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.)

[0:38] Introduction to Episode

Aloha, everybody, welcome to your heart magic. This is Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright. And today we are talking about finding peace when letting go is hard. This topic to me is so universal, and it is so lifelong, in the sense that we will continually come to a space, I think many times in our life where we are challenged to find peace with something that's happened, and come to a space of acceptance when we don't feel peaceable towards it.

When we don't want to let go. When we don't like an outcome, or we feel like we haven't had the closure that we seek. I think there are so many opportunities, if we want to call it that to practice letting go and grounding and surrendering and forgiveness, and the sense of acceptance and this radical acceptance towards some of the things that happen in our life.

And sometimes this is easier said than done. Certainly as we grow and develop and grow in emotional intelligence and emotional maturity, we become a little bit more equipped at moving through some of the situations in our life. But there's many things that we really grapple with. And we're meant to grapple with them.

We are not meant to come by peace easily. I think that is part of our work as a soul on this human journey. And learning to grapple and learning to work with the divisions inside of ourselves, and learning how to bridge some of those divisions and bring peace to the divisions inside of us when we are conflicted about something.

So I don't know that I love this topic, the way that I sometimes love a topic where I get really joyful talking about it. But I love it in the sense that it's so important to understand concepts that help support us in working towards inner peace. And for me personally, this topic feels very relevant. I think almost any year I could pick out in my life, I could probably come up with something that I'm working on.

But I certainly have had a lot of things happen over the last few years that I've been challenged to find peace with. So I think that many of us can relate to this. And if we were all hanging out together and sharing stories, we could relate to each other stories.

And we could relate to themes that we share and similar things about but I'm just so upset, and I'm just having such a hard time letting go. Or I just can't believe that it happened this way. And I don't know what to do. Or where you're really dealing with something really heavy, like some form of a grief or loss or something like that, or a divorce or separation or something that really breaks your heart. And it is so hard to find peace.

So today we're going to be looking at some ideas for how to we at least work towards moving in a direction of peace. And what are some tools and perspectives that might be helpful in supporting each of us on our individual journeys, with things that we might struggle with where we do not necessarily have a sense of peace towards them.

[4:12] A Personal Story About a Recent Trauma

I thought I would start out today with a story from my own life. It's something that's happened really recently and just kind of share this as a personal thing. That has been a little bit of a struggle for me. So this happened in May of this year. So this is only about five or six weeks ago.

And what happened was it was a really beautiful summer or summer Yeah, summer day, beautiful sunny day and I me and my husband had finished a run and our town and we decided to take the dogs out on any nearby trail and this is something that sometimes we'll do after a long run in town where we'll be like let's just go finish off a few more miles and we will exhaust the dogs they are bundles in The energy.

So sometimes it's like there's not enough exercise in the world, we will get a few more miles and kind of practice running on tired legs are both training for the Kauai marathon. So we're racking up the mileage right now. And we'll get out somewhere in nature. Like when, when for all so we're out on this trail. And I remember one moment we're talking about, like, what are we going to eat when we get back home and, you know, it was towards like less than half a mile from the car.

And my husband and I had our dog Rosie on a leash. And they were running just a little bit ahead of me and Frodo, and they took off a little bit ahead of us. And I'm jogging along behind, and I come around this bend. And this is the scene that I stumbled upon. Both of them were on the ground. And there was a pack of five hunting dogs that were in the process of attacking both of them. And it was absolute mayhem and chaos.

There was the hunter who was the owner of the dogs was there. And I looked at this and just saw danger flying through my mind. And I have this vague recollection of my husband shouting for help. And this vague recollection that at that point, like I just ran right on into the fray, I remember being relieved that our other little dog Frodo was not on a leash. And that he could go like run free, which he did. He ran off in the woods at that point, was smart enough not to run with me. He's just a tiny little guy. And our other dog is a wolf hound mix. So she was a lot bigger.

And I have sort of these patchy memories that often happen when you're going through something completely surreal and very scary and potentially life threatening. And what I remember is mostly just dogs piling on top of everybody and that they were relentless trying to get at our Wolfhound, Rosie, she's a rescue dog.

And we're not exactly sure where she came from, though, based on what we've perceived and seen and her she's had a lot of trauma, my guess is she escaped from trying to be raised, not trying, like being trapped and raised in some form of a hunting pack. And that she did not have a good, probably first nine months of life and our guesses that she ran off or got free or something like that. And when we found her she was a stray.

So she's always been fearful around like big packs of dogs. And I'm really reactive to them. And my guess is that maybe they smelled her fear when they saw because they just swarmed and attacked. And I remember the hunter, like a couple times, maybe kicking at the dogs, but mostly I remember him like standing off to the side and very ineffectually just kind of being like, Come on, get off and trying to call them off.

And I remember having a thought in that moment. And wondering, why isn't he helping more, you know, these are his dogs he has, he's got weapons. He's in camouflage, like, like a sports bra and little running shorts. And, you know, I'm in the middle of the spray of attack dogs. And so as my husband, we both got bitten in the process. And I had this flash that if we did not get Rosie out of there, she would die in that moment. And she was on her leash.

