Below is a transcript of the episode as generated by Otter.ai. (*please note, this transcript has only been edited to put in line breaks for easier readability and may contain errors where a word or phrase got lost in transcription.)


[0:13] Introduction to Episode: Talking Story

Aloha and welcome to Your Heart magic and illuminating space where psychology spirituality and heart wisdom meet. Here's your host, Dr. BethAnne Kapansky. Wright, the clinical psychologist with a mystic mind.

Aloha everybody, this is Dr. BethAnne Kapansky. Wright, welcome to your heart magic. Today we have a fun episode I called this talk storytime. And I decided to begin a new series that I will be doing from time to time whenever the whimsy strikes me, where I will be sharing a collection of poems or essays, or something that I wrote from my books, my blog, some of it will be unpublished and just talk about them. I used to do this Youtube series. And I think I had it on Facebook too, called poetry and perspective, where I would do something similar.

And I would just share a passage from one of my works, whether or not it was poetry, sometimes it might be a personal essay or something else. And I would just talk for a while and just go with whatever ideas presented themselves to me without scripting any of it. And that's really what talk story is about it is a phrase that is used over on the islands over on Hawaii, that is really about storytelling and an informal way. And it's something that somebody might say, where they got caught up talking with somebody and say, oh, you know, I got caught up talking story, or, Hey, let's get together and talk story. It is also something that I looked it up.

And there are some origins there that sometimes in other cultures, it has meant kind of this informal art of storytelling, where you share a personal narratives, something that happened to you. And it's kind of a mix of personal experience, and maybe a little bit of folklore. So this is meant to be fun. And it's meant to be a way to speak a little bit more off the cuff, which I laughed a little bit, saying that just now most things that I say on this podcast are off the cuff, but perhaps even more off the cuff than usual.


[2:32] The Value of Telling Our Stories

Before I dive in to the first poem, we're starting with a poem today that I want to read, I was thinking about what is the value of sharing stories with each other? And why is it important to share stories with each other, I could do an entire episode just on this topic, and on our personal narratives, and what we can potentially learn from not only telling our stories, but how we shape language, when we tell our stories, it is a very interesting exercise to write little short vignettes, or narratives about your own life, perhaps even about the events of your day, and change the tone or change the lens based on a prompt.

So you could write it from a perspective that was perhaps to write about this in a very boring way. And then write about your day in a way that brings through the everyday magic. I used to sometimes do this when I was a little bit younger. And I would collect these little pieces of good things that happened during the day, like noticing that the sky was robin's egg blue and noticing that maybe I had soup for lunch.

And it felt particularly nourishing and hearty and the moon might have been a little crescent or sliver or something like that. And I would kind of string these little gratitudes together into the day. And I always felt so much more content at the end of the day. Because I was focusing on the good things and focusing on things that brought me a sense of gratitude. And this was a practice that I began a long time ago, I will occasionally do it now time to time when I am in need of a gratitude list and I want to do it in a way where I use my poet's voice. And it was definitely something that helped me find the magic in the every day.

So our stories are important. And how we tell our stories is important. And for me, when I am writing I often find that the language that I use and the point of view that I use, not only helps me integrate ideas that I may be things that have happened in my life or ideas that I might have about the world around me. Through the act of writing, they become more integrated, they become more a part of my personal narrative. There's a lot of processing that can go on when I write, where sometimes all spontaneously feel better after writing a piece, even if I'm writing about something hard, and it will be like something lifts and me.

And this gift comes from it, where I realized that just through writing about an experience, I was able to shift it, I was able to transmute it, the act of writing often feels like taking something that might feel painful, or unpolished. And making it into art, through the art of language and the art of words, even if it's just a free write, and nothing particularly beautiful comes out, I'll still feel better that I was able to let it out of me.

But the other thing I think that the act of writing does is it allows, at least me, and I think this is probably true for most people who write, we take it a little bit deeper, and we begin to see truths, we began to see things the beauty that might be lying in the cracks is something the hidden treasure and something that we weren't quite able to capture or to see in the moment. And oftentimes, when I'm writing, I almost feel like I am narrating and authoring my own life. And that I have this kind of this voice where I am like, this is how I'm going to choose to script this. This is how I'm going to choose to process this, this is how I'm going to choose to integrate this into my bigger story.

