Below is a transcript of the episode as generated by Otter.ai. (*please note, this transcript has only been edited to put in line breaks for easier readability and may contain errors where a word or phrase got lost in transcription.)
[0:13] Introduction: Grief, Loss and Personal Reflections
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. We are doing a talk story episode today. And I've titled it grief swings. Because all the passages that I'm going to be sharing from some of my books are centered on the topic grief.
And the reason that I chose that for today's episode. And for the theme of this talk story, which if you're just tuning in is a series I do, where I will take passages and selections from some of my different works, read them and then speak some candid reflections about the writing or my thoughts on on it. Now.
These are always unscripted. This is very much unscripted grief. Today, I have a few passages I'm choosing to read. And I've thought absolutely about nothing that I want to say. So we'll see what comes through. But this week in January was the anniversary of the loss of my brother, and he passed eight years ago. Now. It's so funny how time is I actually thought it was seven. And when I did the math, I thought, oh my gosh, it's year eight.
And I remember, especially when it was within like the first year first two years after losing him. And I probably remember this because I wrote about it. But I remember writing, like how will it feel when it's been five years since losing him, you know, eight years since losing him 10 years since losing him and I kind of played the tape forward a little bit and imagine how that would feel.
And I think that's the thing about grief, we don't really know how it will feel grief is a journey that we continue to take when we've had major loss through the entirety of our lives, it just becomes part of our journey. And I tend to think that there is some initial grief work that can be really heavy. That is definitely grief calls you and demand your attention when you are in the heart of it.
And you've had the immediacy of the loss. And I think that there is something very disruptive about that journey. I know for myself, I've often said that I felt like I was bopping along, and life as I knew it.
And this horrible thing happened and it just kind of like plucked me out at the trajectory of what I was working on and who I was becoming, and how I saw my life going and I got plopped down in this like kingdom of grief. And I am a very as a writer, and I'm a very visual person. And so I use metaphor a lot. And I've kind of mapped out these territories that I felt like I traversed. And some of those are woven into some of my books.
So I guess they've really cemented themselves in my mind, almost like I created this map, but there was like the bottomless Deep Blue Sea of sorrow. And there was these mountains that I had to climb where it just felt like I was carrying the weight of my brother. At my back I was Samwise Gamgee, carrying Frodo, you know up to mountain Doom to try and like help him get rid of the ring and support him in this task. And there was a time period I called it the wasteland.
And it just pictured being in like no man's land and kind of crawling across the desert. And you know there was these like Oasis's of hope in these mirages, where I would be like, Oh, maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and it will feel better. And I was really struggling. This is about three months after losing him and I remember being like it's like an oasis.
[4:32] Reflections on Loving and Losing and Embracing Grief
This doesn't get better, it just gets worse. And I am very fortunate and grateful to be able to take my experience and put words to it. So I kind of wrote about that map and some of my writings and over time I found that I no longer feel that I'm on that specific journey. It's more like the grief just became part of my bigger journey and part of grief.
If work isn't just the grieving that we might think of with sadness or loss, it is the loving and it is the integration of who did I become because of this, and were there pieces of my life that I needed to go back and recover or reclaim, because they got shelved in order for me to tend to my grief work, and really take the passage that my soul demanded of me at the time.
So I found over the last couple of years that that has been the focus, it's this sort of missing Brent, I've had so much sense of a spiritual presence of him that that's very comforting, we always miss who they were in human form, and the possibility of what our life would be like if they were still here in that form. But I do take a lot of comfort in His presence.
I've also found though, that a lot of my work has been almost like grieving the loss self, and grieving the back end that I didn't get to become, even as I continue to embrace the Batman that I'm becoming and how gray shaped me and changed me. And remember, we can hold contradictory experiences within the whole of ourselves.
And so those things kind of contradict each other. And yet, it's all part of my ecosystem. So I would like to share some passages today. And these are all writings from the lamentations of the C series, I did a trilogy that really started with lamentations of the sea. It was 111 passages on grief, love loss and letting go.
And at the time, I thought it was a standalone book and the creative process and life is this really beautiful thing. It turns out, it wasn't it ended up being a trilogy. And I went on to write transformations of the Sun, which was composed of 122 passages and revelations of the sky was my version of Return of the Jedi in that had 133 passages. So the one that I want to start with today is from the middle book, transformations of the sun. And this one is really simple.
