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.)

[0:36] Introduction: What is The Art of Transformation?

Aloha, everyone, welcome to your heart magic. This is Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright. And today we are talking about the art of transformation. This is such a fun topic for me, because if I'm asked to write a bio, for something that I'm doing, there's a very good chance that I write something in my bio that says something like I'm a teacher or speaker, you know, and one of my specialties or topics that I speak about is personal transformation. I am a transformational teacher. And certainly, this is a personal topic, because a lot of my journey and how I've come to this point has been deeply transformative.

And part of the work that interests me is really digging into the idea of when we're going through personal change, when when we are going through transformation or something in our life that is hard or challenging, or we're thrust into some sort of an unknown circumstance, or we're going through a major loss or a major change. How do we use that in a way that we become something new entirely, or we get in touch with some new aspect of ourselves, or evolve beyond our previously understood version of self.

And when we do those things, we do transform, we come out the other side of this change or cycle or whatever process it is that we've been in. And we are a slightly different version of ourselves. You know, like, maybe I would call that Dr. BethAnne, like 2.0, or 3.0. Or, if you have, most of us have some sort of a phone or some sort of computer system, they're always upgrading that stuff, you know, to version whatever point oh, or point one, one. That's kind of what we do, we get an upgrade.

And we take the wisdom and the change that we have learned from going through some form of struggle or change or challenge or hardship. And we move forward with this newfound sense of awareness or knowledge or experience that we didn't have in our composition before.  And I titled this the art of transformation, because to me, that little catchphrase right there, that way of conceptualizing, it creates such a beautiful idea for how we might think about transformation, it creates a construct, to kind of experience transformation through the lens of an artist. And the lens of each of us is an artist, and our lives are the art.

And every single day, we have something that we can create and the palette of our lives. And maybe some days are more bright than others. And so we create really bright art and something extra magical happens. And we think I love this piece of art. Gosh, I wish every day I could create something as beautiful as this day, you know, and maybe some days are a little bit more gray, and they're not quite as awesome. And we don't like the art and we say well, like I don't like this art that I made at all today. It was kind of one of those exercises in being human. And I don't like the colors I use and I don't really like what came out onto the canvas.

And the beautiful thing about art is that you can always have a new beginning, you can always recycle something that you created and you decide, well, I don't really like what I'm working on. So I'm going to scrap it and either start over or maybe use the scraps or build something on it.  Art is so fluid, it is so flexible. It is so intuitive. Art can be a very process-oriented activity, particularly if we are creating without a specific product in mind. And we're creating for some kind of like self-discovery activity or doing it for fun or self-exploration. Even professional artists might need to create with a product in mind, often their initial process is still very organic and very intuitive and very inspired.

So there's something about that mindset that I think, I think helps give us a way to think about transformation. And it moves us from this like very logical, rational point of view that often wants to quantify and understand everything. And it moves us into a space of being more process oriented, which is certainly important if we are going through transformation and our lives.

And newsflash for all of us. I think most of us already know this. But we are constantly in a state of transformation. We live on a creative planet, we live in a world that is evolving around us, the collective is evolving around us events are evolving around us nature is evolving. And we are part of that evolution as well. And we are part of an evolution just as an evolving soul, who is gathering new experiences on this human journey.

So our nature is one that is creative and process oriented, and evolutionary, and we are always in some form of transformation. Having said that, there are often events or periods in our life, where we might feel more in touch with the idea of transformation, going through some form of a rite of passage going through a major loss going through major change. Sometimes we're not going through anything major, and if something happening internally.

And we start to feel really out of sorts with our own life, we don't know what's going on with ourselves, since some part of us is trying to come out or grow. There's many things that can help anchor us into a transformative space.

[06:59] The Akashic Records on Transformation

So when we're in that space, how can we work with it in a way that is constructive? And I did what I usually do before most of these podcast episodes, I opened the Akashic records on the topic just to get a sense of what are the Akashic records have to say on the art of transformation.

And the image that the records opened with for this particular topic was that of a pearl forming inside of an oyster, and pearls form and an oyster when the oyster itself is irritated by something in the environment or something gets in the oyster, it's an irritant. And so the oyster as a defense uses the natural coating that forms the I think the shell of it, the mollusk, I believe is what it's called. It uses that to coat this irritant in order to kind of protect against it and to work with it. And that is how pearls are formed. It's not the most scientific explanation. But that's my layperson understanding.