[6:47] The Power of Storytelling

So our stories are powerful, they are powerful for us to write them, or to speak them. And I think they are also powerful when we tell them. And when we listen to other people share their experience itself. One of the things that I think is really beautiful is we see these common threads between our own journey, and what somebody else might say that reflect something back on their journey. I think when we tell our stories, we are holding up a mirror. And we might be mirroring back our personal experience or our viewpoint.

And yet other people might see an aspect of themselves in that mirror, they might hear a line that really sinks into their heart, they might really resonate with something, and maybe they have no personal experience with it, you know, maybe somebody tells a story about loss. And they lost somebody lost a loved one. And somebody like that really moves their heart, and they've never personally lost anybody that close to them. But maybe they lost an animal, maybe they've gone through something in their life, or they went through a lot of grief and lost a relationship, or lost a life face or loss and identity. And they are able to feel something from this other person's story.

And so I look at it as collecting these bits and pieces of ourselves from others thoughts and ideas and their experiences. And we can potentially take those and utilize them to help us understand our own journey better. Sometimes we will really stay with a phrase or an idea. And we'll just take it and run with it and make it our own, and do our own process, work around it and let that become part of our own internal dialogue and our own narrative.

So I think there are all these beautiful things that come when we share our stories with each other. And there are these things that we can potentially learn when we allow ourselves the space to write or to speak, or to dialogue in some manner. Tiny little side story before I read the first one. Several years ago, I put together this content for an online course. And one of the assignments was to video yourself or at least audio yourself telling your story.

And it was a course on grief and a course on healing. And so part of the example. Here's what goes with the assignment is I told my story and I shared it in this course. And I actually had to do it two or three times, because the first time I told it, it took me over an hour and I was like there is no way that a participant is going to want to watch you talk to the camera for an hour. You have to shave this down. And I think I did it again and I shaved it down a little bit more and then finally I did it again.

And I think I was able to get it more like 35 minutes or something reasonable of kind of telling the story of my spiritual awakening and losing my brother and how I went from Alaska to kawaii so it is a very interesting thing if you ever want to just talk about your story and even audio yourself and tell it, you learn a lot through those raw tellings, and a lot of processing can go on, I had no idea that I had like 90 minutes worth of stuff just to say, and my story, but I'd never spoken it like that before, not in one sitting. And I never really told it and that fluid of a manner. So sometimes we surprise ourselves with what's there.

[10:33] Be The Peace: Your Light Matters

All right. With that, I'm going to dive into the first passage that I want to share today. And this is from a book called cranberry dust. It is a poetry book. It's just a very short poem. And this poetry book, cranberry desk was really about poems inspired by nature, but also by some of the life lessons that I was learning at the time I wrote many of these, which was sometime around 2014 2015, is when the bulk of poetry in the book was written. And those life lessons had a lot to do with authenticity, and what does it really mean to be human? What does love really mean? How do we love ourselves? How do we find healing within ourselves, and they were my reflections on those topics, at that point in time, during a time in my life, where I was in my mid to late 30s.

So the poetry intersected with where I was at and those life phases, this is called be the peace. We cannot make the world make peace. But we can work to find peace within ourselves. And we can take that peace and share it and the places we walk, and be a common contribution of hope and heart and a time of disease. You may think your efforts are small, but just ask anyone who has ever been lost in the dark. Even the faintest whisper of light matters. I think that for many of us, we struggle to answer the question of how can I make a difference in this world, especially if we are tuned into a lot of the issues happening within the greater collective.

And this is something that I have been hearing from a lot of people recently, there's the sense of hopelessness, a sense of, it's just not enough a sense of feeling really overwhelmed by the velocity of things happening in the environment, things happening with people cruelty towards each other warring towards each other, a lot of the violence that we're seeing in other countries, and in the places that we live.

Sometimes it's just the stuff that's happening as well in our own communities, or maybe in our family or our friend systems or our workplaces. It can feel like there is this overwhelming quantity right now of darkness, and issues that can often feel insurmountable. And when we focus on our tiny little self, and the sheer velocity of all of that I think hopelessness can often occur. And not only can we feel like how can I possibly make a difference, but often we feel like how is anything ever going to change.

