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] Personal reinvention through storytelling and reflection.
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 have a talk storytime episode. And I have titled it the rainbow of reinvention. I am going to be sharing some stories and poems from some of my books today and personal reflections. And all of it is centered around the idea of what is reinvention? What does it mean to reinvent ourselves? How do we unbecoming in order to become? How do we know ourselves in order to know ourselves in new ways, and I often think that we like the idea of reinvention.
Doesn't that sound positive? It's so refreshing to think if we don't like who we are, well, let's just reinvent ourselves. We can be resilient, we can rebirth ourselves, we can be resourceful, and creative and work with the ingredients of our life and rearrange them if we need to, to understand ourselves and a new way.
And that's what reinvention is all about. And I believe there are times in life where we might be going through a reinvention process, and it's happening within our life, and not a lot has changed externally. But we're going through something internally, we are going through a major shift in identity or perhaps some form of crises of self that leads to becoming a more expanded self, a spiritual awakening, something that is happening that shifts us inside and so we feel different.
And then we're challenged with how do we bring that out into our external world and move our energy and move ourselves into the world in a way that reflects what our new truth is? That right? There could probably be a whole podcast episode because that can be challenging. But that's not today's episode.
So getting back to the idea of reinvention, sometimes it happens because we've shifted an external circumstance, and we have taken something new or done something new, or we are going through a major change. And so we get the opportunity to start over again, or have a fresh start.
And that sometimes is a nice catalyst to say I'm going to reinvent myself. And today some of the stories I'm sharing are my personal experience with reinvention. And when I first came to the island of kawaii I was very specific that I was here for reinvention. Like I actually wrote that in a passage, I'm just gonna read a short quote before we dive into everything today. But there's a passage I wrote in transformations of the sun. And it says, I believe in joy and pizza and beaches and dogs.
I believe we all have an inner mermaid longing for the songs of the sea, I believe and finding the beauty each day, even if you have to look a little harder for it on Sundays. I believe in being an active participant in the process of life, I believe and reinvention. I wrote those words the evening of my 40th birthday.
And I think I'd found the island like 10 days or something like that. And I can't remember if I use that word before I moved over here, or that was just this word that I claimed for myself when I came here. But when I look back on that time in my life, I really was working with the theme of what is reinvention?
And what does it mean to reinvent ourselves. And certainly that was a unique opportunity to really go through a massive transformation, and to really understand myself in new ways. So the rainbow of reinvention. All right, I'm actually going to start with a passage today. That is also from transformations of the sun. And this is called parting words. It's a poem and I will read it first and share a few thoughts on the words behind it.
[5:04] Poetry, personal growth and transformation.
My dear girl, you thought it was over, but you were just getting started. Coming home to yourself slipping into those wings you sowed from bathe and fall and fortitude. Preparing to fly so high, the sky is no longer your limit. Up up up into the stars where those who've walked before reside and your destiny lies like a tree you shall be roots firmly grounded and this blesses Earth.
She is big enough to hold your days, treat her kind and you'll always find your way, with limbs outreached and mind outstretched, your wanting branches waving free, your wise eyes bravely see soaring through the galaxies collecting love for you and me.
May you be safe. May you be well, may you be the change you seek. Go forth my friend and shine your bright and be the light you're called to be.
I wrote these back when I was still living in Alaska. And we were about like, maybe a few weeks from coming to the island. And it was such an extraordinarily strange time in my life because of the energy of endings. And also the seeds of beginnings was all coalescing all at once, like talk about all the fields. And it was such an intense time in my life.
Anyways, the year before that is the year I lost my brother. And I've talked about this quite a bit on the podcast that became the catalyst for deciding within that year of going through my grief journey that I wanted to live bigger, more expansive, more free, that it was time for change in my life. And I didn't feel like I was quite being who I was metamorphosis into who I was being called to be.
And I couldn't find a way to reinvent myself within my life in Alaska. And I had already reinvented myself, I went through a spiritual awakening back in that old life I had gone through a divorce I had gone through shifting in a somewhat small community encourages a big enough city that I was able to find new spaces for myself. still small enough, though, that sometimes the past collided with the President.