And I also had this other flash, I'm still not sure if this was intuition or fear. But I felt very strongly that if we let her off that she would make a run for it. She's very fast, but so were those dogs. And I felt that they would follow her into the jungle and hunt her down like they do a pig and just go for the jugular, and we wouldn't be able to do anything to stop it. Once you get into the jungles of Kauai they're not very penetrable like I mean, they're like very, very green and brushy and you really need a machete.

So it was a really terrifying moment. And I remember kind of throwing up a lot of prayers to the angels and saying, like, we need help, like right now you got to get us out of here. And through I believe a combination of spiritual protection. And me and my husband and like really being like human shields and peeling dogs these attack dogs off of our dog I remember like, like blocking and shielding and elbowing and getting bit like ripping dogs off and like hauling her down this trail and trying to run and like getting her out of there.

And it took a while they continue to pursue us they continue to leap on her, you know, they continue to leap and like grab her neck and grab her ear. And it was terrifying and it was horrifying. And when we finally were free Eat. And you could tell like, okay, it's gonna be okay.

Now, at that point is when the hunter started yelling at us there was no apology or No, any acknowledgement that something on this deadly had just happened. Instead, what happened at that point was yelling at us that we were on this hiking trail. On a Sunday. It's a trail apparently that hunters access and go hunt in the jungle.

And we've been on it plenty of times before we had been on other trails in the area. There's no rule that says you cannot be on it. We've seen hunters with dogs. I've never had an issue. But he was very mad at us that we were out on a day that he was on it as well. And I guess felt we shouldn't have been on it.

[10:45] Reflections on The Aftermath and Present Day

So what ensued after this several things, and it was an eyewitness account to a system that wasn't necessarily stacked and the favor of us are what I would consider was fair and right. And some medics were called the police were called, not a lot was done on that. And turns out, they knew the hunter, the officer didn't even give us his name. Initially, I was bleeding and in shock.

And when the medics came, they treated my husband who was bleeding worse than I was and he had bites all over his hand. But I had a bit a bite, you know, and even though Blood was running down me, not a single person asked, Are you okay? And I had gone into kind of flight fight freeze mode. And I was still in this like crisis solving mode and assessing damage and looking at our dog and making sure everything was okay.

And if you're wondering about our little one, Frodo, he's very smart. And he had run off in the woods. And what he did is he popped back out on the trail when we broke free and ran back to the car with us. So he stayed safe the whole time. Thank goodness, it was that was a great that he was not in the middle of it with us. But what happened with trying to report it was unsatisfactory.

And we had kind of immediately called a couple people who've lived here long term, couple of them born and raised here and said, What should we do, and we kind of got the same thing, hey, this shouldn't have happened, this is really wrong. Like you need to stay on this, this should be reported. And ended up at the urgent care that afternoon, you know, especially for my husband to get his hands treated.

And what we found in the days to calm were a couple things is that nothing was really done about it. And it took a lot of persistence. It took a lot of calling and emailing and talking to the Humane Society and trying to make some sort of a report that this wasn't okay, and what if we'd had a child with us, you know, families were out on that trail that day, what if they had a family dog that this happened to this could have been like so much worse than what it actually was, and trying to actually get something done about it.

And we were really given the runaround. And it took a lot of persistence. And there was a lot of evading of responsibility and being passed to the next people and all of that. And this whole time, you know, we are dealing with a lot of stress and shock and we know our dog, Rosie had some pretty bad wounds, they ended up healing, okay.

And definitely a lot of psychological scarring and psychological damage that happened from that. And some other fallouts that happened, you know, kind of that just came to light during the week. And it was a very angering situation.

I wouldn't necessarily say that justice was done, or we had anything satisfactory happened with it. To kind of bring this story up into president, we finally were able to have the Humane Society do something. But in order to report these dogs, we were sent pictures, and it was an email that said dog lineup. And we had to pick the dogs that attacked us out of a picture of a couple handfuls of dogs.

And there was only there was five dogs there that day, there was four that were really responsible for the attack. And so there was more dogs in the dog lineup than actually were on the trail that day. Now, I don't know about you, if you've ever been through anything like this, and you've had the wherewithal to make notes in your head of markings on the animals to make sure that you can correctly identify them later.

But let me tell you, it's not easy to do when you are the ones who are kind of Fending off dogs who are intent on killing your dog and harming you in the process to get to her. And we found out after the fact that they're was only for the dogs and the seven or eight that were in the lineup that we're actually has the rest of them weren't and if we chose incorrectly that the case would be thrown out. And there would be no citation issued.

And I like to think that spirit was really on our side with this. And also like this did happen to us. So we did actually choose correctly. But that is what it took in order to get a citation. Or what happened. The second thing that happened is we are on our way to court next week, because we got reported by the hunter, because our one dog was off leash.

And this was the dog who was never involved in the fight, ran off and took care of himself on the trail, 10 pound Maltese dog, he's 11 years old, really latched to the hip, he has been my buddy for a long time. And we got reported for that.

