Cultivating Appreciation in Daily Life

Intro/Outro Music 0:13

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

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 0:31

Aloha everybody . Welcome to your Heart Magic . This is Dr Bethann Kapansky-Wright . Today we have a mental health toolbox episode and our topic is the art of appreciation , and we are going to be talking about appreciation and cultivating appreciation in our lives as an act of self-compassion and an act of well-being .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 0:58

I think a lot of us connect with the idea of the importance of gratitude . I feel like it's one of those things of being grateful that we all know , kind of like you should brush your teeth and floss daily , you should drink a lot of water . You know there's these shoulds that we kind of know that we're supposed to do , and gratitude feels like sometimes can feel like one of those shoulds . I should be grateful , or I should look at the bright side of things , or I should find something to be grateful for . And I think gratitude is one of those concepts that's really easy to dismiss or take for granted or have it be something that we feel like we should do , but don't always connect with it , and so whenever we have themes like that , I like to really explore them and try and take them a little bit deeper and rewild them some , so we can get excited again about concepts that we often have heard about so often that we are like oh , yeah , yeah , yeah , I know that I should be grateful and we kind of dismiss it and it doesn't always feel like real and vibrant to us anymore . And something that I've come back to quite a bit on my journey is the idea of gratitude and appreciation and having moments that I'll go through where my attention is drawn to how I've lost those , how I am either taking something for granted or kind of being a brat with life , where I didn't get what I wanted and I'm really angry and so I've kind of lost my ability to be grateful and feel like life owes me and needing to come back to a place of simple appreciation and really trying to see life for the jewel and the gift that it is . And I've talked about so often on the podcast how the loss of my brother , brent , in 2016 has really informed my journey .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 2:56

After that initial grief journey of mine , I remember having such an immense sense of gratitude and the nearness of losing him really sharpened my sense of appreciation for life after I was able to get through the worst of my grief and how much it kind of pressed down upon my ability to appreciate or feel joy . But as I worked through grief and the light started coming in again . One of the gifts that came through was this grace space and how I just had this immense like oh my gosh , it's all a gift , even the hard days and struggling with things . Like there's a gift in that , because there's a gift in the struggle and there's a gift in the beauty and there's a gift in the wisdom that can come when we've been wrestling and grappling with something and after a while we figure it out or we have an insight and life opens back up to us again and everything feels lighter and sweeter and we're able to receive in this new way and I had such an appreciation for the sacred totality , the whole that is our life . And when you go through something like that , you kind of swear to yourself I never want to forget this , I'm never going to

The Need to Recharge and Rewild Gratitude

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lose this , but inevitably in the day-to-day something loses its freshness .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 4:15

It is , I think , the same concept for individuals who might work with a tool like crystals , and sometimes they will sage them or charge them or do something with them to kind of bring back the energy to it , and somebody who doesn't know anything about that might be like how silly and superstitious . Why would you do that ? But anything that we work with as a tool or a sacred object , after a while , when we've used it in ritual or ceremony or taken it for granted , it kind of loses its charge . So , like charging a phone and plugging in a battery and recharging something , somebody might charge their crystals in the moonlight . I did that a little while back on one of the full moons a couple of moons ago and had some quartz crystals that I'd had sitting in a bowl forever and just put them out there in water and it just felt like such a small sacred act of honoring the idea of what those crystals represent .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 5:16

And I think anytime we clean a space and re-energize that space and declutter , we're charging that space . Anytime we sleep and rest and plug ourselves back in , we're recharging our energy . Anytime we go on vacation or retreat or something like that , or even just have a day off , we might look at that as a chance to recharge , renew , rejuvenate . We are the crystal bathing in the moonlight , having the magic juice recharge us . I love the metaphor of that and I think that we need to do the same thing with these concepts .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 5:51

And so I swore to myself oh , I'll never lose this feeling that I have and , as I said , of course we do right Life erodes that . We have to really be relentless in tending our garden of gratitude and cultivating the art of appreciation in our lives . And what I haven't lost is the remembrance of how those moments felt , of that visceral sense of standing on this precipice and realizing how precious life was and how easy it is to fall into the automatic default setting of taking life for granted . And so when I find myself going down that slippery slope , I usually don't wander too far before I'm able to start pulling myself back and saying , bethann , you don't really want to relearn this lesson , do you ? And I can bring myself back to that space . So this is something I visited many times over the years and , of course , before losing my brother , gratitude was already on my mind . I was learning different lessons about it . That's just such a tangible example that illustrates for me a moment in time that I can do X , marks the spot on my own timeline and map a self that I can come back to and say do not forget the lessons learned in your grief , bethann , and the beautiful gratitude that eventually came from the fertilizer and tilling the soil of my grief .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 7:25