But I really felt like back in 2011 and 2012 2013, when I was going through those first years after divorce, that I was able to find a new voice and expression of self. Even though I stayed in the same place. It just made sense for me at the time. And I didn't feel called away from life and Alaska quite yet. But after losing rent, fast forward to 2016 into 2017, part of what was trying to come out and express itself, I call it my unmatched self was this part of me that was more creative, more intuitive, more artistic, that was more spiritual, and had my intuitive abilities and some of my spiritual gifts and talents. And I was beginning to explore those.
But I didn't feel the freedom that I needed. In the constructs that I built in my life and Alaska at the time. I think sometimes if we lived in a place too long, we just have these deep ruts that we either feel stuck in. Or maybe it's more like people see us a certain way because they've known us forever. And so it really is a challenge when we're trying to know ourselves differently. And everybody kind of sees who this collection of like who they think we are based on their sense of us. And yet we're going through this radical change. And I really didn't understand what all was happening within myself.
[8:59] Reinvention, self-discovery, and personal growth.
So much of this that I share. Now I have all this language for and I put all this vocabulary to and it sounds like a grand adventure when I read stories and write poems about it and share them on the podcast. But at the time, a lot of it just felt really disorienting, and really just confusing. But this particular poem was written kind of saying like goodbye, like it's like I thought it was over.
They were sort of these parting words to this, Alaska, Batman and all these experiences that I'd had there from childhood. I moved back to the state as an adult right after I had finished graduate school and my doctoral internship and I came back and started my career as a psychologist and I had been through so much there and I'd run a private practice and I had just closed the brick and mortar version of that practice and it was such an extraordinary time of change and very surreal.
I still look back on that time and have these experiences of like the last, you know, the last time that I sat in my office and the day I had movers take all the furniture away and you know, give it to donation, I cleared it out. And what it was to say goodbye to that and what it was to walk around the duck pond by the loose sack library one last time, that was one of my kind of sanctuary type places that I found for myself in the city of Anchorage, what it was to say goodbye to certain friends one last time and know that I might not see them in person again, what it was like to say goodbye to so many spaces of land and to let go of our home and sell it oh my goodness, be sure love that home, we still talk about it. Just a very extraordinary time.
And then what it was like to drive down Northern Lights Boulevard one last time with the dogs and a cat. And they're on these carrier cases. And we're all going on the plane, a lot of leave taking. But at the same time I could feel this beauty was waiting for me on the other side. And that I was going to go about this process of self discovery. And so that was so exciting. And I could just feel that I had planted these deep roots, and they were going to help hold me steady while I regroup myself and went through this process. So there was also hope there and that poem as well. And about you know, a month later whenever it was I wrote that other piece on reinvention right before my 40th birthday. And then I was like I am now learning about reinvention I am in it.
And this next piece that I'm going to read is from transformations at the sun and it was written about six months later. So I've been on the island for a while at that time and it was the spring of 2018 and this is called Silver sky somewhere and the seams of spring stays. I'm letting myself reform under the gleam of silver sky. Let the oceans help me breathe. But the rains washed clean. Let the new blooms encouraged my heart to seed and be a freer version of me. Allow old values to drift away. I don't need to be needed to be loved. Or equate a checklist with being good.
Or fix each broken wing I see. It is enough to be in hold space for joy and embody the love that I seek. Red mud mixes with tea leaf screen. Songbirds meet on the silvery breathes Kymaro clouds brush the pinks of angel wings, and the earth begins to blossom with saw growth and harmony.
And somewhere in the seams of spring stays. I let myself reform under the gleam of silver sky. Release the shapes of former me's redraw the map of who I'd like to be, relinquish old identities flip onto my back and float in the pool for time. Guava berries bud and cherry reds and leafy limes. The sodden Earth saturates with Miss and tempest night moon illuminates her subtle phases and lines as season shifts its paradigm inviting a greater depth of believing winters deep sleep waking up to new freeing, the road to becoming is paved with new seeing life is a constant rearrangement of being in somewhere and the seams of spring stays.