It's actually very magical. A pearl comes from something that is an irritant to the homeostasis of the organism at the beginning. And so usually when something comes into our life, that we opened a transformation, there is something that rubs against us. I think anytime we're going through change, even if it's welcome change.

Change often means uncertainty, it means not knowing it can mean feeling hard things. It can mean having difficult experiences, or having challenging conversations, or having challenging feelings or aspects of ourself come to the forefront. And those often act as an irritant. They are not always particularly delightful to feel or to experience. Sometimes we want to move past them, and we don't know how to work with them.

And so how do we figure out how to cover them? How to use ingredients that we have been given in our heart, and in our spiritual identities and in our psychological toolbox? How can we use those things in order to work with and kind of cover the irritants that come our way, in a way that is potentially transformative, and create something really beautiful out of something that initially didn't feel beautiful? And that metaphor right there to me is the crux of transformation.

So thank you Akashic records for giving us that beautiful visual image. When I asked the records kind of like well, what's the deal with transformation? Like what do you want us to know? You know, it was kind of interesting because according to the records, it's really about letting nature take its course including our nature, just like letting our personal evolution or the nature around us take its course. And instead of resisting it and saying this is not happening, you know, it's kind of like trying to resist a season. I, somebody who used to live in Alaska, I remember how it felt when summer was like, rapidly waning, and you could tell that it was getting darker sooner and the fall was coming. And, you know, I was always a little bit resistant to that. And it just makes sense, it's a hard place to live.

Sometimes when the changes season happens, and you can't resist it. Like if the snows gonna come or Mother Nature's gonna do what Mother Nature is going to do. No matter how hard you try, and like, throw on a pair of shorts and sip some lemonade and say, well, it's eternally summer in my heart, the change is going to happen.

[10:51] How Can We Constructively Work With Change?

So it's about working with it intelligently. And finding ways when change comes into our life, to accept it, and to surrender and trust the process. And that was kind of the essence of what the records had to say, like taking everything they told me and just breaking it down into some talking points and kind of like, what do you need to know?

You know, the idea behind the records is that when we resist transformation, and we resist the changes in our life, it's often from a place of fear, we're afraid of things changing, we're afraid of losing something, we're often afraid of losing some piece of ourselves, there is a little bit of a limited ego at work there a limited understanding, almost like a protective barrier around something.

And we're afraid if that barriers busted through or removed, that we won't be contained. And we don't won't know what's on the other side, we won't know who we are, or we won't know who we are without this thing in our life. And we won't know what to do without the things that limited us and how the same place, but also felt safe to us and felt familiar.

And the difference between working with these things constructively versus destructively is learning how to consciously surrender and intelligently work with the processes versus like resisting them or feeling like a victim to them.

You know, it's the difference between life is happening, and I am happening. And sometimes the two of us intersect where life is happening, and I'm happening, and we get to dance together. And I'm gonna yield to life but also intelligently work with what life is presenting to me, and let it take its course the best I know how, versus saying, life is happening to me. Why is this being done to me, I can't believe I'm back here again, in almost seeing life as an enemy. And this greater force, the greater force in the universe. And these things that happen, like seeing it as an opponent, and really resisting it and being angry, and there's nothing wrong.

If you, we all go through that, where we get mad at life, we can learn to work with that, too. It's more a matter of do you stay in that place and adopt that is your stance, I am a victim of life. And it's always out to get me and nothing good ever happens. And every time I get back up night life knocks me down, you know? Or do we find a bigger perspective to work with what's happening, even if it's very, very challenging. So that is how we find empowerment. And that is how we work our light.

And something interesting that I wanted to share. And this was kind of a revolutionary thought to me. So it might be for a few people who listen to this as well, is a few years ago, I think it was back in 2018. I had a I think it was a psychic reading it was some sort of intuitive or psychic reading from from someone.

And at the time, I tried out a lot of different kinds of readings. I was trying to grow my own skills. And so I was very interested in how do other people do this work? What might come through if I meet with them, how do they channel or perceive or present information. So I was having this really fun kind of observational survey course of different readers out there. And this one particular woman that I worked with, one of the things that came through was that kind of spirit and she meant I guess the kind of my light people, the people that work with me, they said they're intrigued by how I work my light, and that I'd worked my light in ways that were kind of surprising. They really enjoyed my process.