So with that , I'm going to share a very short piece of writing about appreciation and then share a few takeaways on ideas and tools for how to apply this in our day-to-day lives right now . This is called A Life of Appreciation , is a Life Well-Lived . It is a piece from my upcoming book Small Pearls , big Wisdom 365 Reflections on the Heart of being Human . It's easy to get lost in the constant stream of movement in our world and the ceaseless anxieties so many of us seem to face . Whenever we get caught up in the bigger picture , I find it very helpful to return to our core through gratitude . In gratitude , we remember that , no matter what else happens in this spiraling world , a life of appreciation is a life well lived Quiet evenings , the way the clouds illuminate just before sunset , love in any form , noticing kindness , moonlight , developing a keen eye for things that feel meaningful . We can collect appreciation like pennies and dimes and tuck them into the banks of our hearts , so we keep a cache of spare goodness on hand .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 8:46

Instead of getting ahead of ourselves and wondering what the future holds , we can stay in the moment by trying to appreciate exactly where and who we are right now , how life's strange ups and downs have transformed us and shaped our path , the courage it takes to stay with ourselves and the ways we've shown up for our journey , any small wins or victories that feel important to us individually . Nature's constancy and clarity help ground us in the cyclical nature of change . These are small ways to stay in harmony with our hearts and find our way to a space of inner integrity . Life's bigger picture will eventually emerge if we just stay with the process . Solutions to ongoing challenges will present themselves and new creative visions will come to life and time Things will even out and feel calmer .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 9:43

But perhaps you don't find yourself in that space today , which is okay . This is what it means to trust the seasons in your life and remember that when all else fails and you don't know where you're going or what you're doing or when the answers will come , you're not alone . Find thankfulness for the smallest things and know that a day spent with a grateful heart is never wasted . A life of appreciation is a life well lived . That is a passage from Small Pearls , big Wisdom , and it is being released on November 19th and hopefully , by the time this podcast drops , it will be available for pre-order on all major book sites . And what I appreciate about this piece of writing and it's obviously one that I wrote as a reflection on gratitude and thankfulness and coming back into that space is the focus on really looking at the little things in our life that can help us cultivate a sense of gratitude and , when we're able to do that , it helps us stay in the present and it helps us cultivate patience for our process and being present , focused

Embracing Appreciation for a Fulfilling Life

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.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 10:57

So often I think it's easy to get lost in the bigness of this world . We get lost in our anxieties and fears over the future . We get lost in our concerns over what is going to happen in this world and all the shifts and spaces going on , with global events and local events and how those things might shape the landscape , both politically and geographically and socially and culturally , and all of those pieces spiritually , how those things might shape the future . And we get lost in ourselves and get lost in these ideas of what is my purpose and does my life hold meaning and am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing ? And it's really easy to fall into the void , to fall into this black hole , when we focus on those things and there's a place for all of those questions and there's a place for all of those concerns . But when we find we're spinning and spinning and spinning in our mind and we're not coming up and generating any solutions or insights and we're just stuck in the questions , then being able to bring ourselves back to that core space of gratitude and just know that , if nothing else , I am just going to try and be a grateful person today and I'm going to cultivate the art of appreciation , whether or not I feel it , whether or not that feels authentic , maybe I'm in a bad space and I just decide . Well , I'm going to try and be appreciative anyways today and even if I can't fully receive it , I'm going to develop my muscle of appreciation , I'm going to develop an eye of it , like I am exercising or strengthening something .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 12:38

