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.)

[0:35] Introduction to Episode

Aloha everyone. Welcome to Your Heart magic. This is Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright. And today we have such a delightful topic, we are talking about bringing joy and play into the every day.

Today, when I sat down to think about what do I want to bring in for this podcast, something light felt right. And I think that often it is so easy to get caught up in the heaviness of the world and to get caught up in the heaviness of our sense of responsibility as individuals as spiritual beings.

So often, I think we are many of us like working hard, we are applying ourselves to our path. We are working on doing the sacred work of self, you know, transmuting, ancestral wounds, doing healing, being really diligent about staying in coherence with who we are. And sometimes we forget just to breathe and be joyful and be playful.

And I think that we have to work on cultivating these qualities and our life at times and be intentional about them because it's easy to forget how to do them. So that's what we're talking about today.

And I hope this podcast, and just this topic lights you up a little bit, and inspires you to bring a little bit more energy of that into your day.

[2:14] Reconnecting with Joy and Play in Adulthood

You know, it was interesting, I was thinking about my own relationship with play and joy, as I said about creating this podcast. And I think that historically, I am somebody who really appreciates fun, and being able to do fun things.

And when I look back on the course that my own path has taken, and I look back and see things that I've done. I stayed in dance as an adult and continued to perform, especially when I was in my later 20s And even my early 30s. And even though I was dancing with teenagers, it was so fun. And after graduate school where I was really serious.

And a lot of times when people will talk about their 20s they have these stories about fun things that they did, or wild times or something like that. And you know, I was really serious. I was married young. I went into graduate school like right after college, I fast track the program I was in so I was going to school year round. I really had this like very responsible approach to like very emperor, like we're talking about the Emperor archetype and for archetype next week. And there was a lot of structure in my life at that time, and a lot of things that were very contained, and very set out for me.

And when I was in my later 20s It was after I graduated, I was fully licensed by then I was practicing psychology, I was just at a little bit of a different life stage. And I remember going back to dance class and seeing that a friend of mine that I grew up dancing with, she runs her own studio now. But we were about the same age and we danced together forever.

And I saw a performance and she was still doing it. And I thought oh wow, if she's still doing it, maybe there's space for me to go do this thing as well. And I decided to go re sign up for dance class. And that just became this beginning of this whole other chapter in my life. And really reinventing myself as a dancer after taking, you know, maybe eight, nine years off or something like that.

When I was in school. I danced a little in college, but there was not a lot of space for that in graduate school and it really reconnected me to a younger part of myself. A more free flowing, free spirited part of myself a more joyful part of myself. It was an opportunity to get to do things like dance to numbers from musicals, or Britney Spears or some pop music, you know, something that maybe I wasn't even listening to at the time, and I got to wear Fun costumes and be part of a group of this energy that was a little bit younger.

And there was this exuberance and this possibility to it that was really beautiful. And I really appreciated the role of dance in my life. Because I saw it as such a counterbalance to some of my responsibilities and my career, and some of the weightiness of being an early career psychologist and learning how to be a good therapist and, you know, do the work and grow as a professional.

So it was this whole other side of myself. And when I think about this idea of how do we bring joy and play into the every day, and I think about my journey with that it, that wasn't the beginning. But it was a beginning. And it was a really important one in my life that helped give space and rum to a more free spirited aspect of myself, that didn't always get to come out and my day to day life.

And I think that no matter who we are, no matter what our life looks like, we all have roles that ask us to step into a more somber space or a more responsible space. You know, certainly right now, when we look at some of the troubles and cares that our world is struggling with, it's hard to even think about the idea of well, how does joy and play have anything to do with this high press of needs.

And I have really thought about the idea that I think being able to tap into the frequency of joy is really the antidote to a lot of the apathy and compassion, fatigue, and empathy, burnout, and gravity that we often feel in our world.

[6:52] Balancing Seriousness and Lightness in Spiritual Work

When I'm working with the Akashic records. It's interesting to me how many times I can be asking about a topic that can be very serious. And the records themselves will give me like, maybe I'll see an image in my mind, one of the ways that I receive information from the record is through, we can call them clairvoyant images, for lack of a better word, like, I'll see pictures flashing in my head, and they will be related to the question I'm asking.

And there's something that wouldn't be in my normal thought stream of consciousness. And sometimes they're very light, even if there is a hard truth attached to them, I might see something as a little bit cartoonish, or a little bit more like a caricature or an illustration.

And one of the things I love about doing work with the record is they have this way of bringing levity and bringing a sense of lightness to topics that can feel really weighty and really serious.