Now, this might be the first time somebody had put it to me in that way. I never really thought about spirit in the ability to like be surprised by something We do, I never really thought about them and more of a personified kind of way. And I never really stopped to think that many of the angelic beings, the light beings, the, maybe not so much the ancestral beings, because they've been on, you know, the journey as a soul on earth.

But you know, many of the beings spiritually that we might understand as energies that we're connected with, have not taken a journey, as a soul as a human on this planet. And so the human experience is a little bit foreign to them. And they might be able to relate in many ways, they can certainly give beautiful wisdom and guidance, but there are some things that they might not have the experiential knowledge of, because they are a higher dimensional being, they either, you know, are we so far above us, they don't have to be down here, or, you know, they're on their own journey.

You know, my friend, and a colleague of mine, Ivory LaNoue, by the way, she runs a beautiful podcast called The Angel Room, and she is all about the angels. And she is somebody who was very helpful in helping me develop my gifts with the angels. And something that I've really taken from her some times when she's told me, Well, you have to tell them, they don't know, like that, these are some of the things that you might have to, to kind of be dealing with. So you have to let them know and be specific.

And so these ideas were very helpful to me, because I didn't really know all of that back then. And I had no idea that spirit could be intrigued by maybe how I chosen to transmute light and, or darkness into light. And the other thing that kind of really stayed with me from that was this fundamental concept, that part of how we create new light is by taking events and circumstances in our life, that might feel difficult, that might feel challenging, and working with them in such a way as to create some form of light from them.

[17:17] How We Work Our Light

That was a new concept for me, and it's an intriguing one. And I still am intrigued by this, that we know the light just is the spiritual light is there's plenty of it. But we can work with it. And we can create more based on the choices we make. And we can grow our light and expand our hearts and expand our consciousness based on the choices we make based on do we choose to love? Or do we choose to live in fear? Do we choose to evolve and surrender and increase our relationship with spirit? Do we choose to contract and put up walls and kind of hammer and hide our hearts away, and you know, those things make a difference and how we grow.

And I think how our light grows, and how the energy around us grows, you know. And so it was this very intriguing idea to think about that when we are just kind of minding our own business, and we're doing our inner work and we're sitting around and something hard comes up, and we don't like how it makes us feel, or we're going through something challenging. And we decide to work with it in a constructive way that we are creating light through that act. And it makes sense if you think about it, because prior to that there might not have been a lot of light in that space.

You know, that is another way to think about transformation, it is bringing light into spaces that were previously dark, whether that is a space inside of us where we weren't aware we needed change. And now we know. And so we're bringing, like literally turning the lamps on and turning the lights on and rooms inside of us and saying I gotta clean this up and straighten it out. You know, whether it is that or whether it is bringing awareness to something that has not been talked about, or that has been taboo, or there's a lot of damage or pain there.

And now we start having a dialogue around it. This is happening with a lot of social justice issues and environmental issues. You know, now awareness is happening, people are having more compassion, they're having more sense of care about some things they might not have even thought about. That's bringing new light into spaces that were previously dark or only lit up for the few people experiencing it.

So we can think of this a little bit more literally or figuratively. It's a little bit of both. But that's what transformation is all about. It is turning the lights on and bringing it into spaces that previously might have felt more dark. That's also a beautiful definition of enlightenment. So there's a lot of similarities between these two things and we might just be using two different words for the same concept, but it's my podcast, it's my party, I can do what I want to. So this is the art of transformation, which can also be perhaps known as enlightenment.

[20:17] Transformation is Process Oriented

All right, so a few ideas today that I think might be nice touchstones for anybody going through a transformation process. We've kind of I've been touching on all of these, but I want to break them down to be really clear on them.
 
The first one is, is that we have to accept that transformation is a process, and not try and rush that process. And that's why I feel like it's so helpful to paint a word picture of transformation as like a collage, an art, a piece of art and process. I use language like that a lot on this podcast, because it's been so helpful for me to conceptualize many of the things that we deal with as humans in a way that gives a lot of grace and creativity to those processes.

And I think when we're going through transformation, the Akashic Record said it really well. Fear is a natural response, when we are suffering a loss, or we are going through a spiritual awakening, and we're coming to understand ourselves in a way that was different than how we did before. It also means that we are loosening our attachment to how we once understood ourselves. Maybe we're loosening our attachment to some of the relationships that we created in our previous space. And we're afraid of who will I be on the other side of this? Will I have any friends? What is it going to look like? I know that when I I often talk about the loss of my brother, but it's such a not an easy thing to talk about.

