe what are my career or business or creative intentions. We can have intentions for anything in our life.

And I do think that our intentions are one of the biggest tools that we have that we are able to take responsibility for and help curate a thoughtful mindset and a mindset and way of thinking about our lives that is in alignment with how we understand ourselves. When we think about the word intention, and intention, it's a choice Ace, it is a choice to think about, I want to have an amazing day. That's an intention. It's a thought. It's an intention that we have that we put into a thought, or maybe we speak it, maybe we write it out in our journal.

[10:13] Setting Intentions for Personal Growth and Development

So we'll put words to it. But it starts with this idea of, this is what I want to do today. And if you've ever decided, You know what, no matter what else happens today, it's just going to be a good day, I'm going to look for the good at the end of the day, I'm going to do my little gratitude list and think about what was good today, then you know, how different of a day you might have been, if we might wake up in a bad mood and say, I don't want to do today, like I don't want to Monday, you can't make me Monday, and the whole day, we feel like this is a bad day, bad things are happening. I just want to like get through today.

You know the difference when we are in a space of saying, This is how my day is going to go and it's gonna be okay, no matter what else happens, versus giving ourselves and negative intention, or some sort of message that is really about the intention of resistance, or fear, or negativity or something that is a little bit more of kind of that mass consciousness of grayness is how I think about it, that if we're not being thoughtful about what we want to create, it's really easy to fall into these kinds of automatic thoughts of negative self talk, or fear based consciousness or lack based consciousness, or feeling stressed out all the time, or overwhelmed, or a sense of hopelessness or despair.

Because our world feels so big, and the problems feel so big, it's really easy to fall into that gray stream of pollution of everybody's collective, like fears, and stress and overwhelm, and kind of a can't do sort of attitude.

And if we want to create something for ourselves, that's more soul nourishing. And that's more authentic. I think it is something that many of us have to work at doing, we have to learn to be intentional about it, we have to be mindful about it. So intentions are important.

And they can be anything from something really big. Like it is my intention to close my private practice in Alaska and move to the island of kawaii, where I'm going to live more creatively, intuitively and spiritually and reinvent myself, I actually set that intention. And I've talked about that here before, but it's in my old writing, like I can access my words and see that I was writing that intention, way back in 2017, when I was making the choice, and we were preparing to move over here. And I said multiple times I want to live more creatively, intuitively and spiritually.

And reinvention was my word, I'm coming here to go through reinvention, I wanted personal transformation. And I absolutely can say those intentions have been met the energetic grid work that I laid out without even knowing it, I probably didn't even think about it in those terms back then, I can absolutely say that that was pointing my compass, and the direction of the kinds of experiences that I would end up seeking out and that would be attracted into me, that would help me find the ingredients to learn how to have a more creative existence.

Learn how to work with my intuition and live more intuitively and follow the flow. Learn how to live more spiritually and learn more about my spiritual connection and my spiritual gifts. And the reinvention piece, I actually don't know if you can make a major move like this, and not go through some sort of reinvention.

So that was kind of a given. But I really sought that out. And so there was an intentionality around it. So it can be something huge. Your intention can be in the year of 2024. Maybe you have some big goal and you actually like set A, this is what I'm gonna do this year, this is the year that I take this trip or I write this book or I do whatever, whatever the big thing is something on your bucket list.

And it can also be something really small like I am going to create kindness. I am going to work on balance this month. It can be anything from a quality or a characteristic or something that you are wanting to develop within yourself to some sort of big external outward manifestation that you're working towards. It can be something that you are going to participate paid in, that you think about what's my intention for doing that. I did that this last summer I was choreographer for a musical.

And before I went, I had a good feeling about it, I wouldn't have accepted the position if one, I hadn't been able to work it into my schedule. And two, I didn't already have a positive expectation of the outcome. But I'd worked with the director before, it was Heather's the musical, I thought it sounded really fun, I knew some of the people that were going to be either auditioning or being part of the crew, and I just had a really positive feeling about it, it felt like the right thing at the right time, during the right season in life. But before I set out to do it, I really set an intention down around it.

And my intention was, is that it would be fun, that it would be joyful, I set it an intention that the choreography would come through. I hadn't choreographed in probably about a year and a half. So I had a little bit of anxiety, like, do I still know how to do this, can I really put together a whole show. So I set an intention that for the dance and how I wanted the dance to be, and that for the most part, my intention was that everybody I worked with that it just felt really positive.

And it was a time in my life where I was coming out of some really high stress. And so I knew that what I didn't want was any thing, sometimes when we work with the group, there can be some chaos, there can be drama that comes with that. I wasn't anticipating that. But I really wanted to attend.

