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[0:13] Crafting a meaningful life with intentions
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. Welcome to Your Heart magic. This is Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright. And today we are continuing our power of intention series. And we are talking about crafting a beautiful life. Last week, we started with this foundational piece of intentions. And we talked about laying the energetic cred work, and how to really work with the intentions and our life and make sure that the energy and the roots of our intentions are very clear and very aligned. And I think there was some fun energetic concepts in that episode.
So if it's like as above, so below or as below so above, or whatever that say goes. Today, we're kind of talking like what's above ground if we have done our work, and we've really tried to lay the energetic grid work for our intentions are manifestations, the beautiful life that we want to create. How do we go about actually creating that. And what I love about this whole concept is that this is so not a one size fits all. I call this crafting a beautiful life.
But maybe that word doesn't work for you. Maybe you'd rather craft a good life, a curious life and interesting life and adventurous life. I use beautiful to mean something that resonates with us and helps us feel connected to our heart, to magic to our wisdom to the things that make life worthwhile and worth living. And it's such a philosophical question to even talk about what is beautiful life.
And when we are on the path of wanting to follow our heart magic, wanting to stay and our spiritual connection trying to show up as conscientious beings of light to are contributing a little bit more healing to the world, a little bit more kindness, a little bit more compassion, whatever energies we feel called to create, and the ecosystem around us whatever that is, how do we go about doing that and what resonates with us.
So when we talk about the idea of crafting a beautiful life, just keep in mind, this is a very fluid concept that is very subjective and in the eye of the beholder. And something that I really started asking myself a few years back is what makes a good life.
And at that time, I had moved on the island of kawaii we were here, but we moved into a home and this little town called Kilauea. And it really marked this is back in 2021. It really marked for me this very sort of definitive beginning of what felt like a new cycle at a new chapter. And of course, as we have always talked about on the podcast, one cycle moves into the next. So there's a lot of overlap between them.
But I felt this shift within myself. And sure enough, over the next year, I was going to make some profound external shifts in my life that really felt like yes, I am moving into a new cycle. And as I was working through all of that I was really contemplating the question, what makes a good life? Because our answer to that question has everything to do with how do we craft a beautiful life? And if we don't know what makes a good life, and we can't figure that out for ourselves, or we're cloudy on it, and we need to figure that out? Or we need to reevaluate that right?
There is our starting point for figuring out how do I go about setting intentions? How do I go about crafting and beautiful life? Well, we have to figure out what does that mean for us? And that might be something that we keep redefining as we grow and as we have experiences across our timeline.
So we can certainly revisit this question at different points and our own architecture of development and in our own timelines and in all the growing up becoming that we do as These wonderful soulful beings taking this human journey. But if we can come up with our answer for what makes a good life, and I suspect for many of us, when we really sit down and map that out, it really comes back to what our value systems are and really identifying what do we value?
[5:20] Crafting a beautiful life through accountability and acceptance
How are we trying to create a life that is in alignment with those values. And then on top of that, we might have our hopes and dreams, what are some of the individual things that we feel called to bring into the world or experience or we want to create, and maybe there's some stuff in there about legacy, or the mark that we'd like to make, or the work that we'd like to pass on, or the inheritance of light, the legacy of light that we hope to leave on the planet, whether that is in a very overt way, or a very subtle way of just walking humbly, and living close to the Earth and close to your heart.
And I think that when we can figure out those pieces for ourself, we really get to have some fun, and play with this idea of well, then how do I go about crafting a beautiful life. And when we talk about the power of intention, that right there, if your intention is I want to craft a beautiful life, or, again, use your own best word there a fluid life, a curious life, a life of experience, that's an intention. Intentions can be something very, very specific. But they can also be sort of this overarching umbrella that we house, the rest of our goals and hopes and dreams and experiences under.
And so I think when we talk about the power of intention, the idea of living a beautiful life crafting a beautiful life, living with meaning, living with some sort of purpose or intentionality, figuring out what makes a good life and then trying to focus on those things. That is an intention that probably will stay with you for a lot of your journey. I know for myself that I keep coming back to this question.
And I keep coming back to this choice of saying that when I want to have a life with beauty, then that is really on me to work with what I have, and to try and create as much joy as much goodness as much gratitude, as much meaning and wisdom and learning from the experiences that life gives me it is a dance that I am doing with life.