But it is such a relatable, I think last that I can share from my life, where I was really able to take these concepts and try and apply them. And I remember at the time, something I really struggled with is I was far enough along on my spiritual journey. And just my developmental journey, I think I was 38 when I was 38, when I lost him and I'd had enough wisdom gained by them to know that anytime we go through something cataclysmic on our life, we will look different when we come out the other side.

And I kept feeling like people around me wanted me to bounce back, or be like as BethAnne Okay, you know, and just kind of wanted me to, like, get back to, to who I was and how I was. And I don't think that was meant in a self serving way. And that might have just been my perception that could be entirely inaccurate, and just how I felt that could be my stuff that was coming out. I felt like it was more though people who cared about me just wanted to know that I was okay. And if I went out and did something like went running in the mountains, that was a very BethAnne thing to do. I'm back in Alaska and took a selfie with my, my husband, here we are up in the mountains and had a big smile and, you know, posted kind of a cheery Facebook post. You know, that's how people understood me.

And so they said, Oh, good. She seems like she's doing okay, she's getting out. I've been worried about her. And I did a little bit of those things, but I really wasn't doing okay. And I actually those posts like that were very few and far between. I was really struggling. And I was really going through a death of my own. That was this parallel journey to the loss of my brother. And quite a bit ended up coming from that.

But I wrote an essay called bounce at the time that got woven into my limitations of the see my book on grief. And in that essay, I talked about how I could feel people hoping Come on, I hope she bounces back soon. Where's that resilience? You know, resilience is a beautiful thing. But sometimes our relationship with resilience as a culture encourages resilience and bouncing back over the process and allowing the person to be where they're at for as long as they need to be.

Sometimes resilience is not bouncing back from something. Resilience is knowing that you're about to go through some really painful stuff and instead of resisting it, you just surrender and you go through it. And that's what I chose to do. And in that essay that was called bounce I talked about like I'm not bouncing back. I am getting rearranged right now I'm in some sort of a process. I do not know what I will look like when I get to the other side.

And all I know to do is offer myself up to the process and and use the tools I already had spiritually and psychologically, to work with the process. I used my writing, I used music, I spent a lot of time in nature, and I needed to grow new tools and new strategies for working with it. Because I had outpaced my previous shell of self, my limitations itself, I did not have what I adequately needed to work through my grief, I could not find what I needed to work through my grief, I had to go out and invent it.
And I'm actually that is next week's topics. I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself here.

But at the time, I wasn't bouncing back. But I was being rearranged and moving into something within a greater process. And I knew enough to trust it, and I knew something beautiful might potentially come out the other side of it. And it certainly did. You know, it certainly did. So I think that is kind of step one, if we want to be linear about something that's nonlinear, if we want to be paradoxical about it. It's just being able to keep reminding yourself, I'm in process, my soul's in process, my psyche is in process.

And I can surrender to the greater alchemy of the process, I can trust the process. And a process has a time all its own, like we already talked about with Mother Nature, she is going to do what she is going to do. And no matter how much you want spring to get here or winter to not get here or summer to cool off. So it can be fall. She's running on her own timetable and her own process and her own environmental process.

And we have to just work with that as intelligently as we can. So there's great wisdom there for us, when we can adopt that construct and use it as a template to kind of house our experience. And so we're not so hard on ourselves. And we don't think that we're doing something wrong, or expect ourselves to be somewhere that we're not when we're still in the middle of a change.

[26:59] The Power of Intention

Alright, the next thing that I wanted to share about successfully working with transformation was the power of intention. Gosh, I can't emphasize this enough, I feel like this could probably be and probably will be its own episode sometime on this podcast. But our intention and how we purpose something is often the difference between how we relate to it, and how we don't relate to it.

So when I am going through something hard at this point in my life, and I am angry, or having some form of an emotional suffering, or really sad about something, I don't always do this right away. But I eventually try and move to a space where I say, Well, I purpose this for love, I purpose this my intention for this process is love. I'm deepening my compassion for humanity. I'm deepening my wisdom for these really tough feeling states that we all experience, we can assign meaning to something that feels meaningless.

And that often can give us a way to compass ourselves to the experience, and help guide us through it so that we stay in our light. And we continue to keep our light is central to our experience of that. When we feel like we're just being tossed around by the ways of life, we all feel that way from time to time, so on about if we feel it, it's more about do we feel it and choose that as our reality.