It's a very short poem, it says, it's not that our grief will ever leave us, it's just that over time it learns to grow wings. Sometimes those wings will still drop us down and descent towards the deep and the dark and the hurt of the pain. But other times, those wings will help us transcend taking us up and beyond. So we can embody the utter beauty and miracle that is this life.
I've often said that, I feel one of the gifts that came from losing friends. And we can call this gift ahead and treasure. So the kind of treasure that we find when we look for it. It's not always immediately obvious. But one of those hidden gifts hidden treasures that I kind of dug for through the wasteland, was really getting in touch with the light of my possibility, and really finding more courage to live in an even more authentic way. And
I've told this story many times, but in summation that ultimately led me to pack up my life and Alaska and close down my brick and mortar private practice and move to the island of kawaii and it's something that's really fueled me the last however many years, I guess, eight years.
And when I have wanted to take a step forward into something that felt really scary, like maybe publishing books, or the first time I spoke or the first time I started coming out as a spiritual guide, somebody with intuitive gifts and started self identifying as that and trying to weave it into my work in a professional way, but also in a way where I owned it. I would draw on this deep well that I developed during that time. That was really born from the pain of that rite of passage of grief.
[9:19] Finding Strength Through Grief
And it would give me strength and it would give me courage. And I often thought well what would Brent say if he could like sit down and have some spirit coffee with you right now?
And sometimes I would feel His presence and feel this sense of him being like oh my gosh, and don't hold back like you get it right like this is what you get this is your life and whether or not you travel here again and come back and a different form as a sole like this is the life that you get aspect and and so are you really not going to do the thing, whatever that thing was, whether it's write the book Um, put yourself out there in a bigger way, find the courage to stand on his speech stage and speak to whatever it is like, Are you not going to do that because of fear?
And do you see how silly those fears are, when they are contrasted with the brevity of life and the gift of life and the gift of possibility and the gift of the light of your life. And oh, wow, like that, right there when I am like, when I'm in the trenches, and I'm like, Okay, you gotta dig deeper, I have a handful of experiences that like all dig into, to draw strength from, and that's one of them. And I'm like, if you could, like, make it through that, and if you could take your grief and really excavate it.
And really, I always say, like, put my emotional hip waders on to write these books, because it was cathartic. But it wasn't easy. It wasn't like Yay, I'm gonna sit down and like write poetry about fairies and crystals, and really pretty rainbows and play with words, I really had to access parts of my pain that were difficult to access difficult enough to go through difficult enough to have to put them into words,
I'm very grateful that I did, I do not regret it. But I have always thought if you could like take this dark thing and alchemize it and create something good out of it, something of light out of it, if you could take this loss, and instead of letting it define you in a negative way, let it define you in this like really loving way of soul expansion, and finding courage and really stripping away more of what doesn't matter to become more of who I felt I was meant to be, then like you can do whatever this thing is.
So this is my version of a pep talk. And it's one of my go to set all drawn. And that's grief swings. That is what happens when we can work with something in our life that has caused us pain or loss, whether that's grief over the loss of a loved one, over the loss of a beloved animal companion, it could be the loss of something a little bit more amorphous, it could be a home, a relationship, a country, an identity, a something that we had an attachment to something that we just feel a loss of innocence, because we've gone through something in our life.
There's so many ways that we might experience grief. And if we allow ourselves to try and keep our hearts open to the process. I think that over time, it helps us transcend and it helps give us wings. And I find that thought very beautiful. So this next passage ties into this idea of like, what do we do when we are in this space of loss and we're really grappling and struggling with it.
This is called Becoming it's passage 33 from lamentations of the sea. A loss can take you to some dark places, places you don't want but can't help to go. places marked by despair in great pain, anger, and a sense of senseless want. Places where it is hard to hang on to silver linings, or fragile hope, or any sense that the sun will shine again.
These are the places where you may encounter what feels like the very worst of yourself. A time may come when you begin to miss the old you, the you you were before this awful loss and you want to squeeze back into the old shell of self. Take your old problems back. Take your old sense of normal back. Take Back the luxury of not having to live with the heavy press of grief. A time may come when you look in the mirror and you don't like what you are becoming.
But that's just it, isn't it, you are becoming all this awful, nasty sticky mess is part of the passage of grief and holds the potential to help shine a light and to our darkest spaces, where we will be forced to face our own debris. Forced to find ways to dig deep and bring a blaze of bright into our own darkness. Forced to find the stars that help us navigate this night.