And so we were issued a citation by the Humane Society for having an off leash dog on a trail and breaking leash laws. And in Kauai i when your issue that you don't just pay a fine, you have to go to court before a judge to be awarded or told whatever fine that is. So we are going to be going to do that next week. And I'm taking the half a day off work in order to have to go to court, which is a bit of a drive from where I live.

[16:26] Finding Peace When Letting Go Is Hard

So I tell you the story to bring it back to our topic today. And the topic is finding peace when letting go is hard. And as you reflect on the story that I just told you, How easy do you think it is to make peace with circumstances like this and to let go of something that happened? That was obviously so scary. And also some real questionable justice here, if you even want to call it that.

I think the fact that we are the ones that are on our way to Court this week to answer for a dog who wasn't even anywhere near this think thank goodness, but have to answer for this like infraction that he was off leash kind of says everything about how this was handled. And if this was just and if this is right and fair. And I have been working on finding peace in this.

And working on finding a way to let go of something that happened that was extremely disruptive to our life, it was terrifying. It was very, very scary. I felt a lot of darkness in the attack itself. And coming from the situation. It really disrupted the flow of day to day life, we'd already had some real ups and downs over the last couple of years. I know I once told the story on this podcast, not that many back about the neighbor stalking us in the restraining order.

And so this kind of came six months later after some of that resolved. But it was very harmful and very hurtful. And I have been working on finding equilibrium after that happened.

And so some of the what I'm presenting to you today, these are things I'm doing. These are things that I use in my own life. There are tools I teach my clients, there are tools that I have some times found, because the tools I already know aren't working and I need something else. Not everything is directly from this. But I've definitely definitely used some of these things, and trying to find some sort of peace and resolution and perspective for this.

[18:55] The Necessity Of Safe Spaces To Process Our Feelings

And the first one is, is that we need safe places to do our process work. And there are a lot of raw emotions that we have when we are dealing with something like trauma, or grief or challenge when we are angry. When we have gone through an injustice when somebody hasn't done right by us when a situation hasn't treated us fairly, or things haven't gone the way that we wanted to.

There are many instances in life where we're really in a position of shaking our fists to the universe, and really can be quite angry at how circumstances are in this life. At least I am. And I'm assuming that other people might relate to what I'm saying unless you are very, very evolved on the path and are just in living in peace in Zen with everything else but most normal people even spiritual people and Lightworkers and those of us working on spiritual development.

You know, most of us have this Part of the human experience sometimes where we really struggle to come to terms with life on life's terms, and not our own terms. And I think that the value of being able to do our process work and have safe places to work through things that feel harmful to us, whether that's therapy, whether that's journal, whether that is art, whether that is poetry, whether that is talking to friends, talking to nature, writing your feelings out, we need raw, unfiltered places to allow ourselves to just say it, and to not have to shape it, not have to write about it in terms that are mature or emotionally intelligent.

I think often with spiritual individuals, it's tempting to want to spiritually bypass things, or to try and move through the process faster than our human emotions will really lead us.

And what I mean by that is often when we are somebody who is trying to be higher minded, we already know that we might want to make peace with something that happens in our life, like many of us might already know that holding on to hatred, or anger or toxicity. It's harmful to us, it feels horrible inside of ourselves, when we are holding fear in our hearts or anger, or something is eating away at us, that feels so bad to our nervous system. And it feels bad to our chakras and it feels bad to our emotional system.

And I know that I felt like I had been like, dumped with like poison or something after this attack happened and took about like a maybe a week, probably two weeks, at least, to like really shifted, where I did not just feel like like growing up and my solar plexus because whenever I felt into the energy, it was so ugly, and it felt so dark.

And it felt so just unfathomable, that not only had this happened, but that the owner of the dogs, for the most part, mostly stood there and you know, did not seem to do much at all about it. And I do not think would have been sorry, if our dog had died that day, I got such an ugly energy there. And I didn't want to feel that I just wanted to get to the place where I felt like I could kind of rise above the situation. And the only way to get there is through, we can't skip that work.

And so I really want to make sure that we're giving ourselves permission to feel the feels and all the real ways. And to do that in ways that feel safe and contained. Because sometimes, we want to reject those experiences, we want to reject that shadow stuff because it feels so unpleasant to feel, and it feels so toxic to feel.

And feelings are just information. They are information flows that reflect back aspects of an experience. They might be aspects of a bigger truth. But one feeling isolated by itself is not our bigger truth. And we don't need to be scared to feel our feelings. It's actually scarier to not feel our feelings, or try and press them down, or bypass over them or pretend like they're not there and have them pop up and come out and unconscious ways later on down the line.

[23:35] Practices that Support Process Work

So it's really important that we do this. And I really recommend finding practices. For me, I have safe people to talk to. And journaling is such an important one. I did quite a bit of journaling when I lost my brother Brian, I've done a lot of writing about that. And that is definitely something that I have struggled to make peace with.

Sometimes I still struggle to make peace with it. And I think that building containers, building safe places where we can take the stuff that's inside of us and put it outside of us something else that's a tool that I use a lot is I will draw a big circle in my journal. Because it's a container.

A circle is a container, sometimes I need that and not just the page. And within that circle, I will write down like every thought or feeling that I might be having about something or someone or something I'm struggling with. Sometimes I might just do this at the end of a week.