So if we feel that, and we decide to choose a different reality, and decide to choose a reality and say, Well, I do feel really tossed around in the oceans of life right now. But my intention behind this is it's love. My intention is transformation. I want to use this to grow through, I want to use this and find the lessons here. Maybe I want to find the wisdom here. Maybe my intention is to become a stronger person through this. Maybe my intention is just to develop my sense of humor about how absurd life can be. You know, we can set our own intention. But that takes something that in the moment can feel very messy and meaningless. And it assigns it a meaning a very personal meaning and it gives us a psychological focal point.

So if nothing else, we can come back to that and say, Well, what did I learn about love today? I've talked about this on the podcast that anytime our intention is love, we can always come back to love and say how can I best love myself in this? How can I best bring love into this situation? Even if it's something really simple and we've had a bad day and we say my I can bring love into this by just gifting myself a good night's sleep and pressing reset tomorrow. I'll bring grace into it and grace, this love.

Anytime we do that we're creating light, we are actively working our light, we're taking something that felt like nothing, something that felt dark or meaningless, and we're giving it shape. And we're giving it purpose. And we're doing it according to our spiritual principles. That's how we work our light. That is how we work constructively with dark, hard things in order to bring meaning to them, in order to bring something beautiful into them or something changeable.

So when we can set an intention for it, it gives us a focal point. And it's just transformative. The intention itself does the work of transformation. And we know intentions are powerful, you know, we can try this out and say, I'm gonna have a great day to day and no matter what happens, I'm going to be grateful. And I'm going to see the good things, if you do that, you will likely have a great day, and you will likely be grateful and see the good in all things.

And if it's not a great day, you might find that you laugh a little bit easier or don't fall into a negative space. Or if you do fall into that negative space that you can pop yourself out easier and be like No, I'm having a great day to day. So this doesn't negate my great day, it's just a hiccup that happened today, we can cope a little bit better. So our intentions are very powerful.

[31:32] The Importance of Creating Space for Change to Happen

All right, the next point that I want to make for working with transformation is the importance of creating spaces for transformation to happen. I actually probably should have led with this one. And I did and I'm dropping it in at point three, and that's okay.

But when you're going through something like if you're going through a big change in your life, it is helpful to create a container where you can understand what that change is. And a container could be anything, a container could be your journal, it could be setting aside time in nature to go take a walk every day at lunchtime and just have a space for self-reflection. And maybe you go to the same lake or the same space.

So you develop a relationship with the land. And in that relationship with the land, the land starts to teach you some wisdom about how to transform how to navigate that. I did that years ago when I was going through my divorce and my spiritual awakening. And I used to go to the same little patch in nature. And I vividly remember sitting on this park bench at this park by Big Trail in the woods, looking up at the sky and the clouds were moving and just thinking to myself like let yourself be rearranged. Like be like the sky right now be like the clouds let yourself be be arranged be rearranged.

And as I continue to go to that place over the next few months over the next couple of years, for as long as I was living in that particular part of Anchorage, I found that the lounge spoke to me more that nature had lessons to teach me that there were wisdoms that I was bringing in through the heart of nature that were teaching me how to live better, how to be more graceful how to be more accepting.

And so that little space, that parcel of land, nature became my container. A container could be therapy, or somebody that you really trust for spiritual guidance, or spiritual coaching, or life coaching or something like that. It could be a class that you join, it could be a book that you read that you return to and read a chapter every night, it could be a group meeting that you're a part of, it could be creating a page on social media for whatever it is that you're working through, maybe you're going through some deep healing, and you create something and follow a bunch of other people going through a similar issue with that healing and you and that's the focal point, when you go to that space is to talk about how you're doing and to learn from each other.

A space could be anything that you want it to be. But when we create a container, it builds a place to house that experience. And it's a way to keep coming back to this container and kind of checking in and being like, how am I different now. When I said I used to go to the same patch of woods and sit on that park bench. As the months passed, I was able to look back and be like, Look how different I am from six months ago when I was to just move out of the house. My divorce wasn't even final yet. I was lost. I was scared. I knew I was doing the right thing and I didn't know what I was doing. And six months after that, and then six months after that, I started to see this arc of transformation reflected back to me.