[14:39] Embracing All Aspects of Self With Grace and Self-Love
This is the place where we learned to expand. This is the place where we learn love is big enough to love over our most miserable parts of self. This is the place that holds the potential for incredible heart growth.
This is the place where we come face to face with ourselves and find we are always stronger than we think we are always have a little bit more to give than we think we do, and are always filled with an infinite supply of grace to see us through the journey. I talked about this a lot on here. So if you listen regularly, this won't be new perspective for you.
But I am a big believer that as souls embodying this human journey, we are here to experience our full scope of humanity. And our full scope of humanity includes all the fields, all the colors, all the shades, all the tones, it includes all aspects or all parts of ourselves, even the ones that are really difficult for us. And we'd like to deny or disown them. But when we dismember a part of ourselves, when we just own it, then a few things happen. One, we tend to project it on to other people, because we're not dealing with our own stuff, right. So we get mad at stuff happening in the world around us, or people around us.
Or we think we kind of look at the world through this lens of the stuff that we haven't processed and healed. The other thing I think that it can do is it just really closes us off to fully loving ourselves, and shuts the door on a potential opportunity for self love. And it creates a division inside of ourselves, or divisions inside of ourselves, depending on how much of our stuff we don't like and want to displace into zone. And when we have a division inside of ourselves, now we've got more black and white thinking, we've got parts of us that are likable and lovable, and they're good. And a plus gold star, I like it when I'm this way.
And now we have the parts of ourselves that like they get the F or whatever it is, that is the judgment, the label that puts it down or doesn't like it. And our job as humans, our psychological and or spiritual work is to keep finding ways to reclaim and own and build bridges to the parts of ourselves that we struggle with. And this isn't perfection work. This is not about having to do it perfectly. That actually feels like black and white thinking to me, so we really want to move away from that.
This is about holistic thinking and learning to practice self grace, and learning that even our most miserable feeling states and miserable aspects of self and behaviors that we might not like that all of that is still worthy of love. Because Spirit loves us like that the universe loves us like that the energy of love. It just is it is available to all you don't have to clean yourself up to receive grace to receive empathy to receive love, not in the spiritual sense.
And so if we can learn to bring some degree of that unconditional grace into ourselves and say, All right, I see you over there, little rageful BethAnne huddled in the corner that just wants to lash out. And at the time I was that passage, actually, that I wrote is followed by a very short poem called rage stage, it's pretty dark. So I'm not going to read it for this one. But it was like this rageful part of me that just wanted to rage at everybody, especially people that weren't going through what I was going through. And I was like, I want to complain about my day and have a normal problem and sort of be dealing with Brent, and, you know, really had this attitude.
And I'm kind of laughing, sharing all of this now. But at the time, I knew enough to be like, Wow, this is not good behavior. And I wasn't acting like that. I had no self control that I wasn't like acting out on it. But I didn't like those voices in my head. I didn't like that part of myself. So the way that I worked with it is as a writer, I just wrote a poem about it.
And so rageful BethAnne gets to live on in this book, and I hope connect with other people who know that same feeling state, but I realized that part of my becoming part of really working with the darkness that was being brought up in grief was to figure out a way to accept it with grace. And it doesn't mean it had to control me that I had to act on it. It doesn't mean anything other than bearing witness to ourselves. And that is part of how we heal brokenness in ourselves.
[19:34] Grief, Healing and Self-Awareness
We bear witness. without judgment, we figure out a way to bring radical compassion into ourselves. And we might say like, you're not going to captain the ship today. Just because I was in that place. I wasn't going to go around anchorage at the time and I don't know shout at people or act out or something like that. But we can acknowledge it and find a constructive way to either give voice to that. out or do art therapy, draw it out, you know, do something in nature, there's so many ways that we can bear witness to ourself and we can learn to bring love.
And what is so paradoxical about the process of grief is that oftentimes, like the only way out is through, the only way to heal it is to go through the wound, and to kind of feel the feels and name them claim them, and then we can start to heal them or at least know they're there. I always say that, we don't have to clean up every closet inside of ourselves, like if our inner world is sort of this metaphorical space. And the stuff that is hard to deal with is like the junk closets or like the locked forbidden rooms, you know, that you're not allowed to go into in a home or something, we don't have to clean all of it out at once.
We don't have to face all of it at once. But I do think we need to keep finding ways to find the courage to at least take inventory and know what's there. So it doesn't catch us unaware. That's how we keep our hearts organized. And again, this is not perfection, this work is not about perfection, we can only know what we know, sometimes we can't access parts of ourselves until we stumble across them and think, oh my gosh, I didn't even realize that was there. And that's what that was about. So it's not about doing it all at once.