I've talked about this before and it's my way of containing where in the world have I been this week and what have I been feeling but with the dog attack, I remember doing this and my journal and just writing down like all the toxicity, all the anger, like all the stuff that I really wanted to say, you know, we found out in the course of the attack, our dog had a GPS tracker and it fell off and you can actually track it. So we He went back later to like turn on the device and see where it was that it wasn't even on that trail, it actually was miles away from where that trail was.

And what we pieced together is either to try and cover it up or just to be vindictive. The hunter most likely picked it up and threw it out over the side of the highway into the jungle, about five miles from, you know, where the trailhead even was, it would have had to been carried out, driven in a car and like, tossed somewhere. And that was a lot of money. And replacing it was a lot of money.

And there was money that went into other things like, you know, medication from the vet and all these things. And it took me about five or six days before I really got the anger part. But when we went out to where the GPS was, and I really could see with my own eyes, oh my gosh, like somebody intentionally threw this from the highway into a ravine where it is irretrievable like, and we could see like it had like 2% left of battery left, and it was like, it's just gonna die there because we can't go retrieve it.

That was also the same day where I had talked to the Humane Society. And they'd asked me, could you send us a picture of the dog who was off leash that day? And that's when I really was like, Wait a second, how do they know they we never even mentioned the other dog.

And I really started to see like the craftiness, I thought, I bet we're gonna get cited. And this Hunter reported us for having a dog off leash, who had nothing to do with this, that some of them anger hit. And that is when I really started to feel this kind of explosive rage inside of me and was like, I don't even know what to do with this, you know, and that is when I really started pulling on some of my resources for getting it out. And trying to just release it from my system and be honest about it. So it wasn't eating away at me.

So we need those safe places to do our process work, whatever that is for you. And we need to give ourselves permission to feel those things and not tell ourselves that they're low vibe, or low frequency or negative feeling states.

And so we shouldn't be feeling them, the only way to actually clear them and do the work around them is to put them out on the table. So we know what we're dealing with. It's not to neglect those shadow aspects, it's just to face them head on. And we have to trust that if in our heart, we are wanting to really keep moving in a direction of light, that we will be supported and doing that gritty, tough raw process work. And that we will help to help ourselves and we will be helped and like finding what we need in order to shift it and come to a place where we're no longer stuck in that.

But we're really aware of it. And then the beautiful thing that comes from that is we realize like we do not have to be afraid when we feel things that are dark or shadowy inside of us, we can always know that our light is strong enough to work with them constructively. And to transform them in some way.

And that is sometimes when we make art or we write a cathartic poem, or we write something that transforms the energy. And it makes it become more than just this awful thing. But it becomes something that we share with somebody else or that we gain wisdom from. So that's when some of those hidden lights come through from things that can feel like very non light to begin with.

[28:33] Understanding Karma and Trusting Divine Justice

Something else that is really important to remember, this is a hard one for me, I wrote down remember, you aren't necessarily the right hand of justice. I think that many of us struggle when something has happened. And we're really struggling to make peace with it that it's easy to feel like you just want to be the vigilante for justice. And you want to be the one who kind of brings things to write.

And I think it's really challenging in life when we just are not in a position to do that we are in whether it's a system or the other person isn't interested in changing their ways anytime soon. There's many situations that this can apply to.

But it's so important to remember that there are karmic and justice forces working in this world that are so much bigger than just us. And sometimes when people get upset, you know, they're like, Well what goes around comes around and they'll you know, drop a salty Instagram post or something like that. That kind of says like, just wait till they get their karma. Yeah, that's not what I'm really talking about. You know, I'm talking about a surrender sometimes when you are not able to get what you need from the situation to find closure.

And you actually just have to cede your right to be right or your needs to be Right, or your desire to have the last say, or your desire to see justice. And you have to surrender that and say, I'm gonna have to trust the universe, I'm gonna have to trust the mysteries, I'm going to have to trust that the divine has my back in this, and that they will bring things to a sense of order and a sense of karmic justice.

And maybe I'm being protected. And I'm not necessarily meant to be the person who righted all these wrongs. Maybe I'm not meant to be a part of that, to protect me in some shape or form, because it's not healthy. For me.

There's this interesting channeling, I don't think it's available anymore. It's back when Jen Eramuth was doing Akashic Transformations.net. And there used to be a membership that I had to the site. And it was something that was really helpful for me before I really was working with the Akashic records in the way that I am now. And I was still growing my own gifts. And she would do a yearly channeling on like, what's the energy of the year ahead? You know, and what's the theme of the year.

And I want to say this was for the year 2019, it might have been 2018. But I want to say it was for 2019. And the Akashic Records called that the year of karma. And what they were talking about, if I'm recalling correctly, you know, from this transcription, audio that I listened to, was this idea that karma and seeing the impact of choices that we make was going to happen much more instantly, from here on out than it might have in the past.

And there was this idea around it that if you have been tending your path and doing what you need to to just work with your stuff, and kind of deal with your side of things, then you're probably going to be okay, like, there's probably not going to be a big surprise that pops up in front of you.