And something that I've come back to a lot is the idea that I don't have to carry it all, and you don't have to carry it at all, like you yourself did not instigate and are not the catalyst for everything going wrong in the world. And if you have an awakened heart and a conscious mind at heart, of course you care about these things. Of course, you are absolutely grieved by them. And perhaps with some of the things even more so than others, we can have a personal stake in them based on our own interest, our own identity, things that we feel really passionate about things that we might identify as part of our purpose.

Somebody who feels like an activist for social justice, or an environmental activist or something that might be specific to a cause. Some of these things might hit us even more hard than others do. And again, we often feel like how can I possibly have an impact and change this thing?

And I am so often reminded that not only did we not create every single thing that's wrong, but what really you don't have to solve it. You don't have to solve it. You don't have to be the one who Somehow comes up with the solution for, here's the way forward. I think all of these things are collective generations of choices that have moved things on the planet to where they're at. And they will likely take a collective generation of more choices to shift and to move out of them.

[15:25] Inner Work, Self-Love & Spiritual Growth

And that idea, when it comes to solving problems, like in our own personal life, usually the more complex an issue in our life, the more it takes a while to resolve it, whatever it is, it's never as simple as making one decision. It is often making tiny changes and choices and behaviors, and how we think about something, how we're framing something, how that informs how we act, it is often going through periods of not knowing and having a flash of insight. And so we do something differently. And then we are kind of confused again. And then we have another flash of insight.

And all of those things slowly help build a bridge to help travel us to substantial change to something that actually looks like change. And so I think it's really important to remember that. And I think it's important to know that at any point, as we're building that bridge, that we can always be a positive contribution of light to whatever space that we're in, we can always utilize our heart wisdom, our kindness, our compassion, we can always do our inner work.

And we can always take responsibility for the energy that we are bringing to a space. And that was one of the things that I wrote in this poem, it was about this idea that we can work to make peace inside of ourselves and learn to be a positive and loving contribution at a time where the world needs that.

And so often, when things are spinning out of control, and I have not identified anything that I can do, that is a tangible action step, I will know that if nothing else, I can always come back to a place of peace inside of myself, I can always do my own inner work, and work to keep my heart as clear as possible to keep the gaze that I am looking at the world as clear as possible. I can always work on myself, I can always work on healing inside of me.

The other thing that I want to mention just sharing that poem is that something that's come up recently and a couple of readings actually also came up in the Akashic records for a recent monthly message that is that I am doing an Akashic magic for the month of November of 2023. So whenever you listen to this, that message will be November's message.

And what has come up is to not minimize the small acts and contributions that you that you do make, to not look at something like writing a poem about peace, and putting that down, because you think it's not nearly enough, and it's not substantial. What in the world would happen if nobody did small contribution, small acts with nobody chose to donate a little bit that they could or to clean up a space around them or do their inner work and clean up the space inside of them?

What would happen if nobody looked at a prayer, or didn't take time to meditate on behalf of something happening in the world, or didn't do whatever small action that they might feel called to? Can you imagine how dark that might be if everybody just talked themselves into this mentality that it doesn't matter. And so the Akashic Record said for the month of November of 2023, that it is the small acts that absolutely do add up, they change the energy in a space.

And they actually echoed the idea and the poem that I wrote forever ago. And it was this idea that if you are lost in the dark, and you have a candle with a flame that is helping you navigate through and that candle goes out, how important does that small little whisper of light suddenly become to you? And so we need those small whispers of light. We need our little flicks of light, our little lightning bug, you know, kind of flashing. When we feel called to share our light. We need all of it. So this is really a poem of encouragement and remembering that your light our light absolutely matters.

[20:00] Sacred: Thoughts on Loss and Spirituality

All right, the next poem that I want to share, it's actually more of a prose piece. And it is from my book, Lamentations of the sea 111 passages on grief, love loss and letting go. It is the book that I wrote after I lost my brother Brent and 2016. And I didn't know it at the time. But it was the first book in a trilogy that I went on to write transformations of the sun, and revelations of the sky, and kind of told this whole narrative, from the loss to moving to kawaii to going through the spiritual awakening over here, and also really exploring the question, Who do we become after grief?