They have a way of lightening and enlightening and lightening up and helping things feel a little bit softer, a little bit gentler and a little bit more free flowing and fluid, and a little bit more delightful. There are times that I have been asking you about a heavy topic. And you know, they will say something that just cracks me up or makes me laugh, because it comes through in a way that's very humorous spirit has a fantastic sense of humor.

And something that I have really gained from my work with the record is to learn to laugh at life a little bit more, to not take it all so seriously to find a appreciation for how just absolutely absurd things can be some of the moments that we go through on our human journey where we're looking around. And the timing maybe is the worst timing ever for something to happen. And we're like, oh my gosh, the irony right now. And times that sometimes everything falls apart.

And you almost have to laugh, because it's comical how we can lay our best plans. And then life goes in this completely different direction. And I think about the idea of just laughing at the benign absurdity of life that life can be this really absurd, humorous force sometimes. And the records often helped me find that when I'm tapping into something. And so I think it's easy to dismiss things like joy, lay creativity, doing something fun, as these kind of light Ice Cream Sandwich type energies or topics that don't have a lot of substance to them.

But on this podcast, we talk a lot about the idea of taking all wisdom into the greater context of a whole. And when we think about bringing the qualities of joy and lightness and fun and play into the greater context of the whole of our human experience. All of a sudden, they take on a whole new weight. They take on a whole new level of importance. because if we take those out of the equation, then what are we left with?

Often we're left with a sense of stress, a sense of overdeveloped responsibility. I often look around just how we've set culture up in the modern day age and the pace that so many people are operating out, especially parents. And when I speak to parents who've got kids who are especially in elementary school, and they're the ones in charge of rides, or they're the ones that are coordinating after school activities, and extracurriculars and all of that, and they're working, and they are maybe in a partnership, and they're having marital stuff.

And somewhere in there, they're trying to find room for self care and self actualization and their spiritual journey. Like this is an insane pace that we live at. Just insane sometimes. And I think that it's really easy to get caught in a stress, like a stress treadmill. And this fast track and this kind of just repetitive loop of never stopping to breathe and teach our nervous systems how to feel more easeful and more joyful.

And I think we need these qualities more than ever, I think learning to be an advocate for joy, learning that a genuine smile. And bringing your light into a space can be just as effective, if not more effective, than being the person in the room who's a fixer who knows how to solve the problem, like don't underestimate a lightness of spirit. And that doesn't mean that we can't take life seriously.

It's more a matter of discernment of knowing when to take it seriously. And when to smile, and learn to laugh at it a little bit more and not just laugh at it, learn to laugh with it, and see the greater force of life and the greater force of spirit and being in this universal flow as our friend and learning to make friends with it.

So I think there are perspectives here that if we learn how to weave those into the paradigm that we are seeing the world from, and that we are operating from, that they help give us a paradigm that has a little bit more substance, a little bit more balance of being able to be these like amazingly awesome Lightworkers and individuals who are holding space for goodness and light and truth and justice and you know, different causes that we're passionate about, we hold space for creativity, for projects to come out.

We hold space in our family systems. It's amazing to me, when I work with people one on one, just how many people are just so wanting to be in their integrity and be a good member of their family system, their community. They want to be in alignment with Spirit and be a good ally to spirit good allies to different groups and causes maybe that they feel called to work in.

[13:05] Cultivating Joy and Creativity in Daily Life

So we can be all of that. And at the same time, we can learn to cultivate joy and have a little bit more fun and know that sometimes like we need a little bit of fairy dust and fairy energy as well. So that is my -  I'm stating the case for joy. There we have it. With that I just want to share a few ideas on how we can tap into that energy.

And I grabbed a few poems today to read throughout this podcast as well because I think that when we talk about play, enjoy anytime we are engaging in creativity, and making art and doing something that feels creative that we are innately tapping into a more free flowing like joyful frequency.

So this first one is called change, peace and art.

Show up where you feel called to show up. Look for ways to bring more love into the world. Remember that it begins inside your own heart and energy field.

Feel all that you need to feel about what you need to feel. transmute those feelings into change, peace and art.

More head paths and belly laughs less dreaming short and playing small. This is your life, grab onto it and bring in all the love you can.

That is from my book, which one things of that nature words for the mystic heart. And something that I do when I need to come back into a more grounded space of joy is I will write these little word poems like what I just read to you. I went through a period where I wrote quite a bit of those and they're folded into some of my books that I have out there and they're like these like like a kite tail where I'm stringing together, little ideas and little words, and it's designed to evoke feelings of contentment. then are coziness, or kind of capture the quality of a moment for whoever reads it, and capture the magical qualities that are woven into so many of our moments.