This is about us just working with these constructs these paradigms that are supportive for our healing and our wholeness of being and learning to create more grace and empathy and build bridges inside of us. And that was something that I learned to do, and even more creative ways and a new ways during my grief.
The next passage that I want to read is from transformations of the sun, it's passage 43, and it's called pennies. There are two sides to every coin, heads and tails. And yet it is the same coin, both sides and compost and an endless circle binding them together. The further I go on my grief journey, the more I am coming to see just how much it is all the same coin. My experience is a matter of perspective.
What angle I'm perceiving the coin from day to day. Brent sends me pennies all the time, as a sign that everything is okay. I was actually given a penny the day before he left this earth. I'd had an unexpected urge earlier in the week to watch ghost. Then a few days later, I was at the airport preparing to board and just as Unchained Melody came on the radio, I looked down and saw a shiny penny at my feet for luck. After that, Penny started showing up everywhere all the time. Since time isn't linear in the spirit world. I assume Brent sent me that penny the first time to prepare me to try and reassure me it would all be okay.
And to establish a means of connection between us that I would recognize and all is okay even as it's not. I've become used to just accepting this contradiction as part of my reality. I wouldn't be who and what and where I am if not for Bryant and all the gifts that came from his crossing over. And yet some days I am still shocked and grieved at who and what and where I am.
The Collateral Beauty that has come from my grief guides me, haunts me, directs me, saddens me, comforts me reassures me just concerts me, darkens me, lights me and has become me. I miss him and I love him and I miss me and I love me, and I miss us and I love us. I dance back and forth between the sides, circling round and round that same coin as I remember love is endless. I have come to see that grief is more than just sorrow and sadness and lamentation.
[24:09] Love, Grief, and Healing Through Creative Expression
It is beautiful and transcendent and transformative as well. The contrast of one side sharpening and heightening the experience of the other two sides, one coin endless and it cycles both sides of equal value. I don't think it is a novel concept to say that grief is love turned inside out or like the other side of love.
We grieve because we love it is an indicator that we grieve of how deeply we feel and the only reason we can feel so deeply is because we love it did help me though, the more I was able to frame my experience with grief as an experience with law I have. And when I talk about taking a grief journey, sometimes I'll reframe that and be like, and it's all part of the love Journey, right? It's part of understanding love, and understanding that love, where's a million faces and a million faces more.
Our work here spiritually, our task here is to learn about love, we might have an individual purpose. And we have all these fun things, and good work to do and things that we want to accomplish in our day to day life and on our human journey. But ultimately, we are here to learn about love.
We are here to learn how to open our heart, how to heal our heart, how to live from the heart and listen to our heart. We are here to learn that no matter how badly our heart gets broken, it has this miraculous quality to it that somehow it can manage to heal itself. And it doesn't go back to the old shape that it was before.
But that's okay. Because we might miss that old shake. But if we stay with the process, it will form into something bigger, it really does become like consumed the art, the art of pouring liquid gold into cracked pottery. And so this imperfect, broken shards of pottery over time become something more beautiful filled with liquid gold. This is a metaphor for our spiritual journey.
And it is a metaphor that can help us tap into a image of how we can constructively work with heartbreak, and how we can choose to find the light to find the liquid gold. And so for me, love is like always the thread that I find my way back to I always find my way to this thread of the hearts way. How can I love myself in this?
How can I create love out of the situation? And what I love about this question is there's no right or wrong answer to this. How I choose to create love might be different, very different than how somebody else might answer that question for themselves. There's not like a judge and jury sitting out there that says, Oh, that loves not good enough. That's not an okay enough way to love. We get to answer this question and accordance to our own journey.
So sometimes the way that we might create love might be self loving, and just really taking really good care of ourselves. Sometimes we might create love by taking a hardship or taking something that we've been through and showing up for others and giving to them in a way or sharing our life somehow.
There's so many ways to create love out of a situation or to think like how can I love myself through this how can I bring love into the equation here. This is so fun. It is a personal artistry, it is creative work. And our main ingredient, or artistic medium is the energy of love.
[28:08] Grief, Loss and Personal Growth
And I was really learning at that time in my life. I wrote this passage after being on kawaii for maybe like six months to less than a year, some time in there. And I was really kind of marveling at I was having like so many heavy feelings about Brent. But then life was so beautiful and I was really immersed and the newness of this change and this very blank page feeling of not knowing who I would become.