[16:38] Setting Intentions for a Peaceful Month

Like, that's not what I'm here for. I'm here to dance, and to have such a good time teaching these young adults, this choreography and to have really good relationships with any of the other crew that I work with, and the director. And that's what I'm here for, and really to create joy and to inspire those qualities.

And the people I'm working with and to help participants who were a part of the production, who maybe five the story in their mind of I'm not good at dance just put me in the back row. Like I wanted them to feel inspired and be like, no, no, no, we're not putting you in the back row, because you've got this old story that you're not good at dance, anybody can dance, and we're going to have a really good time with these moves.

So those were some of my intentions and absolutely felt like that was accomplished during my time there. And I think that thinking in that way, and laying that energetic grid work absolutely supports me in creating the kind of experience that I want to have. And that is why we think about what is our intention, because it does support us and helping create and manifest the kind of experience that we want to have. The grid work is our landing platform, it is where energy anchors into.

And so it's kind of like lining it up, right? If we're like calling something into ourselves and saying, This is what I want to create, then we are helping give that energy sort of a shape and a form and a way for it to ground and kind of come into this container and take on the energy that we're intending for it. So how do we do this? How do we lay the energy grid work? Well, it's going to sound really obvious.

But the first thing that we want to do is think about the energy of what do we want to create. So if we have a goal, or we have an intention, we can always take it a little bit of a step further. If your intention is I want to have peace this month, that's a really great place to think about setting an intention. I want to have a peaceful January.

So what kinds of things what kinds of energies or qualities might help you think about? How you're going to create that? You know, and so maybe you think about if I'm going to have a peaceful month, maybe you think about I want to lay the energetic grid work that I'm working on self acceptance. I'm working on radical acceptance for whatever happens in my life.

I'm working on Grace, and I'm just working on finding forgiveness. No matter what happens on a day to day basis, I'm going to choose to be at peace, because I am creating this foundation of radical acceptance, grace for the process and forgiveness for myself for the people around me. And these are the ways I'm going to go about cultivating inner peace and my life at this time.

So we want to think about what qualities might we want to bring to the energy of something like what characteristics might we want to bring to the energy of something? What's the essence that We want to feel sometimes we don't know what our intention is, but maybe you're not in a good place in life right now. And somebody is really struggling. And they're like, I have no idea what my intention is like that feels like way too big of a stretch for me, could you connect with the essence of how you'd like to feel.

And so maybe the essence is, if you're feeling stuck, I'd like to feel some movement, I'd like to feel a little bit lighter. I'd like to feel a little bit more clarity in my life, I'd like to feel, I'd like to embody a little bit more just well being or sense that I'm finding my rhythm again. So what essence what felt sense much you'd like to create in my, you'd like to think about bringing into something. And, again, how do you want it to feel.

[20:52] Aligning Consciousness with Intentions Through Energy

So all of those things help us identify the energetic qualities. And we could think about this as the frequencies that we want to tune into, we could think about this as the colors we want to bring to our artistic palette, the note that we want to put into our symphony, like insert whatever metaphor works for you here, based on who you are, artistically or visually, or how you understand these things. But essentially, that is what we're doing. We are kind of pre arranging, this is the mood board for how I want it to feel. And then we work from there.

And we work from that place of inspiration. And we do that by making that energy, our focal point. It is how we create and align consciousness with what we are trying to make what we are trying to manifest. So if our energy of something if the essence of something is let's say, your mood board, we're gonna go with our example of creating inner peace.

This is a good one, because a lot of us are working on some, some kind of face or form of this that our own way. So if we're working on creating inner peace, and maybe we have decided that part of how we're going to do that is we are going to work on grace for the process of forgiving ourselves, others forgiving life, and we're gonna work on radical acceptance. So how do we make those things our focal point? Well, those are the criteria, I suppose that we use as we're moving through the ingredients of our day to day lives.

So let's say that this is your goal right now, this is what you're going to work on in January, this is your intention for the month, or this is your intention for the year 2024. And you might at the end of the day, if you're having a little bit of reflection time, and you're like, oh, today was not a great day, I didn't feel peaceful, I got super dysregulated I snapped out so and so and I really don't like how I reacted. You can use these energies that you've identified as foundational to your intention to help you figure out how can you work with what happened.

So you can ask yourself, How can I have radical acceptance for how I navigated today? Is there a way to have grace for my process? How could I apply the principle of forgiving myself to help me just be at peace with a very messy day where I don't feel like I was my best self? I didn't really act peaceable. I really wasn't serene. So can I work with acceptance or grace or forgiveness? or all three? How can I grow from this right now? And how can I use those things to help me align and focus on what my intention is?