And what happens just learning to live with loss? And how might that look differently a few years after the fact that it might in those first few months, but lamentations was written during the first about nine months of losing him, and I published it about a year after his loss. So a lot of these poems come and passages come from that time. And this is called sacred, it is an essay.

I had this realization this week, that life in all its shapes and forms and moods, is all spiritual. We have this tendency when we are being our better selves, our loving, kinder, gentler, more patient selves, to feel like we are being good, the best version of self more presentable and acceptable, more spiritual, in a sense. Well, I am all for continuing to learn how to access our better selves, and reach towards our sense of light. I am coming to realize that we lose so much that is authentic, real and raw, we lose so many opportunities to practice self love, and in return to learn to better love others, when we invalidate the experience of self that feels ugly, dark and less.

Self Love is the fundamental footstep to the Sacred Path. It is a path that we are all on whether or not we're aware of it, all of us trying to return to a space of love, all of us seeking love to help heal the wounds in our lives. And the only way we can learn to find self love is to embrace all our moments, the beautiful ones, the ambivalent ones, the ones where we are sitting at the back of life's class angry and churlish and scowling.

This past year has taught me what cessation truly means. After he was gone, I vividly remember realizing that my brother no longer had the chance to be anything more than what he'd been, he no longer had the chance for greatness, he no longer had the chance to blow it. He no longer had the chance to choose good or choose bad or create his own labels as to what those words even mean.

He didn't have the chance to move to Hawaii, or to look for a new job or to play video games with his friends, or to sleep in too long, or to cheer for his cherished patriots, or to eat prime rib, or to have an extra bowl of Rocky Road, to yell at me, to love me to open presents on Christmas, to watch lord of the rings together to see the next Star Wars or to know what his future would hold to have good days and bad day sorrow and joy.

He didn't have the chance to strive for new possibilities. He didn't have the chance to roll in the mud and be stuck and wait for things to turn a corner. He didn't have the chance to choose to live in shadow. Until he found his way out. He didn't have the chance to choose to revel in and embrace the grace of light, we no longer had the chance to be better or worse than what we were. That is the meaning of cessation to me the realization of how absolutely finite it all is.

And in that sense of finite, I have begun to see how sacred is the whole journey. Because if we are here, here in this beautiful difficult finite possible space of this place. It means we have chances, choices, possibilities, regardless of what we choose to do with them. And chances choices and possibilities are an inherent gift inherently holy and hallowed and precious and cherished and prayerful and revered and sublime and divine and all the words that usually get relegated added to religion but really shouldn't, because they are simply adjectives that describe the gift of being here, and the opportunities that are our lives.

 That is what I mean when I say it is all spiritual, all sacred. And though I definitely prefer some moments to others, I can no longer separate one moment from the other and judge it is better or worse, or valid or less valid, more spiritual or dark, when I have begun to see the gift itself is the hole. Even in my murky waters of self, I am learning to embrace what I am feeling and see it for the gift it is to be so utterly human, to be in the space of here that I can unravel and those murky waters and have the experience of feeling them, of choosing where to go from there.

We were never wrong, we were never bad. And even in our darkest places, there is always something divine to be found. It is all spiritual, all sacred, all a chance to love.

[26:09] Self-Growth When Coming To Terms With Loss

When I lost Brent back in 2016, I spent a while on my grief journey trying to understand what is death. And I wasn't trying to understand it from like, what is death? What does it means to crossover? What does it mean to walk through the veil, I had a pretty strong spiritual sense of him. And that's part of my story. It's part of what eventually led me to kawaii and help me find inspiration to step into my intuitive gifts and own them without feeling that I had to hide it somehow.

But what I was trying to understand is what is death from this side of things. Like I could feel that Brent was okay, I could feel that he was journeying on, all these magical things happened where I was getting a sense of his presence, but he wasn't here. And every time I said here with an emphasis and that reading, I wrote it in all caps. Here being this moment, this time, this earth this planet this year, this life, and having to come to terms with that, and just kind of get like his life, whether or not I wished it could have gone on longer wish that we could have had more time wished he might have made some different choices, or we might have made some different choices, this whole of who he is this arc of beginning to end.