And I'm creating from the ingredients that I am working on manifesting myself and bringing into the world. I mean, sometimes I'm creating from the ingredients of what life brings me. And I wasn't trying to create any particular thing life just happened. And I was kind of bowed over by it because the sheer velocity of it brought some circumstances. And so there is an ebb and a flow to that. And that brings me to the first point that I want to share about how do we craft a beautiful life. And that is the idea of radical accountability and radical acceptance.
And I think one of our starting places needs to be having a very compassionate, radical acceptance of where our lives are at like right now at this point in time, and being brave enough to take fierce accountability and fierce responsibility for where our life is at. So I want to talk about what fierce accountability and I suppose radical acceptance is not. And it is not blaming ourselves for circumstances that might have been out of our control that were happening with somebody else or in the world around us. And that somehow extensively changes things for us.
And so we find ourselves in a situation or in circumstances that we don't love. And we are tempted to blame ourselves or to go back and be like, What could I have done differently. And we're kind of bargaining with life and bargaining with our own circumstances. And we're playing this old story in our head. And maybe some of it is that we did some things and choices that we made, might not have worked out. Every now and then we really blow it and we say, oh my gosh, I've got nobody to blame but myself, I brought this on myself.
And so one thing that radical acceptance and accountability also isn't is blaming ourselves and staying in a space of shame and self recrimination for mistakes that we've made. It is not martyrdom. It's not an ongoing pity party.
That's really not accept septons if we're like beating ourselves up, that's actually this form of bargaining unit sort of this shadow side of bargaining. If we can whip ourselves into shape, with all this negative self talk and beating ourselves up, like somehow, maybe we'll get a do over or we're inflicting this kind of self imposed punishment, we won't allow ourselves to be in a state of peace or in a state of grace, because we just have to hold ourselves accountable in a way that is punitive.
And there's no acceptance, there's no peace. And there, there is no, giving ourselves a break for being a human being and figuring life out as we go. So that's not what radical acceptance and accountability looks like. What it really looks like is, first of all, bringing grace to the process, and just being able to have a little chat with ourselves and say, okay, whether or not I love everything about my life, this is where I'm at right now.
[10:59] Self-growth and acceptance
This is what I have been learning. These are maybe some choices I've made and what the outcome has been. This is maybe some things that happen in life, and they intersected with me, and they put me in a different trajectory, or a different path than I ever saw coming. And I've been trying to make the best of it ever since.
And I don't know that I love what I've been doing with all of that. It is just looking at things with the clear gaze, and being able to take inventory and take stock and say, whether or not I caused all this, whether or not I created all this, whether or not this just happened, and I just found myself in the middle of this.
This is the circumstances these are the ingredients of life that I have to work with right now. And I am going to choose to be responsible for saying, at this point in time, this is where I'm going to push off from, and I am going to work on creating a beautiful life with what I have. That's all that it is there's a neutrality to this process. And there might be a little grief work that we do, we might fall into negative self talk, or sometimes holding ourselves overly accountable.
All of those are just simply invitations to do a little bit of shadow work, a little bit of self work to do a little bit of clearing out, if we realize that we're being overly hard on ourselves, there's so many self interventions that we can take to try and bring more compassion to our voice to learn how to be compassionate, to reach out and try and talk to somebody and see if we can get a little bit of a different perspective, to read somebody else's story maybe, and they come out and say, Hey, I'm a human being too.
And I don't love the choices I made. But here's how I've chosen to grow from it. I mean, there's so many points of intervention that we can make. But we have to be realistic about what we're working with. And we thought to stop, like wanting something that we don't have or feeling that if we made a different turn somehow, then we wouldn't be where we're at now. And we keep trying to go back mentally and fill in that gap and have a do over, we just have to find a way to say this is what is. And from here is where I'm going to launch myself. And I'm going to build myself. And when we talk about laying the energetic grid work.
And we talked about last week's episode on that. There's such beautiful work that we can do if we are in a space and we say wow, I really don't like some of these ingredients. We can say, well, I want to make peace out of this, I want to come to peace with myself. I want to learn the art of radical acceptance and compassionate detachment. Those right there are intentions. So we can make this step malleable and learn to shift our perspective around it if we feel like we've got some growth to do.
