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] Embracing life's challenges through breathwork and perspective-taking.

Music, Aloha and welcome to Your Heart magic, an 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. Welcome to Your Heart magic. This is Dr bethanne kapansky Wright, and today we are continuing our August mini series called Small pearls. And in our special August series, I have been doing slightly shorter episodes and sharing a pearl of wisdom from my upcoming book, small pearls, big wisdom, 365 reflections on the heart of being human. These have been so fun to get to share with you, and it's fun to make these episodes because I am usually such a talker, and so having to bring it down to what's the point? 

How to keep it simple and what's the takeaway for today has been a kind of a fun challenge, and I said this last week, but at its core, wisdom really is very simple. It's usually something that we can distill down into a small bite, or something like very easy to digest that we can just take into us and sit with it and let it nourish us and really think about what does this mean to me? So today's small wisdom is a reflection called breathing our way through anything. 

And I'm just going to dive in, and then we'll talk a little bit more about some perspective on this. Breathing our way through anything, a good bit of chaos and discontent is often needed to help clear space and help us reflect on how we're doing in life. 

Change is disruptive, but also create space, space to sift, space to evaluate, space to be in the mess, space to trust, space to receive, space to breathe, because if we're still breathing, it means we are here, here in this love, here in this universe, here in this space, here at this moment, here is a miracle in its own right. Here is a possibility. Here is a chance for better. Here is what it is to be human. Here is life. Even on the darker days, it is a gift to be here rather than not here. 

[2:50] Tolerating ambiguity through breath, space, and curiosity.

Each time we take the simplest of breaths, we can be reminded of our hereness and the possibilities of our lives. Unzen stuff can happen. We can still have an I write chat with life about why. We can also learn to keep an open heart and listen. 

We can learn to respond. We can learn to breathe, receive and be we can learn to tolerate ambiguity, restlessness and angst through curiosity, space and breath, we can learn to breathe our way through anything and and the words of my younger poetic mermaid soul self, we can remember it will be okay life, what life knows we need and what we think we need are often not the same, but there are endless opportunities to find your way along the path, a million possibilities, a light in the sky of who you can be, and if you learn to turn your heart inside out, you'll see love has been there all along. 

Laugh and do not fret. A heart can change, and the span of a blank you're doing better than you think, and the truth of the universe can be held in a single breath. I remember writing this passage, at least the origins of it. Some of the passages in the book are kind of a compilation of a few different pieces that I cleaned up and put into something new. 

But the origin of this was written on an airplane, and I was flying from Alaska to Kauai, and the winter of like, 2014 2015 it was sometime back then, and it had been a really messy winter time in Alaska, just like super dark. It's so easy there to fall into seasonal affective disorder. I had a lot going on in my personal life. I had a lot of stress, and I think I was just having this moment of clarity of just like making breath and space for all of it. And during that time in my life, I was really learning profound lessons on tolerating ambiguity. 

[5:00] How loss helps us appreciate the miracle of now and the transience of life.

And seeing that even when we're in, as I called it, an un zen place and we don't feel particularly peaceful or enlightened, there's still gifts to be found there. And ultimately, when we feel restless or discontent or kind of angsty in the change, if we can take a step back and look at that from a higher perspective. Maybe that happens after the fact and not in the moment, but we might be able to appreciate the beauty of becoming and the beauty of the human journey, and how we're here to experience the full range of emotions and experiences. 

And so those times where we feel discontent and we feel like we're going through something hard, they're also part of the journey. And they don't make us more spiritual or less spiritual, or better than or less than, or worse than, or anything. They make us human. They are part of our whole. And we can breathe our way through those.
 
We can love ourselves through those. We can remember that there is magic too, and the chaos and in the darkness, and sometimes those times in our life where we are going through our stuff, it shakes things up, and it allows us to kind of see things differently, and it allows us to reach the light or look for the light, or have a new insight, or discover something that we might not have any other way. And so there's value in those experiences, even though they might not be the easiest experiences, and the idea that we are here, right? What's the alternative to being here? It's not being here. 

And I have talked about this quite a bit on the podcast, but that lesson has just been so visceral to me since I lost my brother. He's not here anymore, and one of the pieces that I've really taken from my grief is realizing that the possibility and opportunities that he had on his human journey, that the light was kind of snuffed out on those when he passed on and I fully embraced the fact that he's on the other side, and he's becoming a new possibility and opportunity and all of that. So there is so much light in that. 

But something that I really had to come to terms with when I lost him is that his life here, his earthly life, was over, and so it really held up this mirror to me, of even on hard days I'm like bethanne, like you are here, and here is possibility. It's the miracle of now. It's the miracle of transience and the beauty and the gifts that can be found in this unique moment. 

[7:43] Ways to tap into higher perspectives and find wisdom.

And sometimes, when we can't resolve it or solve it, or don't know what to do, we can just take a breath, and that is how we make it through. We take a breath, and then we take another breath, and then we take another breath, and before we know it, we realize that we are breathing our way through anything, and allowing for that breath. 

And so when I wrote this passage, that line a person can learn to breathe their way through anything, was this idea of, at the time, breathing my way through what felt like a very claustrophobic Alaskan winter, where I felt like the darkness was closing in on me, and I was struggling with some grief, and again, some things in my life. 

And so I really was just like opening up to space and breath and not taking it so seriously and trying to play with the idea of, can we just laugh at it, and flipping it upside down a little bit to find some levity, and being able to, like laugh at my angsty self, who felt kind of adolescent in my angst and discontent. 

And one of the gifts of writing about life experiences is being able to tap into that wisdom eventually. I might not always feel it in the moment, but as a writer, if I can sit with it and write it down, I can always find a higher perspective that I can aspire to tap into, even if I might not always, as I said, feel it in the moment. 

So thank you so much for joining me today. It is a joy and a pleasure to be sharing these reflections with you and to be sharing the news about my upcoming book, and I certainly look forward to sharing more fully as I have some concrete publication dates and all of that good stuff. But for now, we are here, in this moment in August.
 
We are breathing and we are embracing the gray space of our own possibility. Have a great week. I will be back next week, and we will wrap up our August mini series in the meantime. Be well, be love, be you and be magic.

You've been listening to your heart magic with Dr bethanne kapansky. Ski Wright, tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your light.