But that if you have been really dodging accountability or personal responsibility, and you have a lot of clutter, and a lot of emotional clutter and things in your life that you've not dealt with, that there might start to be more immediate consequences, or invitations, if you'd like to call it that, to begin to work on some of those soul themes and issues that either you brought into this lifetime with you as a soul.

Or you signed up and said, these are themes that I will work on transforming and transmuting. You know, karma is not a punishment. It's not, you did something bad. So here's your punishment for it. It is a completion of lessons that we're learning. When we are still growing, there are things karmically that maybe we might not have finished in one lifetime. And so we're finishing them up in this lifetime.

Sometimes when I'm working in the records for individual soul paths, I will see that maybe there's like a karmic history in the family of something. Abuse, or oh, I don't know oppression or something like that. That's like this ancestral wound, and it goes back from generations, and it's never really been healed.

And sometimes I'll see, like an individual came to do their own work, maybe their healing the mother wound. And they came to like, bring that to a close. So they don't pass that on to their children. So they heal their own wound, and they're offering that healing on behalf of the ancestral line.

[33:36] How The Concept Of Karma Has Shifted

So there's many things that karma is about, it's not some punishment, immediate reaction of the universe of you did one thing wrong, you're getting punched in the face. That's not what it is. But it is the accumulation of our choices, and lessons that we might still be learning from things that we've made.

Some times it is things that we agreed to sign up to work with, that we might not have been the creator or the cause. But we said I will shift some of this and heal this wound within myself within the circumstances in my life. And I'm going to be doing that on behalf of the collective.

So there's many reasons that that can come up. By going back to this channeling, the records talked about the idea that karma was going to become more instant. And what I can say as somebody who's working with the record is that I've seen that theme echoed over and over again, and many readings that I've done, and I see it and the work that I'm now doing collectively with the records, where I'm really seeing that the consequences of our actions or the consequences of things that might be going on are a lot more immediate than what they once were.

And my understanding from the records is as a souls, I guess a group of souls where we once found it helpful to kind of stretch things out over a lifetime or a couple of lifetimes and bring these lessons and And, and work on them in a slower form, the utility of that has shifted, and where we're at right now in the year 2023. And the evolution of the light and the evolution of our planet and the collective evolution of humanity, that has shifted.

So that utility of taking a long time to like really get the lesson isn't where it used to be. And so now I'm seeing a lot more immediacy, and a lot more resolution. And so it's not uncommon if I'm working with somebody, and they've had a situation in their life, and they say, this is just so unjust.

And all I see any kind of resolution, I often might see, it might not be immediate, but I will often feel that I do see this happening, you know, within the next five to 10 years, or do you see this happening in your lifetime, where you actually will see this come to light. Remember, the truth wants to come to the light, the truth wants to free itself, the light wants to be free.

So when something is being hidden and covered up, it has a way no matter how much the person might be hiding or covering it up, or whatever that is, it has a way of that energy shifting to want it to come to the light, and to want it to come to the surface.

So I feel these ideas are important for us to remember when we are struggling in our own individual journey. And we're having a hard time grappling with what somebody might have done to us or something that we couldn't get closure in.

And we can remember sometimes that there's like such bigger forces at work behind this. And I've certainly had things that have happened. I have more stories that I can share on the podcast, I'm not going to share him today, we'll see we'll stick with the dog attack. That's plenty!

But I can think of things that have happened within the last six, seven years since I've moved here that I was not in a position to see things righted. But a wrong was done. And within the next year or so I really saw where these forces were kind of working.

And I saw a sense of reordering and justice come to a situation and I never would have accomplished that on my own. I didn't even try. It wasn't my role to these are things I actively had to say to the universe, like I can't handle this I surrender, I'm gonna have to trust I'm not the right hand to justice. I'm not the one who's gonna like take all this action here. And so I trust that you have your own methods.

So that I think is a really important concept to remember, we can't do anything about anybody else's karma or their stuff, all we can do is do our own work.

[37:41] Doing Parts Work and Inner Work

And that brings me to the next point I wanted to talk about with making peace when it's hard to let go. And I wrote down parts work, slash what's being neared. So parts work is inspired by internal family systems work with Richard Schwartz. And that is this idea that we all have kind of this internal family and different parts of ourselves that have developed over our lifetime.

And originally, this was developed for trauma with people who might have parts of themselves that are really stuck, or that are really having a tough time integrating into the hole of who they are. But it's also just been expanded that any of us can think of the fact like most of us relate to having an inner child, most of us relate to having wounded parts.

Some of us relate to having parts that maybe if felt rejected or abandoned. I often will refer to myself as in like, oh, like 30 year old BethAnne. Yeah, like that happened. And I'll talk about my younger self sometimes and talk about learning to love my younger self.

So I've been working with this construct for a long time. And what that really helps, like when we're identifying parts of ourselves, it's so helpful to ask, like, well, what part of me is that, like, what's being reflected in me? Like, what about This is so upsetting for me, you know, and like really digging into like, what's being triggered? What's being mirrored? And you that is your information? That's your inner work, that's your process work to really help you see, like, what part is having a tough time letting go of this.