And the next thing that we really want to do is look at what is going right. There is a fearless gratitude of relentless gratitude, a commitment to the practice of noticing the good that I think so many of us have to be really vigilant and cultivating in our lives. Because I think it's that easy to focus on all that's not going right. I think part of the human condition is that it is difficult for us to be content that there's a little bit of restlessness inside us there's a little bit of a wanting more.
And if we can learn to harness that energy, this can work for us and really beautiful ways. We can say I do want more out of life and so maybe that becomes the catalyst that helps us make a courageous change. Maybe becomes the catalyst that helps us get our ducks in a row and, you know, set a goal around some accomplishment that we want to do, or some new skill or hobby that we want to learn.
And that restlessness, that tension of not wanting to be complacent and wanting to somehow create or do more, it actually supports us and kind of ignites a spark within us. And it inspires us to expand and to create progress to create movement in our life.
So that's not a bad thing. But it is something to be interpreted at the context of understanding that sometimes we feel hungry for more we feel itchy for something that we don't have, and it's not available to us. That reality is just not available to us yet. It might be something we can work towards, it might be something that we can't work towards, and we're being invited by life just to be content with the circumstances that we have.
That is something that I can't interpret for people, we just have to meet ourselves where we're at with that and be able to ask ourselves the question of, can I change this? Is there anything that I can do with this? And if the answer is no, then how can I find again, that radical acceptance for this? How can I be okay with this?
[16:22] Finding gratitude and balance in life
And then what are the good things right now? What are the gifts right now? What are the things that are beautiful and wonderful, and bring a sense of peace to my well being? You know, it's a funny thing about life.
And I think one of the wisdoms that adults often learn as they continue on their own developmental path and their own timeline, and they learn this wisdom and aging is that sometimes, the more you have, the more you amass, or the more you accomplish, sometimes it just comes with more issues, or more things to manage, or it clutters up life more, every now and then people get what they always wish that they had, right?
They imagine that, wouldn't it be great to make it to this next tier, this next level, whatever that is. And if I had that, somehow, it would give me this thing, whether it would solve my financial issues, or whether it would give me such a sense of satisfaction or such a sense of accomplishment, or I would feel like I am making my mark in the world, and I'm doing this thing, and then you get there.
And often you find out that there is management that you have to do to stay there, or this whole new sphere of experience opens up to you. And it's not all good. There are hard experiences, there are more lessons to be learned there.
Sometimes you get to this upper tier, and she realized that there is some sort of tax that comes with it. And I suppose if we're talking money, maybe we could say that's a monetary tax, but I was actually just thinking being taxed by life. If you are somebody who develops a huge following, because you have been putting your art out there. And you really wanted people to connect with your art. You know, that might be a beautiful thing.
There might be such a sense of satisfaction from it. And then often though, if you talk to artists, there is pressure to what are you going to create next? Well, I liked it better when you were doing this genre, there is a pressure to stay connected to your audience to stay relevant to stay.
Gosh, and the algorithms if you are trying to put your work out there on the odd mind in any way that builds an audience or builds a base. There are all these strings attached to it when you get there. And you might wistfully say oh my gosh, I wish I was just back in this pure place when I was just making art for art's sake.
And I had these big dreams in my heart. And I was kind of unfiltered by the world around me. And I was just the beginning of my journey. And I had so much optimism. So there's this funny thing that sometimes we get to a certain space. And it's like, well remember when you wanted what you have now. And at the time, that seemed amazing. And then we get there. I mean, sometimes it's not so great. And sometimes it's great.
But it also comes with this whole other side of things that we never saw coming because oftentimes we have to be experiencing something to really realize that no experience is perfect. All experiences have what we can call a light side and a shadow side, a positive side and a side that can come with challenges. And we kind of find our path in the middle of those and learning to balance and work with all of those energies and to build bridges and to unify those experiences inside of ourselves. That is part of how we create wholeness at heart. Have any and our life.
So that piece of just being relentless and gratitude, we talk about that a lot on your heart magic. But I think that is such an important part of creating a beautiful life what is already beautiful? What is already wonderful? What can you already be grateful for? What can you already appreciate what talents and skills and abilities do you already bring to the table that you have worked on inside of yourself? Could we give ourselves credit, for having gratitude for the work that we've done in our own process and the beauty that might be us that might be the evolution of the artistry of us.
