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: 0:33

Aloha everybody, welcome to your Heart Magic. This is Dr Bethnn Kapansky-Wright, and today we are continuing our archetype of the tarot series and we are talking about the archetype of judgment. Something that I was thinking as I was putting together a few talking points to share today is how perfectly timed this episode feels to me in terms of what's happening on the calendar right now. I feel like November into December represents a lot of judgment kind of energy. And then, for myself personally, I have a lot of energy of judgment coming up in my life right now. And for those of you who aren't familiar with the tarot or with the card judgment, it is a card in the tarot deck that represents a point in our journey that we things are coming to a completion, and Judgment is really about looking back at the journey that we've traveled and evaluating, reflecting. There is a higher kind of mindset around it that we can objectively look at mistakes made, what went wrong, what went right, how did we grow, what did we learn? What do we want to carry with us, what is part of the past? We observe ourselves, or observe some aspect of our journey, from a point of view that is rooted in deeper understanding and wisdom and integration. So the card itself kind of has an interesting name, I think. For those who might not necessarily be familiar with tarot, you hear the card judgment and that doesn't necessarily sound like a positive word. I think if we just free associated our ideas around judgment, for many of us it doesn't feel like a word that is like our life and we are sitting in a place of gazing back and understanding. That is a serious matter. And yet at the same time, there is a lightness to this card. Usually, if one pulls it in a reading or is working with it and there is some kind of an inquiry about their life journey, then the card itself means that things are close to an end or you're in that phase of integrating and understanding the pieces and figuring out. How did I grow from this? So the card itself is one that always makes me smile if I'm working with Oracle Tarot and I get some sort of card that utilizes the archetype of judgment.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 3:27

And circling back to what I said when I started this episode is that the timing of this is so beautiful because I usually see November into December as a time where we are organically working with that archetype of the tarot. We organically work with the idea of judgment as we move into the final month of the year and for many of us this time of year represents a natural time that we might start taking stock, we might reflect on what happened in 2024. What has this year brought for us? We might start to look back and have a sense of like oh my goodness, it's almost December, and how did that happen so quickly? And it's almost the holiday season. I can't believe it's going to be a new year and we have all those kinds of very human thoughts that come into our periphery. That's brought on by the end of a year. But on an inner level it's also an invitation for reflection and it's an invitation to work with the judgment archetype and to see the journey that we've traveled over the last 11, 12 months from a vantage point. So I didn't time out the series this way, where we are doing judgment in November and in December we will finish up with the archetype the world. But I think it's really beautiful that things timed out in this incredibly synchronistic way where the time of year lends itself to organically working with these energies. We don't have to reach for them, they're just there. It's happening in the umbrella of the bigger collective and the bigger chronological time right now. So with that, let's dive a little bit deeper today into the archetype of judgment and what this card means, what this energy means when it shows up in our life.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 5:27

It's interesting because in the traditional tarot the card itself is depicted where there is this angel with a trumpet and there's a bunch of light around the angel. And the angel itself in the traditional tarot isn't the one making judgment. It's really the culmination of the fool's journey, where the fool, who has traveled through all these different archetypes the magician, the fool met the high priestess, the empress, the emperor. The fool has gone through being the one on the journey who makes the choice between the lovers, who has to find inner strength as challenges come up, who encounters temptation with the devil archetype and overcoming illusion, who encounters the tower energy. What happens when the rug is pulled out from underneath? After the tower comes the star and this reemergence of hope and looking up and feeling connected to something starry and celestial and something more transpersonal and beyond the self. And so in this card it is really the angel who's just setting the stage and asking the fool to say so what do you think? What have you gained? What have you learned? You are almost at the end of this journey.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 6:46

What is the sum of all of the parts, what's the culmination and when this archetype shows up in our life? That is what we are being invited to do, and judgment might not always happen in these major, grand cycle ways. Oftentimes it is something that we will find if we are completing a big life stage, but we can experience this energy in smaller ways in our life. Sometimes we go through personal cycles where we are working with that energy of evaluation, reflection, review. We've made some decisions and we're ready to move forward and rebirth ourselves, and in a very personal way. This card might apply to us even if nothing major has happened externally, though I really am delighted that what is happening externally for all of us is that we are nearing the last month of the year and so, as I said, we're all working with this archetype right now, and for those of us who enjoy our inner work and getting into our heart wisdom, it's an invitation to work with it more mindfully, one of the ways that this is coming up for me right now.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 7:53

I had mentioned at the beginning of this podcast that this card applies to all of us and that it also delights me personally. It's just energy that's in my life right now as I'm wrapping up several major creative projects that I have been juggling since sometime in the spring. I had committed to back-to-back choreography projects for the Hawaii Children's Theater and our final performances of SpongeBob the Musical, the fall show that I did after the summer show. It's this weekend and so that is wrapping up. My book came out last week and I've had all this external energy happening for months now and really pouring my heart and soul and creativity into people and projects and these ideas around me and holding space for that. And as that winds down, I'm looking forward to more receptivity and stillness this December.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 8:49