I let myself reform under the gleam of silver sky. One of the things that I learned on this journey is that reinvention never looks the way that we think it will. And what I said earlier about like what a fun word that we can all get behind. Right? It sounds so positive and it sounds so growth and change oriented. But I call this podcast the rainbow of reinvention because even though rainbows are beautiful, and there's symbols of hope and promise and usually associated with something optimistic, I also think about just the rainbow of colors means that we experience all feelings, all shades of self all notes and tones and compositions of who we are.
And the truth of reinvention is that for all the beauty and positivity there is a lot of darkness and heavy work and unlearning and letting go and it's never as easy as just saying I'm going to be a new person now I am a new me I'm a better be. It's really about Doing the sifting of evaluating what was it about where we were at that no longer fit, we have to come to some sort of consensus within ourselves of what what was that?
And oftentimes that's an integration process, what wasn't working for us what value shifted? What might we have outgrown? Did we have some new insight or breakthrough or way of looking at things where we just came to New ourselves in a new way, and letting go of old patterning can be really painful, it can be really beautiful, it can be really disorienting. I think, psychologically, it's really hard on us.
Because as we are releasing old ways of being, it means we have to figure out what we're stepping into. And that involves building new cognitions, for how we think about things. It involves understanding ourselves and creating new neural networks in our mind, and new pathways so that our brain gets used to this new way of being, or however we are changing or becoming, oftentimes, it's upsetting to our nervous system, because we're going through change.
And so our sense of how to find equilibrium, and how do we make sense of ourselves and find peace inside of us, that can shift. So there can be a lot of things that are happening, and then sometimes spiritually, we might feel a sense of our energy field expanding, or have something that feels like it's changing with our energy itself, or have something happening where we say things like, I think I got like a download, or something happened spiritually.
[16:48] Spiritual transformation, expansion, and personal growth.
I don't even know what that means. But I could feel something and one of my chakras, what's a chakra, you know, we're like, open to exploring these things, and sometimes struggle to put language to what those energetic experiences are. But all of that shifting, and so it's really confusing. And it's kind of like being dropped into a new territory. And we're like, well, where's the map, and where's all this going, and that was something that I learned, it's like, I kept waiting to be given a map, or almost be given a sense of like, okay, this is what it's all leading up to.
So you just point yourself in that direction, and head over there. And that never really happened. For me, it was more like the reinvention wasn't so much about becoming some new label, or doing something different. There was a little bit of that in there. But a lot of it had to do with my state of being and how I understood myself and how I understand the path of a healer.
And that that is not always hands on work with me holding all the space, there are different ways to hold space, there's different ways to let the universe hold space for a person. There are many ways that we can bring healing energy and be a contributor of light in this world. And I had a lot of growth to do around that.
A lot of shifting. So that was everything I was learning about reinvention. And there was a lot of surrender, and a lot of letting go of expectations and a lot of discomfort, a lot of disillusionment, and a lot of frustration. But ultimately, something that I've really taken from that process is that, as I said, it never looked the way that you expected it to. But I do think when we set our hearts compass and say, I want to go through this change, I am choosing to go through a metamorphosis.
And I would like to come out differently. On the other side, I can feel I'm expanding. I don't know into what but I'm following my heart as best I know how, when we do that we will find our way through, we will find our way through reinvention is the language of the heart. Our heart magic is all about wanting to expand, wanting to learn from our soul lessons, wanting to learn how to be a more authentic, more free version of ourselves.
And I use that word quite a bit in the book transformations of the sun. And that was written during 2017 2018. And it really encapsulated the lessons of those first few years on the island. And what I was going through at the time, and I kept saying I just want to be more free. And when it came to my sense of being and how I understood myself so much of what I was trying to free was the boxes I put myself in and identities maybe that I felt like I had to live up to or fulfill in a certain way that I needed to detach from in order to just completely understand myself differently.
So this next poem is called an invitation To unknowing and it, I think segues beautifully with the themes of what we're talking about today.
An Invitation to Unknowing
Unknow yourself. Unknow who you thought you were- so you can remember who you forgot you are.