And sometimes it's so easy to miss those if we don't develop an eye for it. And that's really the first point I wanted to talk about today is that I think we have to look for opportunities to experience joy, we have to seek out opportunities to see where joy might be happening, and we can join it, or where we might be able to create it, where we might be able to bring a little bit more color, or whimsy or something like that into the day today.

And I think that when we are able to tap into those qualities, we began to bring something special into the every day. I think that one of the fun things that can be fun about being around children, is that they can get so excited about little things. So excited when they see something for the first time, I'm thinking about my brother in law and sister in law, and we were doing a Marco Polo back and forth the other day, my husband and I are with them.

And they were telling us how they took their kids to Lego Land. And we're saying, you know, it was so fun, because we saw Lego Land through the eyes of our kids. And even though it's like Lego Land, and it was crowded, and you know, all the stuff that I think goes to any kind of time, like you're going into an amusement park type situation, that it was so joyful to see it through their eyes.

And I think being able to cultivate that gaze and look for places that we can find joy in the day to day is so very important. And one of the things that I really learned when I went back to dance, because it was just so fun, the group that I danced with was so fun.

I felt like it was a place that I could go and, you know, everybody was accepted, I found that a lot of times in creative communities anyways, there's space for everybody, there's just a little bit more acceptance in the arts, I think a lot of people are drawn to the arts, drawn to drama, or art or being a writer or dancing or something like that, because they felt like at some point, they didn't fit the mold. And they had something and then that wanted to come out in a unique expression.

And I remember like, you know, it's the place I could show up and like rainbow colored sweat clothes, and maybe the children's class would be going before my class started. And for a while they were like ending the baby's class with the song strawberry shake. And nobody would say anything if I got out on the floor and stood up with those kids with, you know, the teacher.

And she was a friend of mine. So this was the kind of studio where this was, okay, very nice family vibe, and just join them and did the strawberry shake. You know, I mean, it was such a fun thing to do. And I remember thinking like There's just nowhere else in my life that I get to have these kinds of experiences, that I would be doing something like this and enjoying being able to just be like, so silly and so playful. It was just such a fun way.

[18:18] Finding Joy in Daily Life Through Color & Gratitude

And it helped me realize how much I needed that energy in my life. I remember so well, those years that I was after my first marriage, and I was going through my divorce years, and I was really finding myself again, and really trying to think about how do I craft the most authentic life that I know how, how can I be my most authentic expression of self. And I really remember starting to see the value of finding joy in the day to day and looking for opportunities for joy to present itself. And I did this in all sorts of small ways. And this is a funny memory.

But I remember like that first winter, I was living in my new space. And I at the time it was like a really dark winter. I called it apocalyptic winter. I think it was 2011 2012 One of those winters and we had this January in Alaska where the temperature was below zero for like, oh my gosh, maybe 20 Something days straight. And it's already really dark that time of year and it was so frigid. And the sun was beautiful when it came up and it hit the ice and the ice crystals. I mean, it was absolutely incredible looking.

But it was a rough rough time when it was like that. And on the days that it wasn't sunny and it was gray. It just felt so gray. And so blah. And I was really struggling to with processing emotions and grief from the divorce and some of the things that I was going through. And I remember thinking like I need more color in my life and I was already somebody who really liked color. I had little white lights in my space. I had moved in have painted the walls light blue. Everything was like really fun. I already wore bright colors.

But I really started thinking about how do I create art in my everyday space. And I started to think about the idea of seeing our life is art seeing each day as a new tapestry, and we get to paint on it, and create something through our intentions, through our, our heart wisdom, through our actions, through our perspectives, through how we choose to see the day.

That is the time of my life that I already dress, colorfully but I started dressing much more artistically, and much more fun, because I just decided that well, if it's going to be gray out, and it's going to be zero degrees. And I want to I'm like daydreaming of the tropics. And you know, living where I live. Now, I wanted to be over on a beach somewhere. I was like, if I can't go to that, like, I'm gonna bring it to me.

And I remember dressing like I was going to some fabulous garden party or tea party or something like that, even if all I was doing was going to the grocery store, and then going to work. And this really made my artistic free spirited side happy.