And everything that encompass the story of us as siblings like this is what we have. This is the totality these are my memories of him my experience of him. This is who he was as a brother and a human. And the things that I knew from my point of view of my relationship with him. And without him able to be here, it really struck me how there were no possibilities for a do over or to kind of get it right or to do some of the things that he'd hoped to do.

And I've often said that part of my journey at that time in order to fully come to terms with loss, and come to terms with losing him and re-embrace My life was to come to terms with death, and what it meant that he had died and was no longer here and what that might mean for me, and what that might have to teach me about how to live with more wisdom, harder and lesson, right not not a lesson that I wanted. I don't know that there's another way to to learn this lesson, or there possibly there is.

But for me, this is what really helped me to like truly embrace this idea that it is all sacred and whether or not Brent could see it in the moment. He was a beautiful soul who also really struggled sometimes and had a hard time with relationship and a hard time fitting into this world. He is somebody who I think very much felt unseen.

And my best memories of him our best memories are sort of these inside jokes and kind of secret sibling things that we had to relate to each other through. We both really liked fantasy fiction. And, you know, we had these book series and movies and all of that gave us a platform to talk and to joke and to kind of form this relationship. But he really struggled as well in this life.

And it really helped me see that all of that was part of his journey. And all of that was just part of who he was during his lifetime, karmic lessons that he was working through. It absolutely helped that I had an ongoing sense of him because it was a sense of, Well, the story didn't end it has gone on a new form.

But just looking at, but this is what we were, and this is what I'll have to cherish him by was very eye opening. And it really shifted my paradigm of how I was approaching life. And I think in that reflection, that personal essay that I read, you might be able to hear some of that shift taking place. You know, I was really realizing that as much as we might strive to be our better selves to embody spiritual qualities, to embody our better nature.

And certainly, we should, I think, strive for that and aspire for that that's part of being conscious minded, open hearted individuals, it's part of doing our inner work. But we're also human. And so we have these days where we feel like we kind of blew it. And our temper maybe gets the best of us, or we couldn't access higher thinking, we felt really down in the dumps, or we're struggling with fear or anxiety.

Or maybe we did something and realize that we failed at something or made a mistake, and we really wish we hadn't. And we're kind of grappling with that. And it was really helping me to see that all of this is spiritual, we're not more spiritual because we embody the qualities of the light, we are always spiritual, no matter what qualities we were are embodying. All of it is part of the Sacred Path.

[31:34] We Are All on A Sacred Path

And everybody has their path to take in this life, their journey to take in this life. And whether or not somebody's path is more linear than somebody else's, even if somebody has wandered off the path, and maybe they've kind of stepped through some side door, and they're caught up in something that is not real or caught up in somebody else's journey and have forgotten about their own, they're still on the path. It's still all sacred, it is still all a part of the journey. It's part of what makes us whole, it is our opportunities to learn and to live and to my body and to heal and to make mistakes.

All of that is sacred. And I think there's so much freedom when we remember that, because it allows us to live with more grace and more permission for ourself, and a lot less judgment and anxiety and criticism, we have so much anxiety around, Am I doing it right? Am I being a good human? Am I being this enough? Am I being that enough?

Am I being whatever it is, and all that anxiety, all that fear is part of what creates these wounds inside of us wounds of feeling damaged, feeling like we're not enough the wound of lock all of that. And when we're living in that place of woundedness, a lot of times that is sometimes when we internalize hurts and pains and don't process them in an adaptive way, because we take somebody's criticism or take something that may be tapped into a wound and make it part of our story.

Or sometimes we defend ourselves against those things, if we're in that place of woundedness, and lash out at others and strike from that place of the wound. And that's when we tend to either hurt others or do a lot of projecting or do a lot of defense mechanisms that might not be very adaptive. And so when we are able to free ourselves, and work on healing those places inside of ourselves and bring grace and compassion, and self love to the parts of herself that we might still be working on the works in progress, we'll call them, there's so much freedom that potentially can be fell in there. And that kind of leads me into the last little.

