[00:37] Introduction 

Aloha everyone! This is Dr. BethAnne Kapansky-Wright, and this is the inaugural episode of Your Heart Magic, a brand-new podcast that I am launching this year. I am so excited to be here! I am delighted that you are here! So welcome. Today I wanted to focus on sharing a little bit more about who I am and what inspired me to begin this podcast. And talk a little bit about the idea of what is your heart magic, and how might that apply to each of us. 

So first, I am a clinical psychologist. And I have been practicing and fully licensed since 2005. Psychology has basically been my world and my life since I believe- it was 1998 - when I declared my major in college and said, “I'm going to be a psychologist someday!”. And I have been on that path ever since. 

I currently live on the island of Kauai and I run a telepsychology practice. So, I do telehealth and in the process of my own career, and my own journey of change, and becoming as a human being, part of what I found is as much as I love psychology, there were other dimensions and avenues that opened in my life in terms of feeling really drawn to creativity, and drawn to spirituality, and weaving all of those things together in a way that is holistic and comprehensive. 

So currently, in addition to my telepsychology practice, I also do intuitive readings. And I work with the Akashic Records. I am an author and have been known to write poetry. And this podcast is my latest project and offering that I felt guided to create because of the guidance and the wisdom in my heart. 

[2:53] Heart Magic & What This Podcast Will Be About 

But my life did not always look this way. I am from Anchorage, Alaska. So, there's a story behind how I ended up on this island at this point in my life. And what I can tell you about that whole story, and anything that I will be sharing on this podcast, is that there is one thing that everything will have in common. And that is my heart magic – my story about learning to connect with the wisdom of my heart, learning to access my intuition (through the gateway of my heart) and my journey of learning to understand the emotional intelligence of the heart, and navigate difficult flows in my life like grief, challenge and hardship. 

I’ll talk about dealing with life when you thought it was going to go one way and life tips sideways and goes a completely different way entirely. I’ve learnt to understand the emotional wisdom and listen to my heart and trust that it's guiding me through – it’s helped me deepen my spiritual connection and be in a space where I felt comfortable talking about things like the Akashic Records and talking about spiritual and mystical experiences on the air. 

All of that has come from my heart wisdom. So, I am deeply passionate about many things. But what all of those have in common is the heart. 

And I have learned that when we listen to our hearts and learn to connect with them and learn to connect with our inner voice - and the unique wisdom that each of us holds inside of us - magical things can happen and our life can take on this robust, juicy rainbow-colored flavor. It might not always be easy, but it is worth it because that is where a more soulful existence and a more authentic existence is found. That is what this podcast is all about. 

We will be talking about psychology, spirituality, wellbeing, creativity, and weaving all those things together to provide wisdom, support and a healing perspective for all our journeys. And I say all of us because I include myself in that. So much of what I share has come from a direct and personal experience and I’ll share the things that have either worked for me and the things that are still processing for me. And I'm still finding helpful tools and saying, “this is working great”. And I’ll share as I want you to know about it as well. 

[05:42] My History 

So, a little bit about my history so you have a sense of who I am beyond what I've just shared.

As I said, psychology has been my field forever. And I like to think of psychology as my roots. All of us are a tree. And if we were to draw a picture of a tree of ourselves, we’d draw our roots and what has rooted us. And let's say those roots are thick and plentiful with many different tributaries, many different root systems feeding into these giant trees that we are becoming - psychology is a huge part of what my roots are. And it is something that anchored me for many years and continues to anchor me. 

I ran a private practice in Anchorage, Alaska, for quite a while. And during my own development as a human some time back in my 30s, around the year 2011, I found myself going through a profound spiritual awakening, that felt a little bit like destiny walked into my life at that time in a pair of combat boots, and said, “let's shake things up. And we are going to turn everything upside down!”. 

And at the time, I began to experience what I now understand as many intuitive images - I had a few mystic visions at the time. And I really felt like I was going through a dissolution of self and a dissolution of identity as I knew it. I might call that a ‘crisis of self’ that is also understood as a spiritual awakening in more spiritual circles. But it was a crisis of self. 

And part of what was happening in my life is all these smaller selves, false selves, these old identities were just being ripped through and washed away like a tidal wave. And during that time, I held on to some form of internal guidance, that kept saying, “no matter how crazy things get, there is some form of an authentic, deeper truth that you are sensing on the other side of this, stay with yourself, stay with your journey, trust this process and don't give up.”