But it was this way of being like, I am going to insist on having joy. And at the time, I really was writing a lot more. And I started writing poetry. And I tried to use my words, to create these little experiences of joy when I was writing. And even when I was writing something hard. That's when I really began to use words to bring myself back around to a place of but how can I find a lighter perspective in this?

How can I reach for joy, and using language as a Avenue and a gateway to connect to the energies of gratitude, the energies of appreciation, the energies of finding higher wisdom, all of that is the soil that helps us plant the seeds of joy and to cultivate a greater sense of joy. So I have these really fond memories of being very intentional about it. And I think that's what we have to do.

We have to take the time to notice like, oh, the sky is beautiful today. Okay, well, what color? Is it? Like? What makes it beautiful? Is it robin's egg blue? Is it kind of a gray day, but it's sort of like this maybe silvery color, and you can feel it's going to rain? And maybe there's some fun stuff happening with the clouds? Is it really dark out? But maybe you can say like the skies like this beautiful obsidian black? How is it beautiful? Like, what is it about it that you might sense or perceive or feel that makes it sacred? Or that makes it special?

How can you approach whatever you're going to do that day? And bring a little bit more of an attitude of fun to it? How can you say, you know, I need to feel a little like less structured today and really kind of rock my Empress energy, that creative energy that we were talking about last week? How can I bring a little bit more of that free flowing, fluid, grateful, appreciative part of me? And how can I see where joy is happening?

You know, this morning, I was going into my meditation time, which looks different every day, you know, it could be something that I do for just a few minutes, sometimes it will be a little bit longer. And for me my meditation time is a little bit more focusing my intentions, and focusing whatever prayers I have, whatever requests that I have for the day, anything that I'm like universe and angels like I need help with this.

And before I tapped into any of that today, I just started with a gratitude list. And I started with like, just thank you for and it was like the sky out my window. It was really beautiful. It was kind of this golden light. The sunlight is shifting this time of year as we get closer to an equinox in the northern hemisphere. And the way that it shifts close to where I live is that it rises and it sets closer to the window that I'm at. And so it changes how the sign looks. It changes the colors that come through.

And I was like thank you it's so beautiful. Then I really had a moment and the one of the dogs is on the bed when the cat was on the bed and I was like, Oh my gosh, look at these like little fluffy beings and they're so sweet and they're so joyful. And I was working with some oracle cards, which had this gorgeous art. I think all art. Not all art is joyful, but a lot of it is a way to help us connect with more joyful energy and to the qualities of color and the qualities of expressing ourselves in a more fluid creative way.

[24:55] Cultivating Joy and Play Through Self-Awareness and Mindfulness

This particular art felt joyful. So I took a moment and gave gratitude For just even being able to have this super cool deck that I'm working with, and that really helps lighten my heart. And when we talk about joy, and we talk about play, and bringing those attitudes into the every day, I think many of us might struggle to define what does that feel like for myself. And this kind of brings me to my next point, which is the idea that we have to teach ourselves what the energies of joy and play feel like.

And I guess I could amend that to say that most of us have to teach ourselves, maybe you don't have to teach yourself, and you're really good at this, and you should be teaching us, I will totally give that to you. But I can say, for my own experience, I've really had to teach myself. This is what joy feels like. This is what it feels like to allow yourself space to play. For many of us, it's very hard to get out of our mental chatter, and just be in a space of feeling joyful.

And oftentimes, I think we think about joy is something that is an experience of euphoria, or this absolute bliss. Certainly, there's times that that could be quantified as joy. And that would fall under the joy category. And I maybe bliss might be a better word for that. But I often think that joy can be a little bit more quiet and more sneaky than that, just like love has a million faces, I think joy has 1000s and 1000s of faces as well. And that we can teach our nervous systems, and teach our brains and teach our emotional processing systems.

This is a moment of joy. And we can teach ourselves how to be more in tune with our senses. develop our gaze for joy are gays for whimsy, we can teach ourselves, our brains to develop new thought patterns where we take time to appreciate to spout spontaneous poetry and our mind about how beautiful the tree is, and come up with some descriptors that help us connect to why that tree feels beautiful to us, or why something feels magical. I think that we can look at art or read books, or surround ourselves in things that help us develop more of a language and understanding of what that is.

And it is possible to create new set points within ourselves that allow us to tune into those frequencies a little bit faster. So that when we are having a moment, and we think, Oh, I missing it, Joy is happening right now. And I'm so in my head, that I'm not even able to connect with that, that we are a little bit more likely to say, Okay, I really want to invoke Joy right now. And it allows us to tap into that energy inside of us.