Do you hear how that can help us line up with the consciousness that we're trying to create? And how different that's going to feel if you beat yourself up, and you're super negative, and you're like, I really blew it today. I'm never going to get this like, I'm gonna give up on this meditation stuff. And on this mindfulness stuff and this spirituality, like I'm no good at it. And then you just like getting the shame spiral and you get really down on yourself.

Can you hear how just how you think about it, how you use sort of, to how you might tune into a different frequency of positivity, or resilience or a compassionate acceptance, how that is going to help you and how very different that's going to feel than if you tune into like self hatred, or some form of really negative self talk or just stewing on your thoughts, right?

Maybe your inner peace that you didn't achieve is somebody else's fault, because you're really upset with them and you're really mad at what they did. And the more you spin out about it and think about it, after a while, you have a moment where you kind of can sit outside your thoughts.

And you're like, wow, I've literally spent the evening stewing over so and so like, they are renting so much space in my brain right now. So much space in my brain right now. And all it's done is made me feel angry, and it's made me feel bad. And I'm no closer to a solution than I was earlier today.

So how could you like work with the principles of grace or forgiveness or acceptance, and there's always a way to work with these things. So and so that you're stewing over my let's say they really are to blame, and they deserve to be stood over is a problematic relationship.

And you're really being challenged to grow and just set boundaries, and you do a little bit of self evaluation, and you're like, I'm not overreacting, there's actually a problem going on here. Well, we still have ways that we can work on finding inner peace and trying to come back to a space of peace, even if part of how we find inner peace is to just have compassionate acceptance, that sometimes we might do a little bit in our process.

And we've learned maybe that it's better just to write it out and write a letter in our journal and get it out of our system so that we can work on cutting back into a more peaceful place and a more quiet mind, there's always a way to work with it, there's always a way to do a u turn to kind of loop ourselves back to make take a why in the road if we need to, and come back to the energy of what we're intending and what we are trying to create in our lives.

And so we get to be creative with this. And this is also to why I think it's so important to think about the energy because we can blow an intention. Like we can look at how we navigated a day and say, Well, I did not make my intention at all to be productive today. I had this intention, and I was going to do all these things.

And I really didn't do any of those things I laid around and I napped instead. And if we look at it and judge it based on how we acted sometimes that absolutely, like just kind of stops us in our tracks. And then we decide to like throw out the goal, or we decide that it's not worth it. And we get really down on ourselves. And it can just lead to these dead end streets sometimes of self pity or feeling bad about ourselves. And then it makes it so much harder to actually be productive. Now we're kind of stuck in the quicksand and stuck in the muck.

But let's say that you decided that you're going to be productive today that that was your intention. But you've also set an intention for yourself that maybe this is separate from the productivity one, but you are just working on being kinder to yourself. And that is something that is part of your foundation, as well. And so maybe you are like I was not productive today.

But you know what, I rested? Maybe I really needed that rest. Maybe there's a reason right now that I just could not make myself be as productive as I wanted to be? And how can I be kind to myself in this? And how can I kind of loop back and say, Well, I was very productive at taking a nap and getting some rest. And now that I have attended to just having downtime, I'm I'm going to try again tomorrow and try and get those things on my list done.

[28:41] Aligning Energy and Intentions for Personal Growth

There's always a way, always away. And so that's one of the things that I love about working with energy is that it's so malleable. And when we realize that we've kind of left our own grid and we have wandered away and we are not really aligning with what our original intention was.

We can come back to that we can do the self work, we can ask ourselves, what's going on here? How did I get so off track? Is there a way to think about this? to reframe it, is there a way to come back and to realign with this consciousness that I'm trying to create? And that consciousness is how you are choosing to show up in the world? Whatever your intentions are, that consciousness is you mindfully taking responsibility for your path that is creating the consciousness of Who do I want to be and how do I want to be and what might I like my footprint to look like in this world?

And that intentionality is what gives us purpose. It is what allows us to have a sense of sovereignty on our journey. It is what we can come back to if we feel like life is totally out of control and circumstances are out of control. and sometimes we do go through the seasons and our world right now there's so much in it that just feels way too big for any one person to take on by themselves.

And when we have this sense of loss of control, a sense of helplessness or a sense of victimization, it really helps to think about, well, what do I have a sense of power over? What do I have control over and our intentions are probably one of the number one things that we are in charge of, we can always work with them. And if you start down a path and realize it's not working for you, what is so great is we can change our mind. And we can say that was an interesting experiment. I don't exactly like where that took me. So I'm going to re intend something else.

So there's so much room for change and for growth and for transformation, and for fluidity here. So the last thing we want to do, as we've identified the energies we won, and we've really kind of honed it down to these little bullet points of what are my focal points for how I might want to create this energy, what things might support this energy is we want to ground the energy somehow.