Unlisten your fears. Unlisten all voices that tell you to keep your walls high to hide behind when the voice of your heart knows that is no way to let the freedom of the light inside.
Paint your mural of riotous sobriety, whose primary entirety is quietly composed of the ongoing inquiry that is you. Become the answers to your questions.
Be the living art of your contradictions. And within the bounds of your quantum dimensions – learn to grow in graceful tension and truth.
Build bridges to retrieve your forgotten selves. Collect the pieces and parts you stowed on your shelves. And make the space inside of you a sanctuary of reclamation for the galaxy of yourself.
Uncover the notes in your half-written tunes. Recover the love in your infinite roots. Discover your voice and speak all parts, whose pain you once pressed mute. And bring the brilliancy of dignity’s hues to a place where shame once ruled absolute.
[21:37] Letting go of old patterns, choosing new ways of being.
I actually wrote that last year as a kind of a marker at the time, I had just passed the threshold of being alcohol free for six months. And that journey is something I've talked about a little bit on the podcast, not a lot. But it will be 18 months this February. So I stayed with it. Being alcohol free. It's just part of who I am now in sobriety is part of who I am.
And that was a piece of myself that I was I was going through this transformation process and going through my own personal growth. Part of what the last however many years have been 567 years since I've been here had been like slowly dismantling things in my life that felt like they no longer fit and clearing off layers. And something that I found is sometimes there is a lot of things that we need to clear. And we create all this new space.
And then we find that sense of new self for a while we find that sense of reinvention. And then something comes along and we realize we have more work to do we have more space declare, we are ready to reinvent other parts of ourselves, we are ready to unknow behaviors that maybe we hadn't yet challenged because it wasn't yet time. And so this was something that I felt challenged to change in my life about, I guess a year and a half ago now. And I really felt like keeping alcohol in my life was something that was robbing me of my potential.
And it was something that I felt like like every year that I have this in my life, I am shaving off a little bit more energy, a little bit more vitality a little bit more time and creativity and productivity. And I felt like it was something that had become a toxic thing in my life as opposed to something that had once been fun or joyful. And my heart just said this is no longer for you. And it definitely took some applied effort, I could probably do a whole other podcast talking about this journey.
And talking about my experience with why I felt called to let it go and what I've learned in the process. But that poem came six months and and it really summed up how I have felt about this entire journey. It was simply another aspect of myself that I had in my life for a while and it was time to I know it so that I could remember something more authentic in myself so I could liberate myself in a greater way.
So I could feel more free and more expansive and more vital and more clear. So I could keep moving my energy and moving my life forward in a way that held as much space for sunlight is possible and gives me as much opportunity when the shadows hit and the challenges come and the hard thing shake me up to handle those in a way where I am as clear as possible as grounded as possible and in my heart as much as possible. And I think this idea of an invitation to unknowing. Ultimately, whatever we're unknowing in ourselves, that is what reinvention is
All about it is an invitation to unknow, something that has been part of our core matrix, whether it's a behavior and identity, a relationship, a job, a location that we've lived, a belief that we've held for a long time, when our heart says, Hey, this is no longer serving you, it can take a while to get on board. And that's okay. We all have a process around change and thinking about change and actually moving towards change. So there's no judgment or timeline attached to that. But as we start to move, that's truly what reinvention is about. It is this unknowing, it is an invitation to let go, to detach, to say, what if I knew myself differently?
And what if I could invite myself to unknown these things that I have held as either true, or that have kept me locked in a holding pattern, or kept me stuck or kept me feeling like I'm trapped in a mold? And what put me there in the first place? What can I do about that, so that I feel more free to become a more expansive me. So with that, I'm going to read one final essay and kind of catch life up until now. This is called grace, growth and gratitude. And I wrote it in this past November, so November of 2023.
[26:28] Personal reflections: grace, growth and gratitude.
It's a cooler day on the Island. And I found myself in a very place as we step through November, busy with responsibilities in a way that feels productive and kind, thoughtful with reflection as I began to do what I always do around this time each year, slowly take stock of what the past 11 months have brought, and contemplate the changes rendered as we began the initial stages of descent, drawing us closer to the conclusion of another calendar year.