Something that I've often taught is this idea of how to tune into the frequency of love. And when somebody says to me, like I want to work with my Akashic records, or I want to develop my intuition, or I want to anything having to do with intuitive spiritual work, I will teach them something that helped me immensely. And that is learning how to tune into the frequency of love.

[28:21] Tuning Into Love to Connect With Your Intuition

Because so many spiritual energies are kept at the frequency of love. The Akashic records are kept at the frequency of love. I'm sure there's other frequencies and harmonics that they're capped at. But I can say for myself when I was first learning how to access them, I started out with a meditation, where I would meditate on a memory that brought me a sense of just like really joyful, unconditional love.

And that memory for me is thinking about this really great day. It was back in 2013. And it was a super sunny September day in Alaska. And I took my little dog happy little old Gremlin man by then he was 14 about to turn 15 And we went to the Rose Garden, which is just this little patch, this rose garden patch and the park strip in downtown Anchorage. And it's not much of a rose garden compared to some of the ones that you might find in Portland has a beautiful rose garden. I know there's places in warmer weather states that have these beautiful rose gardens and the roses can flourish much more the year around. But for Alaska, it was not too shabby.

And it brought me joy and there was these little benches there and it was always one of my favorite places to go. And I remember that day I put on like a really fun dress and ballet flats because why not? At that time in my life. I usually dress like I was about to go to a Mad Hatter's Tea Party but I hopefully in a very delightful way because it made me happy. It was this artistic expression of myself at the time, and I used to dress the dog and sweater

So I remember putting Pepe and like a little sweater. I think this one even said something about how, you know, he was my best friend, or the peanut butter to my jelly or something like that I had all these fun little shirts for him. And I took my art supplies, I got some ice drink to drink from some toffee stand somewhere, you know, and trucked on down to the Rose Garden and just sat there and, you know, Drew worked on my art for about an hour. And it was just peaceful. It was one of those moments that if I had tried to plan it, and say like, I'm gonna go to the park strip and do art, and you know, and I'm gonna go be enjoy, it probably wouldn't have felt as joyful.

It just happened so spontaneously, and so unexpectedly. And I had some nice insights come through that day, some nice epiphanies. And it was just this really beautiful moment. And because it was this amazing, gorgeous day in September out a day or at a time that sometimes did not feel amazing and Alaska, kind of this unexpected gift of a summer day in the fall, it made it all the more extraordinary.

And so I worked on remembering that memory and even talking about it now I'm smiling, it lightens my mood, and I would put my hand on my heart. And remember this and notice the good feelings that I feel in my body. And to me, that memory represents unconditional love. Pepe was just so content to hang out with me. And like sit on this park bench like I was his person.

He was my little guy at the time, we were this dynamic duo together, I was doing something I loved. It was just this really beautiful sliver in time. And I would meditate on that. And it didn't take long at all. It wasn't like I meditate on it for 10 minutes, it was more like I think about it.

And almost instantly, my heart would open up and I would just feel a sense of warmth spread through me. So I did this for a while. And I started to think about like this is how I can tune into the energy of love. A little bit like if you were to tune an instrument, and you have a tuning like I guess a tuning instrument that you make sure that you've got it the pitch just right. Like that was how I set my pitch to love.

And when I started to work with the Akashic records, and I needed to get into a clear hearted, open hearted space to do the records work, I would start with that I would do my little meditation, I got so good at it that I really only took 30 seconds maybe to tune into the frequency of love. And then I developed my own prayer that I'd say to get into the records.

And it really supported me in getting into the right frequency in order to be able to work with the records. So I will tell anybody that ask how do I do intuitive work? Well start with tuning into the frequency of love. Because when we're in that frequency, our heart opens.

And when our heart is open, we are better able to receive from spirit, we're better able to receive messages from our angels, we are better able to maybe work with some cards and give ourselves a good reading. Because our heart is open to that intuitive wisdom. If nothing else, we are learning to tune into spiritual frequencies when we learn to tune into love.

Because love is the universal language. It is the Language of Spirit that Spirit speaks. It's the language of God. So there's so many beautiful things that can come from that. And I think we can learn to tune into joy as well. And it's a similar frequency slightly different. But we can learn to teach our bodies, our minds, our nervous systems.

[33:44] Cultivating Joy and Navigating Life's Uncertainties

This is what joy feels like. And if it feels really like out of sync for you, and you're in a joyful moment, but you can't access joy, then maybe play around with in your meditation time doing a joy, meditation and thinking, Well, what does represent joy to me. And when was the time that I remember feeling joy, I always recommend choosing something that that doesn't have any kind of sadness attached.