So when we talk about look around your life, and find the gratitude for the beautiful things, please include yourself in that. And include your own experience as a human and all the work and the growth that you've had, please find ways and perspectives to give yourself credit, for all the growth, all the small steps, all the ways that you are working your light, and that you are just showing up for yourself and doing the best that you can with what you have to work with.
[21:14] Balancing gratitude and purpose
I feel like that is very important. So the next thing that once we kind of have that gratitude piece in place, I wrote down the line soil, the soil, plant the seeds. And this is this tricky tension between figuring out am I content just where I'm at. And right now I just want to tell the soil and kind of keep things the way they are. And I'm in a space in life. And that feels really good for me. Many of us might say yes, and there's also these things I want to grow. There's these things, I want to experience the things I want to learn. That's that restless part of us that wants to reach for dreams and create a bigger vision.
And that maybe says Oh, but I still have good work to do. Usually, when I have done Akashic readings for people, and I've done intuitive work with people, a lot of times something very common that I've heard is that so many people have an unrealized dream inside of them. Whether it is they want to write, or they want to publish in some shape or form they want to travel, they feel like they have a sense of purpose. And they're not quite sure that they fulfill that yet.
And how do they do that. And so I think the idea behind this piece with creating a beautiful life is recognizing the beauty that we already have created, at the same time being able to hold space without attaching to the vision of the beauty that we could create. And this is really hard. It's easier said than done.
For myself personally, I often find that I can be too vision focused. And I'll have these grand ideas of these things I want to accomplish. And oftentimes, it can rob me of my ability to be present focused, I actually wrote a piece for a book that I'm working on called the gap. And in that piece, I talk about what I describe as the tension between wanting to be just happy with where I'm at, and really learning the art of gratitude and the art of contentment and learning that inner peace.
At the same time. I have such a big sense of purpose inside of me that I always have a sense of like where I'd like to go and where I need to go. And one of my like big soul lessons of will probably my life it's probably a theme I'll work with my entire life. Many of our big soul essence we just keep coming back to in different forms throughout our own timeline.
But specifically for I'd say like this last decade in life, I'm 46 and I think something that's like really marked by my mind 40s In some of this was really kicked off with with losing my brother Brenton. 2016. So I think that was a catalyst was really working with these tensions of learning just to show up and be grateful and love my life. And at the same time though, like I thought this courage to do these bigger things and to like, actualize my dreams.
And if I'd stayed in that place of just being grateful I don't know that I would have ever moved to the island of kawaii I think it would have been really kind of scary and big for me to find the courage to start writing. I probably wouldn't have this podcast. There's so much that I've chosen to create and has come from that piece of me that was like no, I know I meant to do more.
At the same time. I can honestly tell you that I feel like I lost a lot A lot of time and discontent, my first few years on the island because I was developing such a chip on my shoulder over feeling like I was trying to follow this soul path and have this bigger purpose. And it just wasn't having that I wasn't having the breakthrough moments that I wanted, I wasn't having the growth that I wanted. And I really struggled to be grateful and really happy for the small steps, and then all this hardship happened.
[25:28] Finding contentment and gratitude in everyday life
And all these things kind of came along, and those were all joy suckers as well. You know, it's like, kind of like when life itself is an energy vampire. And there's all these things that like, take from you and undermine you.
So I was really grappling with all of that. And when I came to that space in my life back in 2021, where I was saying, What is a good life path? And part of what I was doing then was sort of that fierce inventory and that acceptance of like, okay, you have been here, give us four and a half years, maybe five years at that point, these have been your experiences, what do you think of those?
Like, what do you think you're doing right? What do you think you could have done better? What can you learn, and I was really doing it from a space of self compassion. And there was some grief involved, because I probably would do some things differently. But then again, I needed some of those experiences to grow as a human. So who's to say, we could have done better, we can always say that we do what we can. And as Maya Angelou said, when we realized that we could have done better, we move forward, and we do better.
And I was in that space, though, of that compassionate, kind of fierce inventory, and was asking that question, what makes a good life, and everything on my list was so simple, it was so foundational. And I really arrived at this place of if I do the big things that I hope to do. That's awesome.
That'll be great. That will be icing on the cake. But I spent the last few years focusing on those big things. And I took steps towards those big things. So I don't take away from those experiences. But am I happier? Am I more grateful? Am I more content? Can I travel back to myself of my 2016 2017 year old self who had this dream of kawaii?