And I don't think I realized at the time how absolutely extreme it was to just move over here. And to have like maybe a couple inklings of a plan but also not at all. You know, like we had rented a place like sight unseen. I really didn't know what I would be doing for work. I was going to keep a small telehealth practice going for a while, but I wasn't having any plans to expand it.
And I was just letting things immerse in this change. Everything just felt novel and different. And almost like even though I was living in the world, I felt like I was in some movie on an odyssey somewhere. And I probably look like it to the people that I'd left behind, right like I moved to this island and I was finding myself and I felt really disconnected in some ways from the real world, even though I was still a part of it.
So it was a really really unique time in my life. And there was such a sense of how circular and cyclical this cycle was like my grief led me here and it's so beautiful. And the more I felt the beauty the more I would have this like almost overwhelming sadness and sorrow of how like poignant and bittersweet grief FERS and knowing that I'm don't think I would have found what I needed to make the changes I did at the time I made them.
Without this loss. I think I would have perhaps gotten here eventually. But I probably would have done it with a lot more of a safety net and a plan. I really flung myself into the precipice and was like, Here I am, like, catch me. Ah, I can't remember if I've done a podcast episode called when leaps of faith fall flat, I'll have to go back and look, but that would be a good one. I wouldn't say it fell flat.
But I would definitely say that when I was like, Here I am, catch me that there was some, I hit a few things on the way down. But all of it so beautiful, right? All of these things and for my experience of who I am, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. So I want to close with this passage today. And maybe a final reflection before I read these words, that our losses are our own.
And just because we think we know what grief is because we've been through loss before doesn't mean that we have grief figured out grief is amorphous. It's like a labyrinth that keeps changing. It's a shapeshifter. And just like love wears a million faces, so does grief. Because grief is love, right? So grief is really just another aspect of love. And so it's subject to the same lack of ability to qualify it or quantify it.
That's the thing about love, it's like, the more you learn about it, the bigger it gets, the more it multiplies, the more it keeps growing, and morphing and shifting. And grief is a reflection of that it can feel like a darker reflection of that. But it is a reflection of our love. And so it keeps morphing and shifting as well. And I find that I will probably forever be writing about grief, I will be using different words and writing different reflections on my experience. I don't have a lot of new things to say anymore.
When I sit down and write about who and Brent and I were like, I feel like I've really written that. And kind of sad what needed to be said. And I've never felt like I needed to continue the lamentation series are stay with that particular theme. It was like, here's this trilogy, and it represents this very pivotal shift and changes in my life that encompasses a grief passage and, you know, spiritual awakening and all these things.
But I find that I still write about grief all the time, it's just in different ways and through a different lens, and perhaps with a different wisdom, then I might have had in some of those younger passages, which doesn't not make them wise, it just makes me at a different place on the journey, accessing different perspective than so these days.
When I think of Brent, I found many pennies. This past week, I tried to do some small things that I knew he would have appreciated, it is helpful for me to remember him and that way and remember the things that he loved in this life. It keeps his memory alive.
I chose to make this podcast about grief and to share this in the hopes that it resonates with others. It's also another way though, that I get to share Brent with you and he gets to live on through me and my words, and people that he probably never would have met never been introduced to in my circles if he were still alive. He met some of my friends but you know he, I seriously doubt that I would have been making a podcast and talking about him if he was here.
Maybe if I was doing this podcast talking about other things, probably not my brother. Now all of you can have a little piece a little reflection of who he was to me. And as I said, it's really the love inside right? That is ultimately the reflection of what grief is about. And that continues to multiply.
So every time I write or share about him and use those words to create something and offer it to somebody else to read or listen, that love keeps multiplying. I think that's amazing.
This last passage is called these last words on grief. I love you. I miss you. I always will. Losing you changed me it always well. I'm okay with that even as I wish it wasn't real, because missing you keeps changing me and so it shall and losing you keeps rearranging me even still.
Now carrying you as part of me, within the deepest part of me. I'll miss you till my soul is free and so on. until I always will.
[35:03] Coming Up Next Week
Thank you so much for joining me today for our podcast. Coming up next week we will be continuing our archetypes of the Tarot series and we will be talking about the card justice. And the week after that we will be tapping into the Akashic records and doing some sort of Akashic Energy Update or Akashic topic of choice. We'll see where wimzie takes me when the time is here. But for now, that is what you can expect over the next couple of weeks. And until then, have a magnificent week.
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.