You know, for me with that memory with Pepe. I used it after he had passed. But he had been gone long enough. I lost him actually in the fall of 2013, about a month and a half after I think that very magical day.

And when I started doing this exercise of tuning in about two years had passed, you know, maybe a year and a half but I was far enough removed that I just had like such an appreciation for this little spirit being dogs presence in my life and like the heaviness of the grief was gone enough of life had grown itself around me that he was like firmly cemented in my heart as you will always be a part of me. But these gifts had come on the other side of losing him.

And so I was able to tap into that without sadness, and just have this beautiful appreciation that had happened. So I encourage you to use something that feels whether it's fixed or feels kind of untouched by any kind of a sad memory. Like if you're going to use a memory pick something that maybe you don't have a thread of nostalgia or sadness attached to.

So it can kind of remain your joyful thing. And maybe don't choose a memory, you might think of nature or a color or a flower. But that's a beautiful way to help you tune into what does Joy feel like in my body. And then when you're having a moment where you're cultivating joy, if you can't feel it, you can say I want to try and tune into that joyful feeling right now. We have to teach ourselves so many of us and learn to get out of our head and the thinking mind the anxious mind, get into our hearts and get into our bodies and learn to embody joy again.

Something else that I think we need to do is learn to cultivate a perspective of seeing life as an adventure. And the Akashic Records talk about this quite a bit, where they will often give a perspective on seeing ourselves as adventurers or journeyers. I remember when the pandemic was going on in the quarantine was going on, and I opened the records and said, Oh, like what do we do?

People are really stressed out, and they're really freaked out. And things are really unpredictable and really uncertain right now. And I wasn't asking specifically, like, tell me all about COVID. And your thoughts? That was a separate channeling that I did.

I was asking about how do we navigate right now, I need some guidance to share with others on best practices for how do we navigate right now. And you know, we can always trust the records to come up with something that is wise and insightful. And as I said, with a little bit of levity, and they said, Imagine if you were a traveler in the like the 1970s or 1980s, before the age of the internet, before there were smartphones before you could easily find your way around a foreign place with the use of an electronic device.

Imagine if you were traveling before you could look up in advance on some online site of these are the recommended places to go. And you just had to figure it out yourself. Like maybe you had a book that you found at a old thrift store or something about backpacking Europe. And you know, you're just sort of dropped off into this place. And you know that you are wanting to have an adventure in Europe.

And you are at the airport and you're like, oh my gosh, where do I go from here? Like maybe you've been had enough foresight to book a place to stay. And maybe you haven't. And the guys had this playful image of just this kind of very full, like archetype and adventurous person with a backpack on their back, maybe a travel book to refer to maybe a dictionary of language translations to try and communicate and getting to the airport and being like, what do I do next and having to figure it out.

And they brought through this really fun idea that there was so much room for serendipity and that kind of travel. Yes, there's room for things to not go right. But those often become part of people's travel stories, where they talk about how they, you know, found this bed and breakfast and it was the worst thing ever. And often that gets turned into some like humorous anecdote when they're telling it to people, even if it wasn't very funny at the time.

In hindsight, it often takes on this really funny quality, you know, or I didn't book a place and spent the whole night kind of wandering around trying to find a place in a park bench. And just waiting until the sunlight came up. So I could go check myself into a hotel.

[39:05] Embracing Playfulness By Seeing Life as an Adventure

You know, there's these fun adventures that people have. And there's also all this room for serendipity. It's so funny how often people will try and like go online now to find like the hidden gem and the hole in the wall that nobody knows about.

So they too can have the authentic experience of finding the hidden gem and hole in the wall, you know, or we cannot look that stuff up and just see where the winds take us and hope that we might discover our own hidden gem or hole in the wall because that is how when somebody traveled they ran across it in the first place. Either they maybe met somebody who lives there who recommended it to them or it was total happenstance.

But the idea that the record said is if you can bring a quality of adventure to it, even though this doesn't feel very adventurous right now. And you can bring a quality right now in this quarantine time of how can I stay A little bit more open.

How can I see myself as a traveler? How can I see myself as somebody who's been dropped off and I don't have a guidebook, nobody had a guidebook, we were all figuring out as we went, if I can invoke that, it's going to make it a little bit easier to adjust my perspective to adjust my attitude. And I feel like that's just a beautiful metaphor for life.