And can I say to her, yes, you should go and you're gonna find better life satisfaction. What would I tell myself? Ooh, those were questions, y'all. I have to say, some of my answers to them, really set me on a track of working with finding sort of this newfound appreciation of gratitude and the every day. And it's not like I'd lost that. But I think it had taken a backseat to this over focus and this overdevelopment on the bigger vision.
And I had some rewilding work to do, to really try and get that back and come back to a place of how do I craft a beautiful life. So much of what I came back to, was these really foundational lessons, this kind of old territory that I'd really walked back in right after my divorce, and right after my spiritual awakening, earlier in 2010 2011 2012, and it was really coming back to this place of like, well, a good life is what you make of it.
It is creating a mindset of finding the good in every day focusing on the good. It is remembering that self pity is a dead end street, you can have a time limited pity party, it's true story, I used to do this, I'd set my timer, like you get 30 minutes to wallow, and then you have to get up and go do something good for yourself. You can write about it.
You can transmute any grief you have. And you can create beautiful words out of it. You know, but you can't stay there. You don't get to wallow. It was remembering that a day well lived and a day of just finding gratitude was a beautiful life. It was really choosing to work with the circumstances that I had in life, and just try and find the beauty and the joy and make the best of it.
And so I think that when we talk about working with what we have, while at the same time planning for any dreams, tilling the soil, planting the seeds, we work with the energy of realizing that there just might be some tension there and that it's not about being future focused versus just learning to be content in the everyday it's about finding balance, our own equilibrium, our own sense of what is the fulcrum of knowing that we are mindfully envisioning whatever it is that we'd like to hope for.
Dream achieve. contribute to, while at the same time making sure on a day to day basis that we can find good things to ground us into contentment, into peace and into a sense of satisfaction. And that's really, I think what it comes down to when we talk about creating a beautiful life. We have to keep learning how to find the extraordinary and the every day.
[30: 26] Finding magic in everyday life
I say this a lot on your heart magic, but I need the message. And so maybe there's others who need this message as well. But the longer that I go on my timeline, and I sort of do this human aging journey, the more I keep realizing that life is really comprised of so many moments where we're either down in the valley, or it's just a normal routine day, nothing extraordinary happens if we don't look for it, that those mountaintop moments and chasing those mountaintop moments are not what it's about. They happen.
We can create little mountaintop moments for ourselves, we can take ourselves on a fun adventure if we need some joy or exploration. We can be Pippi Longstocking and become a thing finder on a day to day basis and collect as many beautiful things or experiences. As we want to, if you're not familiar with Pippi, that was such a delightful children's series.
And there is one of the books she's like this thing finder and she goes out looking for treasure and the treasure could be this piece of string and a bouncy ball that she found and, you know, a little coin or something like that, and she gets so excited, because she found this treasure, we can develop that kind of mindset with ourselves.
But I think that ultimately, it really is about knowing that we have to bring that mindset that shift, that ability to get excited to find the Wonder on a day to day basis. And we can absolutely try and create opportunities where that's more likely to happen. We can break up our routine by going somewhere by taking a walk by moving, we can meditate and connect with spirit, we can bust out our box of Crayola crayons, and we can do some art. And we can do something that makes it delightful. And we think oh my goodness, I just had such a wonderful adventure and art right now.
We can watch something inspirational. We can work with exactly where we're at and bring in this extraordinary. But I often think that if we're waiting for something big to happen, it's like it's already happening. This is it. And while we might not love every day, there are beautiful things. There are grateful things happening on a day to day basis that we can really find the magic and spirit is always moving around us.
We can say angels help connect me to the magic again, give me synchronicity helped me to see some signs helped me to have a sense that I'm not alone in this. We have so many things that we can work with. When we allow ourselves to open to the magic of the every day and allow ourselves to be awed and amazed at this wonderful world and so many miracles that are happening around us all the time.
[33:23] Coming Up Next Week
All right, that feels like a beautiful stopping place for today. Have a wonderful week. And best of luck everybody with crafting whatever beautiful life that you are creating for yourself. I hope this brought some inspiration through and a little bit more permission to keep doing that. Next week is going to be a talk story Episode I have a particular theme that I want to focus on. I'll share what that is next week.
And so I thought the best way to do that is to share some of my writings around this theme and some personal reflections on some of the things coming up for me with that so you can stay tuned for that. And in the meantime, 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