And that could be different for so many people. It could be I just can't accept that. This is what reality is. It could be some part of me, still loves them. Let's say it's a relationship and I just can't believe that they're gone or that they've left. And I don't know how to let go at that. I'm really narrowing it down sometimes and seeing where you stuck specifically, if you know that you need to let it go. And you want to let it go. And you're struggling though to let it go.

Asking yourself what part of me is still hooked into this. What's being triggered? What's being mirrored? What am I questions is how old? Do I feel like the part of me that feels really stuck? Or the parts of me like, how old? Do they feel? Do they feel my biological age? Do they feel younger? Do they feel like an adolescent? Do they feel like a child, there's so much good information that can come from that.

And that can help us see. Really like, how old is that aspect. And if it's a part of us that feels like really young, or that feels like an adolescent, a really nice follow up question is like, what is that part need? You know, what is that part maybe need to offer some peace, or maybe I'll do some journaling and write a letter to that aspect of myself. There's so many directions that could go.

And this is when things can be so therapeutic and so cathartic, and really help us do some pretty cool psychological enter in depth work. But I think that when we talk about, we can't manage somebody else's stuff, we can only manage our own.

I really love working with the idea of being triggered, what part what aspect, figuring out as much as I can, because if I can figure out where I'm being hooked, and really looking at like, what's so sticky about this, for me, that is usually for many of us, like the first step to like beginning to unstick ourself, because then we can start doing things like meditation work, or mantra work, or journaling or feelings or doing strategic interventions or different kinds of catharsis, or telling somebody safe, this is where I'm stuck.

And I had this insight, I think this is why I'm stuck. And I just cannot seem to navigate this. That's when things began to shift.

Remember, the truth wants to come out. So within ourselves, when we are tapping into what is my truth in this, what part is stuck? Is there some part I'm not expressing not saying, and we haven't had insight, or Something's just not in our consciousness. And we can take that from the unconscious and bring it into the conscious and work with it in an intentional way. We're actively helping, like for your own stuff.

And when we read something, we bring it out into the light, we give it room to breathe, we give it room to heal, we give it room to grow. Sometimes when we're like, where am I stuck, you might find that I'm really stuck, because I can't believe this happened. And that's tapping into a deeper vein of there's been other things in my life that have made me feel this way. And I feel like there's like layers to this wound here. You know, how beautiful to be able to provide yourself with that insight.

So those are really nice key questions to help us get to that space.

[42:46] Practicing Loving Kindness Meditations

Something else that we can do this one is really hard. It's a challenge. Something else that we can do when we're really stuck. And we're having a hard time letting go, especially if another person is involved, is a loving kindness meditation. And I've probably talked about this on the show before I don't remember if I have but this is pretty standard teaching for me.

A loving kindness meditation, I think the basic one kind of says, May you be safe. May you be well, May you be peaceful and at ease. May I be safe? May I be well, may I be peaceful and at ease. May we be safe? May we be well, may we be peaceful and at ease. And it's a mindfulness practice that we can do to compassionately begin to detach from a situation.

And I heard about this years ago, it was a study that I can't reference for you because I don't remember where I read it. I just remember seeing this study that was talking about compassion, fatigue and empathy, fatigue and like therapists and mental health workers and psychologist and they had them use loving kindness, motivation, and loving kindness meditations as an intervention to work with themselves and to work with that compassion fatigue and that sense of burnout.

And what they found is that those who practice it regularly and would do it with their work, do it with clients do it with things where they were struggling to detach, began to report higher degrees of well being and have started to see good results from it.

And that's around the time that I actively started making this practice my own. I really liked the idea of it. I started to do it at the end of workdays, and it's not that I would I remember really vividly at the time, it wasn't anything or anybody that I was particularly attached to.

But sometimes it would be hard for me. This is back in Alaska in my old practice, I might see a lot of people and then I had to go Um, and go like right into family mode. And I sometimes had a hard time transitioning my drive home was like 510 minutes away, it wasn't a lot of transition time.

And I would take a little bit of time, at the end of the day to just kind of mentally go through every person I met with and just say that loving kindness meditation, you know, for each of them once, I'd say it for myself, and it's like, it just opened up space, it opened up wrath, it opened up this idea of giving them a blessing for their journey, and then releasing them into the hands of spirit, the very capable hands of the universe of God have their angels of their guides of their light beings.

And it was acknowledging that like, I deserve the same, you know, I also am releasing myself into the capable hands of my guides and my angels in the universe and my spiritual connections. And it's such a beautiful way to create space in situations where we might not have space.

I might have I've modified this throughout the years. And so this is where it gets a little bit tricky, but also a little bit fun. I actively use this in different situations and my life with individuals sometimes that I've really struggled to let go of something that has happened with them.

And there's nothing particular like there's not one thing that I'm talking about with that, I'm just kind of thinking about, like this cascade of things that could be anything from a challenge and a friendship, to situations, we were bullied really bad the first year on the island, and this woman harassed me, she was horrible, really, really made it so I couldn't even walk in one section of the neighborhood because of the things that she did.