[34:00] Self-Love & Healing Through Recognizing Inherent Wholeness

It's really just a short poem that I want to read. And this is from transformations the sun, it is the next book in the series 122 passages and finding new life after loss. This one is Untitled, it's just passage 59 And it says,

Sometimes healing and reconciliation with yourself starts with a single realization. You were never damaged to begin with, not in your soul where it counts the most. And once you can begin to wrap your mind around your inherent state of wholeness. You can begin to love yourself with fuller acceptance, no matter where you find yourself.

An idea that I write a lot about and I talk about it a lot here on the podcast is about building bridges inside of ourselves and learning to be content and our own wholeness of being learning to see ourselves this whole time I think when we do healing work of ourself, and we do that work through learning to talk to ourselves with compassion, working on self love, we might do it through doing something formal or structured, where we talk to a therapist and work on specific traumas or specific issues. When we do that work, there's so many ways that we can do that work. There's so many ways to build bridges inside of ourselves.

But when we own all parts of ourself, and we start to see that parts that we might want to disown things that we don't like things that feel ugly, or unlikable, and us things that we'd rather pretend, aren't there, or maybe things in our life, maybe we don't yet identify that they're in us. Maybe there's something in our life, we don't want to examine, and we start to examine it. And that leads us to the question of, well, how did I end up in this? Or why have allowed this in my life? Or is there anything that I might be contributing, that is causing the situation to happen or is contributing to the situation happening? When we ask ourselves those questions that is often when we're able to see places inside of ourselves that might need a little bit of TLC.

And I think when we remember that on a soul level, like it's all good, we are loved. We are light and bright. We are souls here on this human journey. And on a spiritual level, it's all intact. There is nothing that we can do or not do that lessons us in the eyes of the universe, of God of love of spirit, when we remember that truth, and try and at least take a little like microcosm of that truth and to our own self view, it potentially allows us to remember that we can give ourselves forgiveness, we can learn to see ourselves not as damaged. But as a work and repair perhaps, who is also a neatly hole, I wrote a piece and I'm not going to read it today.

But I think it was called something like broken and whole around the idea that we're always a little bit broken, and also always hold and it's through our brokenness that we continue to become more whole. And that's such a paradox. But I think there's so much truth in that when we realize that those breaks, those flaws inside of us, are also the place where we are able to build a bridge to bring in self compassion to bring in spirits compassion, that allows us to continue to become more real, more authentic, more whole, more self loving.

And when we're self loving, what do we do, we bring that energy to the spaces we inhabit. Looping back to the first poem, we read about being the peace. As we build these bridges. As we work on wholeness within ourselves, we become more peaceful, or at least we potentially can come back to a space of inner peace, even if we're going through hard things in our life. And when somebody is in a peaceful place inside of themselves, you feel it, you can feel when somebody walks into a room, and if they're really like discombobulated or angry, we feel that energy, some people just have a very whole energy to them, we feel that we pick up on it.

And we can do that always, no matter where we're at. So your takeaway this week is all about loving yourself and continuing to find ways to keep making peace inside of you. And maybe just thinking of one or two things that you can do to work on seeing yourself through a more compassionate lens, or a more loving lens.

Something you can do to keep building a bridge inside of yourself to something that you're still working on healing. And give yourself the grace of seeing that part of you with compassion. And then thinking about how can you bring a little bit of love and a little bit of light into that space.

[39:19] Coming Up Next Week

So we are going to pause there. Coming up next week, we will be continuing our archetypes of the Tarot series, and we will be talking about card seven, which is the chariot and looking at what is the archetype of the chariot mean? What is it traditionally mean and the Tarot? How can we feel inspired by this archetype to empower us to bring that energy into our life a little bit more and to see where we are the chariot and our own life and where we might have some of those qualities happening for us. 

So that is coming up next week. In the meantime, have a beautiful week. A beautiful beginning to November if you are catching this podcast when it first comes out I think it will be dropping on November 2. And with that, be well be love, be you and be magic.

You've been listening to your heart magic with Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright. Tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your life.