So many of us kind of feel like we're dropped off, and we're figuring it out as we go. And we get really stressed out because we feel like we haven't met some deadline or timeline or it's so amazing to me, how many of us have these expectations that because we're a certain age, or at a certain life stage, like we think we should be somewhere other than we're out right now. It's different for everybody. Some people think they should have done more with their career.

Sometimes it's money goals, sometimes it's relationship goals. You know, sometimes it has something to do with what they thought they would achieve or accomplish. Oh, my gosh, like, where does that even come from? It's not coming from spirit, you know, that is coming from expectations and things that the world has set up that says, in order to be a successful human, you have to meet these benchmarks.

And instead, if we can, like, ease up around it, and trust that we're on this great adventure, and we are doing the best we can, and we're trying to have some fun in the process and see it as an adventure. It really helps destress and helps us find a lighter gaze to potentially allow us to feel a little bit less stressed out and less heavy with expectations and tap into the levity of this is life.

And I'm going to try and treat the things that need me to show up in a serious way with as much seriousness as I need to when it's appropriate and when it's right. But when I can weave into my paradigm, my viewpoint of looking at the world, a little bit more grace levity, joy, play, seeing it as how can I be playful today, so much space opens up. This is kind of fun for me to do on a day that I am really busy. Because I'm so I love nothing more than an unstructured day.

You know, my favorite day of the week is usually Fridays, I do my client work Monday through Thursday. So Fridays kind of begins by weekends. And actually, it's Thursday night begins the beginning of my weekend, I just love the feeling of stretching out and being like, okay, like, you get to do whatever you want the next few days, and maybe there's stuff I have to do, you know, certainly things that I need to do in my own life and household and all of that.

But there is a sense of being able to move into less structured time downtime, or creative time. I love that so much. But there is value and being able to bring play into our day to day as well and bring it into our routine and bring it into busy days.

[43:00] How Joy Can Help Balance Stress and Routine

And so I really love on a busy day, being able to say like, Okay, I don't want to feel stressed out by the end of today, I'm going to be really busy. How can I be a little bit more playful? How can I try and stay in a lighter space.

It is amazing when we set the intention to cultivate joy and play in our day to day, even if it's a normal routine workday, how much the universe will respond to that and energy will respond to that. And give us opportunities to go through something with a little bit more of a playful attitude. Or like I said, develop an eye for joy or whimsy, we actually see something funny that happens when we laugh our way through the day.

And we realized at the end of the day, well that was really busy. A lot happened. But I'm not this like stressed out messy ball of you know, decompensating because I had put so much pressure on myself. I was able to navigate the day with a little bit more peace and ease.

And so often. There's this blessing of, you know, may you find peace and ease today. I've heard so many. Just so many people say that I write that sometimes in a newsletter. I've seen other spiritual teachers who say I wish you peace and ease.

I often have people tell me I'm looking to live with more abundance, joy, peace and ease. These are some of the catchphrases, I think, that are thrown around a lot in the spiritual field. But they're authentic catchphrases. You know, so many of us like want to live with more authenticity, peace and ease, a little bit more bliss, a little bit more joy.

And I think that part of invoking those energies and our life and learning to kind of conjure those energies and invite them in is connected to developing a mindset of seeing those opportunities are available to me right now, no matter what my life looks like. If I don't have to shift my entire life to be in a more peaceful easeful state, yes, there are times that our circumstances are very hard, they might not feel peaceful or easeful. So I acknowledge that.

But oftentimes we can work with what we already have and say there's an opportunity to feel peaceful and easeful right now, even though it's a busy day. Even though I have a lot of responsibilities, I can ask for spiritual support, I can ask for my angels to help me lighten my load, I can spend a little bit of time in gratitude before the day starts. So at least I started off with a light heart and a happy place, I can wear bright yellow, or something sparkly, or I don't know, something fun, whatever that is for you.

And something that makes me smile and feel a little bit more light, I can plan a really fun lunch, or a celebratory dinner or decide to have a picnic on a blanket at the end of the day, and you know, have some Brie cheese and pretend I'm in Paris, and watch some movie that is, you know, focused on France, there's so many ways we can create adventures and the day to day.

And I encourage us to do that. I think it's part of not only cultivating the quality of joy, but learning to like rock our creativity, magic, and take responsibility for CO creating every day and CO creating moments of joy. And working sometimes with mundane moments in our day that might not feel joyful.

Often. It's a matter of pausing and breathing. And again, choice happening right now, how can I tap into it? And that just brings me to the last idea that I wanted to share. And that is this idea of redefining what joy and play mean to us. If you feel like those things aren't available to you. Or you feel like they are not something that you relate to, but you'd really like to have them in your life.