Truth be told, I haven't always liked the lessons the past couple of years have brought, but I am trying to embrace and integrate them so I can move forward with the wisdom learned.
When I moved to kawaii years ago, I thought I was open to the possibilities of what life may hold. But I still arrived with boxes of ideals and rose colored expectations, hopes, dreams and attachments to the narrative of what this new chapter in life might be. I remember feeling stuck in the grooves of life back then.
And when I read back through old poems and writings, I can sense the restlessness and hunger for growth inside of me. I was seeking more creativity, more spirituality, more intuition, and a more free flowing existence.
I now now I was seeking all that lay unmet and myself untapped aspects of potential that couldn't be accessed and the life I'd created, new ways of being and an inner world filled with the richness that could only be tapped into through acres of solitude, time in nature, and unstructured, soulful space to dream, create, receive and be, I needed to loosen the boundaries of myself and release the identities that structured me in place to become freer, bigger, more myself. Hawaii was a brave, bold leap into the unknown, beautiful, soulful, frightful, life filled, confusing undoing all of that alkalizing into a new becoming of self.
Through the whole of the journey. And reflection, I can say that I didn't fully realize what a gift those first formative years on the island where I think some things in life are just this way, we must first experience them and embody them simply by living them. Sometimes the demands of the moment prevent us from fully feeling and grasping how sacred a moment is. Often it's not until afterward that we can fully appreciate it's bright Quintessence. At the time, I tried to find gratitude and savor the moment.
But I struggled with my questions itself, and often got caught up in feelings of disillusionment, disappointment, and frustration that my vision wasn't manifesting more quickly or clearly. I've often thought that if I could travel back in time, I tell my slightly younger self to just keep breathing. Just keep appreciating the opportunity to wander and lose herself and unlace the old ties that once bound and defined. I'd remind younger me that this was an utterly unique time in her life, and that she'd likely never make a movie
Again, where she choose to blindly follow her heart without worrying about practical matters, like housing, or career, or finances or future planning. Mostly, I tell her to get extremely comfortable with cultivating the qualities of patience and adaptability that the world was going to change dramatically in front of her eyes over the next seven years. And she finds herself changing too. I tell her not to take it so seriously, while still putting the best of her heart into it.
And I tell her to work on releasing her attachment to how she thinks her life should look. So she is better able to stay open to what does show up and present itself. Or maybe I wouldn't tell her any of those things. So she'd have the space to discover them for herself. Make the mistake she would inevitably make, then find grace, growth and gratitude through the process.
[31:01] Parting thoughts and coming up next week.
There are a lot of things I've learned over the last seven years on this journey of reinvention. And that's been a journey that is bigger than just that timeline. This has just been kind of encapsulates, I think, the rainbow of reinvention and what it is to learn patience for ourselves patience with the process, to be adaptable as we know ourselves and choose to become more authentic.
And as I said, we often don't know what that's going to look like, right? We haven't experienced it yet. So if we haven't experienced something like how can we draw a map of it. And I've really learned that part of what we have to do is keep finding gratitude in the moment. Again, finding patience for the process. I know it's hard to do. But you'd be surprised at how deep our roots of patience go when we are forced into continual surrender and have no choice.
And also just keep working with what life with what spirit presents to us with what our heart draws into us with what opportunities and information and guidance what helpers come across our path. And that is the dance of reinvention. It is taking all of that and weaving it together as we come to understand ourselves in new ways. And more importantly, give ourselves permission to live it, and to live that experience in a new way.
All right, thank you so much for joining me today for talk story time and all these really, I think heartfelt and also fun reflections on reinvention I always enjoy being able to talk story a little bit to everybody and share some of my reflections from my own journey in my own life. Next week, we are moving back to our archetype of the Tarot series, and we are up to card 12 The Hanged Man.
So we will be talking about what is the archetype of the Hanged Man, what does that mean? It has a lot to do with surrender. So today's talk story podcast actually really moves nicely into next week's theme that is all about letting go surrender and forced patience. So we will be back next week with the new your heart magic and the meantime, have an amazing 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