And that space acted as an anchor, a touchstone a, what do they call that in the old Harry Potter books is that a port key that you go and you touch an object and it takes you somewhere, you kind of operate somewhere, you know, it's like an anchor object like that, you take it and instead of operating somewhere entirely new, it allows you to access your memories, and your own process of change. That's happened in that same container and that same space over time.

So we need to have ways to understand ourselves. And that is why sometimes when somebody's going through a change, and they go do something really new, and people who may be new them from one social setting said what are you doing joining the triathlon or joining this club, like, and this person can feel something new coming out in them, and they don't know how to tell like this group, that they used to be a part of why it's so meaningful to them, they don't even have the language yet, they're going through a deep process of kind of dis identifying with who they were bringing some aspects of self, this unmet self that they don't really know what they're about, but they want to meet them.

And they're bringing that self out into this new activity, this new club that they're doing every time they engage and triathlon and are in that group. And they have don't quite understand it yet. But they're trying to find growth there and give purpose or structure to something in them, that needs a space to come out and explore itself.

So that is what containers and spaces gift us, it is the opportunity to explore something that was previously unexplored. And to try and do it in a way that it's contained enough that we can step away from that container when we need to, and kind of pop back into our normal life. And that is tricky. Even transformation. Often if we are in the middle of a deep change. And then we have to go interact in relationships, or in a job or in friendships or anything, professional role, where we're presenting one way and some part of us is like, but I'm changing, I don't even know if I'm this person anymore. And we have to go step into that, that can really give us some cognitive dissonance and some conflict.

So that is tricky. It's we can navigate it, it's just tricky. And maybe it's just helpful to know that you often will have cognitive dissonance that's entirely normal. And it doesn't always mean that we have to go trash everything in our life that came before. So we can become this entirely new person. A lot of times what comes at the end of transformation is just a deep integration process, where we take the best of who we've been, and what is meant to go with us and grow with us. We take the newness and the wisdom of what we're learning, and how we're changed. And we create a new piece of art to continue to move forward on our journey in a more integrated holistic way.

[38:12] Transmuting Pain to Art

And that feels like a beautiful segue to my next idea, my next point for transformation, and how do we engage with it constructively, and that is transit, I wrote down transmuting pain to art.

So we've touched on this already a little bit. But anytime we take trauma, anytime we take challenge, anything that was hard, anything that felt dark, and we bring in here's ways that we bring light into a space, let's make break this down. So it feels really real.

Maybe we see it through a more beautiful lens. Like somebody maybe says, Oh my gosh, I had the worst day and I was awful. And they're really hard on themselves and really negative. And they're in a really dark space. And a loving friend comes along and says, Well, I'm so sorry that you had a bad day. But it sounds like you did the best you could. And I'm gonna bring compassion into the space. We all have days like that. And guess what, you're not alone. Every single human being blows it. And we say I'll try again tomorrow. And I hope I do better.

You just took something that was dark and felt very cramped to that person and you brought some light in, through your compassion through your act of offering grace. So that's how we bring light into a space when we bring new wisdom and our new understanding. Or we stop lying to ourselves about something and say I'm going to not lie to myself anymore and I'm going to be truthful even if it means hard choices have to be made. Truth is light. So Truth brings new light into a space.

So anytime we're working with the frequencies of truth, peace, justice, beauty,
art, creativity, seeing things through a softer gaze, we are bringing light into those spaces. Anytime we take something that has been ugly, and we somehow make it beautiful through how we cover it, right?

My protective layering habitually is love. You know, I've been writing about this for years and have plenty of poems where I talk about how can I love myself through this? How can I love the other person? How can I love humanity, you know, that is the protective layer that I have chosen for, like my little oyster when your attempts come into me. There's other ones there too. But ultimately, for me, I am a teacher on our heart magic, I teach about the heart. And the language of the heart is the language of love. So that is my personal protective layer. And that's how we make something beautiful out of it.

And I want to give a concrete example of just kind of how this might look in action. And this was something somebody had given to me this idea didn't originate for me something a mentor suggested years ago, when I was going through my grief over Brent. And I was just suffering, I was in grief, I was suffering, my heart hurt. I felt like my lungs had halfway been ripped out. And I was kind of walking around with like half of me, and this other half was like dead and had fallen off and had died with Brent. I had no idea how to do life without him. Even though I'd been an adult for a long time. And even in our adult relationship, we had times where your close ties are not so close.