And that is where I really began to connect with the idea of our heart wisdom, and the way of the heart and following the path of the heart in a way that was more than just words. And in a way that was experiential, and in fact, is hard to put into words. 

Love is an undefinable force, and our hearts are multi-dimensional. And in many ways, I feel the wisdom of our heart is a bit undefinable. And it's hard to pin down. I always say that “love wears a million faces”. And if our hearts are the physical representation of love, and the heart chakra is where we hold love and understand emotional intelligence in our bodies, then our hearts have a million faces and a million different forms of multifaceted intelligence.

It's hard to define, but we can experience it. And one of the things that our heart wisdom will teach us is that sometimes we cannot put logic and words to something that is real and true for us. But we can experience it in a way that feels real and true. And that is what was happening for me at the time. I did not always have the words in the moment of this spiritual awakening to say what I was going through. But there was something experiential in my heart that kept saying “stay with yourself and stay with your path”.

[9:42] After the Awakening

I came out the other side of that. And I had gone through a profound transformation. And part of what happened with this transformation is one - I was tapped into my heart. And two - I began to open up to ideas around intuition. 

And if we have this inner voice and the soulful self and this deeper aspect of ourselves, how do we listen to it? How do we connect with it? Spiritually I was wide open at the time. I had just been through so much visioning and change. I knew there was something beautiful and magical and radical and numinous out there. And I was open to discovering more and so I began this process in my life of setting out to find myself and rediscover myself in my 30s. 

And that led me into many fun new avenues that included writing and discovering that poetry was an amazing gateway to connecting with my inner wisdom and expressing my feelings in a way that was less about linear logic, and more about symbolism, colors and phrases. 

I began blogging at the time. And when I got my courage underneath me, I started taking all of that and putting it into articles. And eventually books of poetry. I also, as I said, was spiritually wide open. So, I did a lot of study and a lot of research at the time and was very interested in what kinds of things are out there and learning more. And somewhere along the way, I picked up my first deck of tarot cards. Archetype cards might be another way to think about those because the Tarot is rich in symbolism and universal archetypes. 

And I discovered that if I sat down and use the cards to try and connect with my inner voice, it worked, and that they were reflecting some form of very real and authentic guidance back to me. And I found, the more I did that for myself, the more I wanted to do that for other people. And that became something that I had a lot of growth in, and a lot of fun with. And through all of that I really developed these new routes in my tree, where it wasn't just psychology, but it was spirit as well. And this growing budding spirituality that I wanted to know more about. 

Now, that brings us up to about the year 2016, where something profound happened in my life at that time. And that is, in January of 2016, I lost my brother Brent, very suddenly - it was very unexpected. And that was another catalyst for turning me into a completely different direction. And what that elicited in me was not just a grief journey or just solely undertaking this journey of loss and grief - needing to understand my grief over my brother - I had been a psychologist long enough to know at the time that either I dealt with my grief in the moment and figured it out as I went through it. Or I could wait and deal with it years later, and kind of shove it away, which isn't really an option for me, it didn't strike me as a very authentic way to live. 

And sometimes when we don't deal with things at all, and we don't even shove it away, we pretend like it's not there. That is called avoidance and denial, we live from that wound, it doesn't really dissolve or go away, we began to enact the wound. And that wasn't a good option either. 

So, I'd learned the wisdom at that point that really the only way out is through. And “I'm just going to have to go through this”.  And so, I wrote my way through it. And I felt my way through it. And I had more spiritual experiences around all that. And part of what came from that time in my life was this profound realization that I wanted more. I felt like there was more for me on the path. And I felt like my heart was calling me to some form of a new world - a bigger world than what I had created at that point in my life and Alaska. 

[14:29] Reinvention: From Alaska to Kauai

I had this dream in my heart at the time of moving to the island of Kauai and starting over and going through a process of complete transformation once again and reinventing myself and part of what came from my grief journey was finding the courage needed to start over again. And finding the courage needed to make a huge turning point in my life and say, “I don't know what that more is, but I believe it's waiting for me and that I can't stay in this current sculpture and architecture that I've currently created for my life, I need to almost completely start over again”.

And so, in the next year between 2016 to 2017, I found myself beginning the steps to close my physical location of my practice, to start to close down life in Alaska, and to prepare to move to the island of Kauai, with my husband and our fur-kids, two dogs and a cat. And I found myself over here in the summer of 2017. And at the time, I had said, “I am here for reinvention. I don't know what that looks like. I don't know what reinvention means to me”. But that was my word for 2017 - reinvention. 