That is a day well spent , and a day of that well spent adds up to a to a life well-lived . It's the life of presence and just focusing on the moment and being in the now and truly , bringing it back to the only thing that we have any control over the space of ourselves and how we are engaging with the world around us in the present moment , right now in life . There's a lot happening in my world a lot of different things , and I've often had this sense , this kind of felt sense of things just spinning and spinning and spinning this last season and some of that is due to the busyness right now and pace of my schedule and some of it is due to things that I feel going on around me . And some of it is due to things that I feel going on around me , people that I care about who have things going on in their life , and again , that sense of constant motion and spiraling , and I often will just find myself taking a breath and just saying just stand , still , learn to be the eye at the center of all of it and just focus on the things that you can control right now . Surrender to the process to find grace , find appreciation , and it's so grounding to be able to be thankful that the sky is a beautiful color or notice the phase of the moon and be appreciative of whatever phase the moon is teaching us at that time . It's such a gift to pet one of the animals , one of our dogs or our cat , and feel the touch of the fur . It's such a gift to be able to use an essential oil . I did that before I hopped on today and I used an oil and had a little prayer time where I grounded my energy before I began this podcast . All of those things are these small ways of connecting with appreciation in the moment and just trying to be

Buidling a Well of Appreciation Inside Ourselves

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here now and when we do that , something else that I think comes from that that's so important for our well-being is we begin to build something of substance inside of ourselves .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 14:42

There was a line in this piece that I shared earlier . It says we can collect appreciations like pennies and dimes and tuck them into the banks of our hearts so we keep a cache of spare goodness on hand . I like to think about cultivating appreciation like we are investing in our like piggy bank of self and we are storing in our treasure chest all these jewels and gems that we can draw on when life feels a little bit colder or emptier . And we're able to have this warmth inside of us because we're cultivating a sense of joy , a sense of pleasure , a sense of grounding into gratitude , and I think that helps us build something , a substance , inside of ourselves .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 15:30

Feeling in abundance is a natural extension of appreciation . You can't be in appreciation and also be in lack . We can't be focusing on what we have and , at the same time , focusing on what we don't have . And so appreciation and gratitude and thankfulness are this way of being , like I've got this gem and this jewel and I've got this beautiful moment , oh , and I have this thing over here , and it's really focusing on filling our cups , our internal psychic and emotional and heart space . We're pouring goodness inside of ourselves and when we're doing that , we are focusing on the receiving of those things , as opposed to the energy lack where we look at what we don't have and what we're not happy about . And that feels to me like a colander , a sieve , where we are leaking energy and we're losing whatever we have put into our bank of self and , instead of being able to hold this substantial space inside of ourselves , we become more amorphous and thin and emotionally dysregulated and more likely to fall into a place of disquiet and not being grateful .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 16:47

And I want to emphasize that there's nothing wrong with feeling that way . That's not not spiritual If you feel that way . I go through those seasons and those moments all the time . It's not about not acknowledging those things . It's about the recognition that when we stay in that space too long , we're not allowing ourselves the opportunity to restock and refill our cup of goodness inside , and so we start to run on empty and then we develop an eye for looking at everything that's not going right , everything we're worrying about , everything that makes us feel bad and we have nothing substantial to draw on inside of us that helps us emotionally regulate . So when we cultivate appreciation , we are also building the skill of self-soothing , restoring up warmth , we are giving ourselves something more solid to stand on and that helps balance out some of the natural lows that do happen in life .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 17:58

Through the grief of losing my brother is I'd been doing enough inner work at that point that I knew the light would be coming on the other side and I trusted the process that , even though I felt just miserable in the moment and so bereft of heart , I felt like my heart had been ripped in two like half , my lungs were missing and I was barely breathing and kind of crawling along internally , even if I look like I was showing up in a strong way on the outside . That's how I felt inside . But I had faith in the process because I had been doing my inner work and developing my heart connection and my spiritual connection and really stockpiling something substantial inside of me that was made up of gratitude and belief and trust in the process , made up of my heart connection , my spiritual connection , my intuitive knowledge that sometimes we do wander in the dark , only to lose ourselves and eventually find our way back to the path . And we gain growth from that journey . We gain new diamonds of light when we're in the darkness . So I had all of those things to draw on , all of those things that had appreciated and value inside of me through the inner work I'd done over the years and they helped sustain me during a season that felt so dark and cold .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 19:15