And I remember actively being like, I don't want to hold hatred in my heart towards this, but like, I actually couldn't say, I hope you're safe. But I hope you're well, I didn't mean it. And so I couldn't force it.

So I really started playing with the wording. And I think I probably came up with some form of like, May the light bring you what you need, may you be guided in the direction you need to go on your path, and May the light bring me what I need, and may I be guided in the direction I want to know on my path.

Like I really have played with the words on this sometimes that if I can't say it and mean it, I keep coming back to the drawing board and writing it out in a way that like I can actually mean it towards the person. And I've given this before to parents who group that I once did called Soul care for sensitives, I made like an empath care kit.

And I had all these affirmations and I use this one for a couple parents who were going through a situation of a divorce situation and an estrangement from children because of the divorce. And because of a spouse or an ex partner kind of influencing the kids against them and just really struggling with how do I stay present in their life when they're shutting the door in my face.

And so I use it to modify it to give situations and examples for here are some things that you could say, as a parent, you know, here are some things that you can say to somebody that maybe you still love, but you need to let them go or you need to let the relationship go. Here are some things you could say to somebody who has betrayed you, or hurt your heart in some way. And you don't really wish them well, like you wish that they would fall in the nearest hole and drop off the planet and you're struggling. To be honest, I have not even bothered to do this with the hunter. Like it's not necessary I feel in this situation.

My tools that I've used for this have been a lot of prayer, a lot of spiritual protection, a lot of calling on the angels and calling on my guidance and talking to my people that are my supports and just getting what I need in the situation. But I haven't felt a sense of like anything that I need to do that towards him.

So no, I don't think you need to do it and make peace with every single person, you will know who it's necessary for. There was just nothing, nothing to do or to bless there or anything like that or to compassionately detach from I'm pretty clear on what I picked up from him and what my feelings are and I don't feel a particular attachment to him or like I'm obsessing or thinking or anything like that. So I don't feel that need to separate myself from his energy.

This is just really helpful when you can't separate yourself from the energy and like they're they're in your head and you can't stop thinking about them and you're like stop taking up so much space in my brain. I gotta get you out. I do not want to rent all this free space to you. Or you're carrying them in your heart so heavy and you know that you need to free your heart in order to keep moving forward. Like this is when I find that this is most helpful is to compassionately Attach in those situations. So loving kindness meditation.

[50:05] Have A Conversation With Their Higher Self

And then the last thing that I put down today, and I really love this one as well is to have a conversation with their higher self. There's a few ways that you can do this, when you have a situation and you have somebody that you are not able to find closure with, or you can't make peace, or you can't, can't find closure to something, maybe it's a loved one who passed and you didn't get to say your final words to them or say what you really wanted to say, one of the things that you can do is you can have a conversation with the individual's Higher Self, if it was a loved one who passed, you might be able to just talk to the loved one yourself and speak to them in your heart and say, Me, My angels get these words to you.

But most likely, if they were somebody close to you, they can hear you. And they will hear those words, and you will receive a sign that they heard what you had to say. But when they are alive, and you know that there's just no way to have a conversation that they can't hear what you have to say, they are not ready to receive it.

Maybe there's just circumstances where it's not appropriate to have a talk, or you don't know if you should say anything, because you don't know where they're at, a really nice strategy is to have a conversation with their higher self and tell their higher self the things that you would like to say to them. And is this really easy to do, I suggest just getting into your heart by I usually put my hand on my heart, and I'll just kind of focus on my heart chakra.

And I will just say, you know, may there may these words reach their higher self, I'd like to speak to so and so's higher self, I might just wait a couple pauses or so. And then I might just began the dialogue of what I want to say, you know, maybe it's something like, Hey, if things were different, I would be happy to have a conversation with you, you who's here, you know, and have that in person, but they're not different. You know, and this situation really hurt me.

And I'm really sorry about or I really wish we could have resolved or whatever it is, this is your conversation that you get to have. And you get to listen to your intuition. And you get to make this your own.

If this helps, especially if it's somebody that you've been connected with, I haven't really tried this with somebody that I'm not close to that one, I use the Guardian Angel and looping back to the woman who I said was harassing me anytime she saw me out walking the dog, and she would be in her car. And that's a whole other story. That happened for another time.

But at one point, I remember talking to my guardian angel and saying please go talk to her guardian angel. I can't imagine that she has one. She feels very nasty and mean vile to me. And she's done a lot of emotional damage. But she probably has a guardian angel. And please tell her guardian angel that like there's no point in this any longer.

I'm not willing to be the recipient of this person's unhappiness, their bullying, whatever it is that is going on here that she so triggered by me, I was like, I'm not interested. I don't think this is in my highest good. I don't really actually think it's in her highest good, but I can't control what she does.

And I just had this really honest chat, and just kind of told my guardian angel. And it wasn't like I had a sense where I was sitting there watching this big orb light nod and say, okay, BethAnne, I'll go take that message. When I say have these conversations, I might have a sense of their presence.

But often I've just taken on blind faith that these energies are responding to me. You know, I believe that my angel heard me because I know our angels love us and are connected with us. And I just trusted my angel would go talk to her Angel. And I want to say after that a lot of it stopped. You know, I think that was after that it really ended things. And that was probably the last incident that we had. And then as things would happen, I didn't cross paths with her again. And there is a part two to that story that I am not going to tell because of time. And it's just not the appropriate episode to share the sun.