This is the laying the grid work part, right? It's like we think about what the grid work is, but then like, how do we actually like lay it out? How do we lay this sort of brick and mortar, energetic foundation underneath us.

And that is when we get to have a fun time with something like a vision board, or writing your intentions out in your journal, it might be something where you do a little ritual around it with the moon's, the moon's and solstices and the start of the month, anything cyclical that kind of resonates with you and that feels meaningful for you is always a nice time to create some sort of a ceremony or a tiny ritual, or an elaborate ritual, I guess it doesn't have to be tiny.

But we don't have to have something elaborate for it to work, rituals are more about coming into some sort of a container that is being held by you by the power of the moon, or the land, or the astrological transits, or maybe a special day or an anniversary that you connect with. And it's about creating something in that container, where you are making a little bit more space to meet with spirit, to be mindful of Spirit, you are creating a little bit more space for magic to happen for something sacred to happen.

And so there's an intentionality to the ritual. No matter what you're doing that you are stepping into something that you wouldn't do on a day to day basis with the intention of grounding your new moon vision, if you want to call it that of grounding your goals for the next week, or the next month, or the next year, or whatever that might look like.

[33:09] Setting Intentions and Visualizing Goals for Personal Growth

For example, I for 2024, I didn't do anything elaborate. But I did in my journal write out, like what are the goals that I want for the shear I'm working on? Well being I'm working on inner peace, and that's a really fluid word for me. Sometimes I choose a word for the year. But this year, I decided I didn't know if I wanted to be bound to any one word.

So I kind of chose just like the essence of inner peace, the essence of well being. And my idea behind it is that every month I might think about, is there a particular focal point or a particular word that feels right for me to focus on this month to help me tap into this. So maybe I'll explore inner happiness.

One month, maybe I will explore
serenity, the word serenity, maybe I'll explore different qualities of the idea of inner well being and inner peace, I have to see the years still really young. But that was kind of my little ritual for 2024 is just identifying, here's the direction that I'd like to go this year. This is what I want to align with.

And I want to see what happens after that. And and then another beautiful way that we can ground the vision is through visualizing it and doing some form of a brief or longer depending on how how positive you feel about visualizing and how long you're able to sustain your focus. But you could really take some time and envision what you want to create. So for example, when I first started the your heart magic podcast, I remember when I was back on Episode One and two, it was just last year like February of 2023.

And I think I had maybe like two episodes out, maybe a third. And I couldn't wait to get to like 10 episodes because I remember that felt more substantial to me. Like if you've done at least 10 episodes of a podcast that at least shows people that it wasn't like a one and done deal, or something that you had a whim about, and then you never came back to it again. And I had this vision of how I wanted to start to see more people engaging with it, that I was hoping to see more downloads and more signs of engagement. And so sometimes I would actually sit and I would visualize the podcast, and I visualized about six months ahead.

So I remember sitting down in February and March, and I would visualize sometime around the month of like, August into September, and I visualize seeing myself saying, hey, Episode 30 is come out, I didn't really count how many that would be I just figured by then I'd at least be up to 30. And I remember having a sense that there was like this huge library now that I was building on. I remember having a sense that doing the podcasts felt more comfortable. I felt like I dial the system.

And I thought about how great it would feel to have it be something that was just part of my offerings and part of my services and part of how I'm sharing cart wisdom. And I saw myself just kind of joyfully like moving throughout my day, sitting down, you know, writing out some notes, making the podcast itself, doing the behind the scenes editing and all that. And it felt really good. And when I was first creating your heart magic, before I got to like episode 30.

And we're on like, 52 I think today, it might be the 52 episode or 52nd episode, but before I you know, got there, and I was just episode like 123. And there was like maybe three people downloading it a week if that. And I was like, how am I gonna grow this thing. I grounded the vision. And I visualized it. And I was really thoughtful about what I wanted it to look like and how I wanted it to feel. And so visualizing something is a really powerful way of also helping create that focal point and ground the vision ground, the energy of welfare and tensioning and our life.

[37:29] Coming Up Next Week

So that is how we lay the energetic grid work. And there's probably about 50 other ideas that I could have added to that. But I think that's a really good starting place for us for today. 

The next time that we are talking about this series, the power of intentions we will be talking about crafting and beautiful life. So we will be looking at how that energy might support things like manifestation and really curating and creating a life that feels beautiful for us. 

So that will be coming soon on the podcast. We will also have another archetype of the Tarot coming up this month. I think we are about on card. Our justice, I think is our next one. And we will have another talk story coming up in a few weeks. So we have some good things happening on your heart magic in the year 2024. With that, have an amazing week everybody. Be well. Be Love, be you and be magic.

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