So when we appreciate life , we are also appreciating and value and inner value . And when we do that and we build something inside of us through the compassionate act of appreciation , we are really learning to dance with life in such a beautiful way . That's when we really begin to embody the lesson that life is not lived in these big grand moments where something great happens . I love those moments . Love , love , love those moments . But those moments tend to be few and far between . So much of our life is lived in the in-between . It's lived in the gray area , it's lived in the amorphous area , it's lived in seasons of asking the questions and wandering in the wilderness and not knowing the answers and not finding our path . It's lived in the moments where we're in the darkness and we have to discover that darkness is magic too . It's lived and learned , and all of those moments the undane and the ordinary , and sometimes the extraordinary and in that collection of moments it's where our life is found . That is , the sacred totality of the whole of our life

Journaling Prompts and Writing Practices

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. So when we cultivate the art of appreciation , we develop a more all-encompassing idea of what appreciation is , and it allows us to redeem our moments , to redeem our life , to be grateful for everything in between .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 20:44

I love nothing more than , if I feel like I wasted a day in a bad mood or just not being my best self , I love being able to feel like I can still redeem that day through sitting down in my journal and asking myself well , what went well ? What can I appreciate ? How can I look at this and see the gift in it ? And then writing about whatever comes through , and it helps me shift my perspective and I realized that , even if I couldn't see it , something good was still happening during what might have felt like a gray day or a day , a throwaway day to me Something was still going on behind the scenes or under the surface and through like taking that moment to be still with myself and to just receive and see from a different perspective . It helps me dust off what felt like a discarded day and see it from a more bright and beautiful perspective , and so there's a few questions that I just wanted to share today that might be really fun intuitive writing prompts for your journal If you want to work on any of the concepts in this podcast , and the kinds of things that I often find myself writing about . What can I appreciate about this ?

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 22:01

Wherever you're at in life right now , what can you appreciate and that is an open-ended question you can actually appreciate something about a situation that you're in that you don't feel very appreciative of . Maybe you find something that is a silver lining in it , or maybe you just appreciate nature's constancy or a small victory , or that you made it through the day and that you're showing resilience right now . What can you appreciate ? You are the one who gets to answer that for yourself and connect with whatever feels authentic to you . Is there a hidden light in life right now ? What hidden light might there be ? What buried treasure or hidden gem might come from a season or a time that might not look beautiful on the surface , but maybe you learned resourcefulness , maybe you had to go foraging for something , maybe like a forager , somebody who might try and collect different berries or a certain kind of a truffle mushroom or something , something that's not easily available and they have to go out into the wilderness and know where to look for it . But then when they find it , it's worth it . It's like this really valuable thing because it's not readily accessible . Sometimes we have to forage for the hidden lights in our life and find the beauty and the darkness , find the light that might be shining through the cracks .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 23:24

What would my role model say about this ? I love this question . Whoever the role model is , that could be somebody that you look up to . That could be a sense of what would spirit say about this . What would the angels say ? That could be a fictional character . What would Captain Janeway say ? I used to love Star Trek Voyager when I was back in graduate school and I often used to draw on the essence of Captain Janeway's character to say like what would she say about getting through ? You know this class today ? And Captain Janeway would say that she needed more coffee and she would say sometimes you just have to , like , punch your way through something and stay with it . I loved using that as an archetype back when I was in graduate school . So whatever kind of role model or universal character or archetype that you want , what would they say about your situation ?

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 24:20

If you can't find your own wisdom , tap into somebody else's wisdom and see what they might say and then bringing it back to so what wisdom is there in this ? What wisdom can you find in this moment ? Maybe you're learning about patience . Maybe you're learning the wisdom of breath . Maybe you are simply learning the wisdom of the art of appreciation , no matter where you find yourself in life , and how to be a constant gardener of gratitude and thankfulness and allow yourself to collect that and take that into your heart and use it to live with more peace and ease and joy for the gift of life .

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright 25:02

Thank you so much for joining me in this episode today . I will be back next week .

Seasonal Magic Celebration

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We have a special episode on your Heart Magic . It's coming out , I think , the day of Halloween , so I am going to be sharing some fun pieces of writing that were inspired by this time of year and doing something a little bit magical . I don't know exactly what yet , but part of the fun of your Heart Magic is that I often will have a topic in mind and not really know how I'm going to ground that topic until I really sit down to share the show . So something that celebrates some of the seasonal magic of this time of year . In the meantime , have a beautiful week and , as always , be well , be loved , be you and be magic .

Intro/Outro Music 25:58

You've been listening to your Heart Magic with Dr Bethann Kopansky-Wright . Tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your light .