But either way, like we were one year apart. He is all I ever knew as a sibling. And I didn't realize how deeply that ran until he was gone. And it was like part of me had gone as well, during that time. And I once had a psychic tell me that there was some sort of kind of twin flame and a brother sister white energy between the two of us that we were counterpoints. And one of the reasons it was so painful is that I lost that spiritual counterpoint. And that we had traveled many journeys together. And without him here physically, and that he'd come a year first, I was told this, because it was going to be really, really hard. And I didn't want to come down here again, I thought that was kind of a very interesting theory. But it resonated on a heart level with me.

And so now he's gone. And I'm kind of walking around half formed, trying to pick up the pieces of my life. And I had a mentor, tell me purpose, your suffering. And think about all the people out there who've lost and they have no voice for their loss, they are in some sort of circumstance where they can't speak up against it, they can't self express, maybe it's not safe to, maybe they have to suffer silently.

There's many, many reasons that people might have to suffer in silence, and might not have the freedom of self expression, to write about it, to talk about it to use their voice. And so that's what I would do. I remember I would sit on the couch at night, and I would just feel my pain and I would picture taking it. And kind of almost like if I could put it into these little balls of energy, a little ball of light, and kind of offering it out like I was breathing love out into the universe and saying, I purpose this to love, I purpose, my suffering for on behalf of all those who suffered in silence. And I You're not alone. And may this help be transformative, and may a grace and a gentleness fall on on anybody who's going through that right now I prayed about it. I just worked with it energetically.

And I took something that didn't feel beautiful. And I thought that was a really beautiful way to work with it at the time. And it felt more beautiful to do that. And it came from a very organic place not because I thought I had to, like I chose to in that moment, I had plenty of moments that I needed to just be childish, and like hang on to my grief and be really angry about it. But when I was in a space of feeling more transcendent, I tried to make something more beautiful out of it.
So when we do that, again, that is how we create light. And we work with light.

[44:17] The Great Clearing of the Akashic Records

Something interesting that I channeled in the year of 2020 December 2020 Going into 2021. So I got a message from the Akashic Records themself that said the Akashic records were going through a clearing and that their records were clearing themselves. And this is a fun image. I heard this and just my imagination literally pictures like librarians tossing books out of a library and being like, Well, this one's old. We've got the newest edition don't need this anymore. And I was like, what does that look like? Exactly? Does that mean like a portal opens in space and all these books just kind of fall out?

But what the guardians of the records explain to me is that what it really means is how the rest Kurds are cleared how they're cleansed is really through us. When we work with our trauma, when we work through the woundedness, and our ancestral line, and we clear it, we come to some form of an acceptance, we make peace with it, we heal the wound, somehow, there's so many ways we can do that. But I think most of us could just relate to the idea that we're in, we're in the wound, we are actively hurting and may be acting out the wound. And when we have healed the wound, we've made peace with what's happened. Maybe we go back and occasionally do a little cleanup or kind of like a doctor's appointment, sort of do a check in is this still doing okay? But we come at it from a much more healed place.

And that the way that the records are cleared is as trauma is cleared as we do that work, that that was one of the ways the records were energetically cleansing themselves. Because ultimately, our experience as humans is some part of the records. It is some part of kind of the history of the records. They are vaster than just us. But part of how they're being cleared, at least as far as humanity is concerned is through us doing our work and clearing our trauma.

So that right there is a way that we transmute something dark, and we make light out of it, you're helping clear out the Akashic library. I guess we're all a bunch of spiritual custodians, if you want to think about it like that. That's a fun image.

[46:31] Authoring Ourselves Into Being

All right, the last point that I wanted to make is that when we're going through transformation, it is a really powerful concept to think about the fact that even though we're dancing with life, we are still narrating our personal story, our experience of our life. From our point of view, that is what we have been given is, our hearts, our personality, the makeup of who each of us is.

And even though that is subject to change, and we will reinvent ourselves, we will become different as we grow as we gain new experience. We also have a core self and essence of who we are, that often doesn't change over time. So we might have an experience where we are a little bit like Alice in Wonderland, I think the caterpillar says like, who are you? And she says, I don't know, I knew who I was this morning. But who I was then and who I am now are entirely different creatures because she's gone through all these experiences.

So even if we're a little bit like Alice, she was still Alice, like the integrity of who she was in the story, she has become a new character, she is narrating and her narration changes as her experience changes, we are narrating our own story. And something that is extremely powerful when we are in process. And we don't know how it's going to look is to use our words, to use our language to use our intention to write about the outcome that we'd like to create. Now, you don't have to know the details of this.
But I'll give you a divorce. I'll give you a divorce! I will give you an example that is connected to my divorce. How's that for a fun slip?