Maybe working with how could you play with those words a little bit and redefine them in a way that support you might be something to I'll just say play around with. I'm not talking about being angry for heavy trauma, there are times where life is just not in a place that we can tap into those qualities. And so I want to acknowledge that and make space for that.

[47:36] Redefining What Joy Means to Each of Us

But when we are able to, I think that it helps to redefine what does Joy mean? How nice does it feel to think that even if you're weak is wonderful. And maybe you pull up Instagram and see that there's all these people traveling and they're doing amazing things and you know, you're stuck at work and you have a moment of being like, I want to go do something like that. I want to have a big adventure, like

How amazing would it feel to be like, You know what, I'm going to make the most of the life that I do have and I'm going to aspire to get to do whatever it was that inspired you. I really would like to be able to go travel over there someday. But my life's just not there right now. But you know, what I can do is find ways to do art, or to watch something fun or to listen to music or to inspire or something fun in my family. Maybe I'll throw a gathering and make it a theme party.

Maybe I'll decide to decorate because it brings me joy and because it's really fun. This is coming from the woman who just put out all these really fun colored glass pumpkins for the fall season even though it's really hot right now on the island. It does not feel like fall over here. I was like this, this this fall - it's fall on the island, at least in our household.

So there's all these like fun posters or like little 10 signs that say like pumpkin patch this way, you know, and all of that because I wanted to be able to tap into that fun spirit of the autumn season. And I felt like I needed that joy and that levity this year and so I decided to provide opportunities to surround ourselves with that a little bit more. And I'm kind of thinking about like, what fun adventures can we have this fall? You know, there's like no hayride or pumpkin patch to go to in Kauai.

But you know, maybe there's something that we can do that again evokes those energies and is celebratory. So how amazing does it feel? How empowering does it feel, to know that you have the ability to work with life right now and to work with whatever you have in your life and find the ways to cultivate the qualities of joy.

So I want to close with a passage from lamentations of the sea and it is called we will have have joy. And just to kind of drop you into my mindset when I wrote this, I did write this in the year of the passing of my brother. But I wrote it as I was coming out of the worst of my grief and realizing that if I want to have gratitude and joy and goodness in my life, I'm going to like have to relentlessly insist on it, and prioritize it or else it's going to be too easy for it to slip away and to stay in a space of focusing on what the loss was. And I wanted, I needed to feel a sense of new life growing as well.

[50:40] Book Passage: We Will Have Joy

So, We Will Have Joy:

There are going to be days when despite our best efforts, we just can't connect to that which is good. And that's okay. Especially when suffering and processing loss, it is important to know the scope of the darkness so we can learn to find the stars that guide our way.

But when it is time, and those stars have led us through the worst of it, we have to make a choice about how we choose to see this life, and what we choose to nurture inside of us. And if we want to find what is beautiful in this world, then one has to be rather persistent when it comes to joy and gratitude.

These gifts can quietly start to dissolve when we are not actively tending to them. A slow continental drift that leaves us with only tiny shards of good. Every day we are given a choice. Life asked us the question, Who do you want to be in this world? The way we choose to live as our response.

Our perspectives, attitudes, thoughts, heart energy, that's all on us. Nothing external can change that change is an inside job. We are the only ones or we are the ones who have to insist on finding joy. Even when life has handed us a heap of gritty muck.

At some point, we have to choose to find the gifts anyway. To see there is always space for new ideas, new moments, new intentions, new loves new, letting goes new skies, new experiences, new interactions, new beginnings, new moons, new creations, new imaginings, new places, new heart spaces, all just waiting for us to recognize them, grab onto them, and shape them according to our energy efforts in intense so we can choose to find the gifts of their day. The gifts that increased joy, love, happiness and gratitude.
 
Some days, we just have to work a little harder for it. But we all have the capacity inside of ourselves to do the work, to change our set points, to challenge ourselves to be more than our circumstances to insist that in this moment, on this day, no matter where we find ourselves.

We will have joy.

[53:15] Coming Up Next Week

Hmm. Thank you so much for joining me. In today's podcast we will be talking about the Emperor next week, and exploring what the Emperor archetype means and continuing our archetype of the Tarot series. 

So you can look forward to that I release a new podcast every Thursday evening at your heart magic.com And whatever podcast platform you are listening to this from is not a proper English sentence. Ah, thank you again for being here. 

Have a beautiful week and wishing you much Aloha. Be well. Be Love, be you and be magic.