And the other thing that was my main goal for coming here is – I actually wrote out my mission statement - was that I wanted to live more intuitively, more spiritually, and more creatively. 

I spent the last six or seven years, whatever it's been, learning what reinvention is, and learning how to do just that. And during that time, many things have happened that I have either written about, or I'm still planning on writing about or intend to share at some point. 

But I learned that when you sign up for the universe, and say, “I'm all in, I will take this leap of faith. And I will undergo this journey of personal transformation”, that you actually have no idea what you were signing up for. And you don't know what twists and turns like this going to take. And of course, my personal twists and turns have collided with the twists and turns that life has taken for all of us over the last few years, and the twists and turns that our world has taken and all these things that have happened in the collective. So, a lot of interesting things have come from that. 

[17:25] The Present Day

And that brings you up to present day where I am currently living in a way that feels more authentic than where I was. And I have this personal mission to really weaves together the wisdom of psychology and the wisdom of creativity and the wisdom of spirituality, and whatever other modalities really speak to my heart - and to offer perspectives that are multi-dimensional and holistic. And that is really part of the magic of our hearts. 

[18:06] The Collective Awakening 

We are multi-dimensional holistic beings. And something that we have seen over the last few years is a newfound sense of people wanting to connect with their purpose and a bigger way and a deeper way. 

In some ways you might say that since the pandemic hit in 2020, our world has been going through a crisis of self and our world has been going through this mass spiritual awakening. 

Some people are more tuned into that than others. But there are many individuals who might identify as lightworkers, or spiritually curious or empaths. Some form of feeling really connected to spirituality in some shape or form, who would say that the last few years has really shaken their life up. And that the shaking has been hard. And they've experienced a lot of disruptions and consciousness, and disruptions in self and disruptions as life as they knew it. But in that disruption, there has also been opportunity to go into a deeper version of self, and to deepen their relationship with the mysteries, and the numinous and spirit according to their own understanding. 

So, there's been a lot of growth going on these last few years. And one of the things that I am observing and so many individuals is that we want a more multi-dimensional experience itself. We want more in our lives. This one-dimensional linear path of “this is kind of what people do, you know”, and it’s very cookie cutter and the sense of “these are the big milestones, in terms of relationship and career path” and those kinds of things. Many people are saying, “you know, I don't want that, or I want some of that, but I want it to look different. Or I want to redefine what these concepts of relationship and career and spirituality and hobbies and pastimes and creativity. I want to define those things for myself. And I want to create a new narrative where these things work for me and support who I understand myself to be”.

And again, I believe that is connected to our heart wisdom that our heart has this very multi-dimensional wisdom that says, “we are not here to be one dimensional people. We are here to be multifaceted. And we are here to understand ourselves in multifaceted ways and to give ourselves permission to grow, and to become bigger and to transcend labels. And to transcend some of the categories and the boxes that we either feel like we've been placed in, or often those categories and boxes exist in our own mind”.

I never would have dreamed back in 2016, when I was looking at making this jump to the island of Kauai, that I would feel comfortable doing a podcast where I not only talked about who I am as a clinician, but also talked about my intuitive spiritual work - that would have terrified me - because at the time, I had put myself in this box in this category of what a clinical psychologist is, and what BethAnne is, and what I needed to look like. And one of the things that I have found over the last few years is that I can be more than just these categories that I had imposed in my mind. 

We can carve out a new path for ourselves if we feel like the way that everybody else is doing it or is understanding it just isn't working for us. 

[22:09] Summary

So that is what Your Heart Magic is all about. And I am excited to share more. And to really begin to break down some of the concepts that I've been sharing with you today from my own personal journey and develop those more fully in the upcoming podcast and upcoming individual episodes to hopefully help you and support you and serve you on your journey. 

With that, that brings us to the end of our first episode today. Next week, we will be talking about spiritual awakenings. And how to navigate them. 

There is a lot of good information that has been coming out about what's a spiritual awakening and we will review some of those things so we're all on the same page with that. But we'll also be looking at, so you had a spiritual awakening - now what? What comes next? Or you're going through a spiritual awakening, and you worry that you might be going crazy. 

We’ll talk about how you navigate that and how you stay grounded and how you find a way to anchor yourself when you might be going through these massive changes in self and massive identity shifts. 

So, next week will be on spiritual awakenings. With that thank you so much for tuning in. I will see you next week. 

And until then, 

Be love. Be well. Be you. Be magic.