But back when I was in my divorce, I had a lot of very painful feelings that I was working through as to be expected. And I was doing quite a bit of writing at the time that became my container i that is when I talked about build a container.

One of my containers was just coming to a Google document and writing my experiences. And kind of writing these almost like little blog posts. I don't think I did anything with them, maybe shared them with a few trusted friends. But I would come to this space. And I really developed my voice as a writer and I developed a place to reflect on my experience. And I had a lot of hurt there and a lot of pain. I went through a lot of feeling misunderstood and really feeling a little bit outcasted from circles that I was once a part of because of my experience and what was happening.

And I didn't want to stay in a space of resentment. I knew that I had not made these profound changes in my life to listen to my heart, in order to stay in a space of bitterness and a space or resentment or hating, feeling anger towards people I once called friends just because they couldn't understand what I was going through. That felt very bad to me.

So I would often write about the band that I wanted to become and the band that I wanted to become was pretty simple. It was despite all this I want to be my best self. I want to be authentic. I do not want to shut my heart down. I do not want to become a person who is as judgmental as some of what I feel I'm experiencing. I would write about the bath and I wanted to become an over time I had this really kind of freaky experience, where I realized I was becoming that Batman. And it really sort of brought up this did I write myself into being? Was I always meant to be this person? Was it a little bit of both?

My best understanding is, is that a little yes to both of those things, that I was just following the compass in my heart and the true north in my heart, and just intuitively doing what I knew was right for me. And what was right for me was to find the growth, not shrink back and become a bitter angry person. But at the same time, writing and using my words was a little bit like I'm creating my own prophecy, my own spell, if you want to call it that, or my mantra, or a vision of myself, it was using words as a vision board. And it was saying, this is what I want to become. And the more that I would say that the more I would align with that person.

So if you're going through change, you don't know how you have to look on the other side. But are there qualities that you wish to embody, that you know, will hold true for you, regardless of what happens, I want to be more loving, I want to still be a person of integrity, I want to be more creative, I want the growth, I want the wisdom, whatever that is, create a word picture, right out, who do you want to be?

If you've had a bad day or a bad week or a bad season, and you really want to turn it around, write about that. I don't want this to define life right now, I want to be able to see the light and to open up to the beauty and life again, I want the healing, I feel really blocked right now I want my heart to open back up to love, work with wherever you're at. That's how we bring light into hard spaces. That's how we make art out of our lives. And when we do that, and we can trust the alchemy of the process, right, because that's part of trusting the process, just letting nature take its course.

There's this alchemy of us dancing with life dancing, with spirit dancing with so much beautiful spiritual support, if we can trust that we hold the ability to have such incredible growth, and incredible change and transformation throughout our lifespans. And to not be afraid when we're going through it because we know it's going to be okay, we've been through this before, not our first rodeo. We know that something beautiful is waiting on the other side.

[52:30] Ways to Connect w/Dr. BethAnne & Coming Up Next Week

With that, that wraps up today's podcast. And just a couple quick notes, I realized I have not once ever said out loud on this podcast that if you want to engage with me outside of this podcast and you are interested in the Akashic records, I have a free monthly newsletter called Akashic magic, all my links are in the write up to this podcast that you can stay updated on what are the record saying about the energies of the month and I do individual readings virtually and online globally to people who might want to connect with their records and connect with their wisdom. And I have links to that as well. 

But if you are wanting to go deeper into your Akashic journey, I have a couple of access points that I offer in my work to help you do that, and help you discover your own Akashic magic and your heart magic. So with that next week's topic is a life as a ceremony. So we're talking about the idea that life is a ceremony, and we're going to be talking about ceremony and rituals. And some of this will kind of dovetail with what we were talking about today with containers for transformation because ceremonies are a little bit of a container. But we'll be talking about that wisdom and sharing more about what our ceremonies 

How can we access this in our day-to-day life? how can we create ritual in the every day? And what might we do if we feel called to some kind of bigger ceremony or ritual that's a little bit more bigger than just the day to day and I'm going to share some of my experiences around that. 

So that will be coming up on next week's episode of Your Heart Magic. I believe that is episode 16. Woot, woot!

And until then, have an amazingly beautiful week and be well. Be Love, be you and be magic.