But when you want to talk about you not being able to bring justice to a situation, but the universe bringing its own karmic justice. I actively saw some things that happened in this individual's life, multiple things throughout the course of the next year. That really reassured me we are not alone and we are not unseen if we are being fairly unfairly persecuted or attacked or somebody is doing something against us. I can say that I more than adequately felt like what happened was addressed.

And it really made me be like BethAnne you stay on your stuff because I would much rather like be accountable and have personal responsibility. and face my own music, you know, as I'm going and just do my own work and do the hard thing, then deflect and blame and deny and leave it up for the light to decide what the consequences are. So we do our work, we stay on it.

[55:19] When We're Struggling To Come To Terms With Life

The last thing I want to say with this is, a lot of what I share today is situations that are actively happening. I think sometimes what we're trying to make peace with might just be life. And there might not be like a singular person, or a singular incident, or something that we can like, do the process work on or say the prayer around or calling the higher self or the angels, when we can be really focused and strategic, strategic, it's helpful. But sometimes our problem is with life, or we can't let go of a grief or we can't let go and get over a season. That's past. I

know I shared on here a lot that just as I was really building my speaking career, and I had this great speaking weekend in February of 2020, the pandemic hit in quarantine happened in March. And everything that I was building just fell apart before me, it just was impossible. Like I put together a business plan. And that plan was no longer possible because of the conditions of our world. And that really became this domino effect that eventually led to me coming back into a tele psychology practice and like really reopening a Kauai branch of that practice.

And a lot of things changed for me career wise, and that, and it took me a long time to come to terms with that I'm there now. I'm really, really happy with where I'm at. And I really see the wisdom and the intelligence and how I've been guided and directed. But I really fought it for a while. And I really had it in my mind that I didn't come over here to do what I'd already done. And I just didn't want to regrow something that I felt I'd already done and I had this like real attachment to this is what my path is going to look like.

And I had such a hard time like getting over myself, and getting over life and getting over circumstances well beyond my control. Like I really, really kept gripping, and you know, struggle to like release the grip and let go. And then even as I was letting go and surrendering and starting to move in a new direction, because I had to, you know, I was still really struggling with it.

So sometimes our issue, it's not with an individual and it's not with the situation, it's really with life. It might be with God, if you want to think about it like that, or the universe, or the bigger flow of life or the circumstances or the terms of life. I think that's what we're meant to grapple with. And through the grappling, we began to realize my issue really was with coming to terms with this is how it looks and coming to terms with my own soul path. And really coming to terms with myself.

And really coming to terms of surrendering my ego and attachment to how I thought it should be. And instead embracing my higher self in my own soul plan and the spiritual guidance that I got that says but this is the best path word right now. And it's the one that will eventually bring you the most joy.

So often we think our issues with something bigger and when it comes down to it, we're just really grappling with the terms of our own life. And sometimes we are grappling with higher power. And those are our things to grapple with. It is our soul right to grapple with those things, to ask the questions, to have the luxury to struggle and to know that we're still loved. We're never judged we're never rejected for having those struggles.

And that one, if you're in that area where you're struggling with the bigger picture, all I can say is allow yourself to grapple, find safe places to process your feelings. Find safe people to talk to so you can get perspective. Find other teachers and thought leaders and wellness workers and clinicians and whoever it is that helps inspire light inside of you and perspective inside of you find what they're writing or teaching or speaking and gift yourself with introducing yourself to those perspectives so you can get out of your own thoughts we need sometimes somebody else or other ways of thinking to help us build the bridge to get to better thought or to get to a better framework.

Give yourself spaces to do catharsis and make art or write angry poetry. Bad poetry. Right about I'm laughing I once wrote a write bad poetry. It was a really funny, sarcastic home after a breakup and it was all about how I wrote really horrible poetry to get through this breakup. And I eventually published it into a I'm on elephant journal called write bad poetry and shared some of this like awful poetry that I wrote. That was cathartic and really fun. If I can dig it up and find it somewhere, and it's still still online, this is like a decade ago, I'll try and drop the link in the write up.

But do what you need to do to keep struggling with. There's no timeline that says you have to make peace right away. There's no expiration date that this work has to happen. We don't make peace because it's required of us. We choose to make it because it feels better for our hearts, and it helps us feel more grounded.

So peace is a choice. Choosing to work towards that as a choice. Sometimes we have to stay stuck a long time before we're able to make the choice to feel like we want to shift some things. So you're good wherever you're at. We're all good wherever we're at. And when we're called to do the work around it, then we do the work. Alright. It looks like it's about time to wrap up for today.

[1:01:01] Coming Up Next Week

So we are going to end there. I wrote down Oh, tuning into the frequency of nature for next week's podcast episode. That's a tentative topic. It's just what came through when I felt into what should we talk about next week, so stay tuned for more on that that might evolve a little bit before I sit down to make the episode. 

In the meantime, have a beautiful week. And be well be love me you and be magic.