But I'm finding myself in that phase of really evaluating what did I learn from all of this? How did this work for me? One of the things that judgment asks us to do is to do an objective review of what we've just traveled through and look at the lessons learned, the wisdom gained, and so that's what I'm doing. I am doing self-reflection and self-evaluation, and that started before the show wrapped up. We're not technically wrapped up yet, but I could feel it starting right before we opened and knowing that the minute we opened and audiences come in, that for me, as the choreographer, I release the reins and say I've taken things as far as they can go. Now I'm just an audience member and we'll see how things play out on the stage and allow the audience's feedback and their whatever they take from it to kind of be the judgment.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 9:46

What does everybody think and what do I think of the sum of all of these parts? What was wonderful for me, what was challenging, how did I grow creatively, how did I possibly grow interpersonally, and relationships and my relationship with myself? And so those are the things that I start thinking of and I'll go into this space of trying to appreciate and trying to savor and trying to just see the journey as a whole, the highs, the lows, the in-between, and when all of that is distilled, what do I think about that? That is the epitome of what judgment is, and I absolutely will take some time in my journal I've already been doing it a little bit where I will usually just do like a bullet point list of memories and experiences and feelings that I had. It is an integrative exercise that I will do when I need to kind of be like wait, so what the heck just happened and something has moved with such a fast speed that I haven't necessarily had time to take inventory.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 10:49

And so one of the ways that I clear out the mental chatter from my mind and look at what experiences have I collected, and I think of it as clearing the metaphorical, my metaphorical psyche, and that if I had this giant work table filled with all sorts of art supplies and half finished projects and things that I kind of started but maybe hadn't had time to fully finish, that is my way of looking at what is laying out on that table, noting whatever it is, clearing it off the table if I need to, wrapping it up, if something feels incomplete, making a recycle pile or an upcycle pile of things, and it opens up space. And so I will be in my journal making these little lists and bullet points and notes and just reflecting on my experiences and then reflecting on what did I learn from that. So judgment itself is a kind of mixed card of evaluation and I often think of it as the pause before action. And even if things are moving on the surface, there is a psychological pause that seems like it happens with this card, and we need that pause for our evaluation time and in order to reflect when we are going into the end of a cycle and the beginning of something new. There's this really important phase that happens before something new starts and it's not perfect. It's not like life always affords us time to fully wrap something up and harvest our experiences and say, okay, I am ready for what's next. And then automatically there it is and we've moved on to that new thing.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 12:32

There's often a lot of overlap where something's beginning even as we've moved on to that new thing. There's often a lot of overlap where something's beginning even as we're still working through that judgment evaluation phase. And life is just complex like that and there's a lot of blurring of boundaries. So, even if things are busy on the surface and you are continuing to move, there is still that pause, energy where psychologically there might be a part of you that is integrating, assimilating. Maybe you notice your dream life increasing, maybe you feel called to more reflection, maybe you feel called to go inward somehow, where we can capitalize on the energy of understanding our experiences so that we're able to integrate, release what we're ready to let go of and take the wisdom that we've learned and that idea of releasing what we're ready to let go of, what we're ready to recycle, to compost, to say I've experienced this, I don't have to take it forward with me, I've experienced this, I don't have to take it forward with me. And moving forward with the wisdom. There is a transcendent energy to that. That is also an important part of the judgment card.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 13:44

Judgment card is not when we have learned a lesson and we're automatically given a practice opportunity to try out that lesson in our real life and to integrate it even deeper. That is something that tends to happen before we've had that culmination experience. Judgment's kind of like the final call Things are closing, something new is happening and you are out of opportunities to have a do-over. It is the idea that this is what happened, this is what you've had to work with, this is where things went right, this is where things didn't. How can we forgive ourselves? How can we say, well, that happened. And if we don't love the results, how can we make peace with that? And how can we prepare our hearts and clear ourselves to move forward where we are no longer actively practicing the lessons we've just learned, but truly exploring new territory of the heart and psyche and mind and soul? And that doesn't mean that we won't have opportunities to continue to apply the growth and apply the wisdom gained.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 14:54

But oftentimes judgment signifies the ending of something, and so when we move into a new cycle, we're going to start having new soul lessons, new themes that are coming up, new things that we are working with, new materials that will be on our metaphorical workspace, where we are being encouraged to create something new. And so there is again this ending idea behind it, this culmination of efforts and this transcendent energy to the archetype, and one of the best ways that I have to conceptualize this is, a couple years ago, one of the Akashic magic messages for the month of. I want to say it was like the fall of 2023. It might've been August or September's message that year. It was a while back so I don't perfectly recall.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 15:44

But I remember choosing the photo to go with the message, as I was preparing the blog post and the newsletter, and I chose a photo of this huge spiraling staircase structure where there was people standing at the top looking down. And I chose a photo of this huge spiraling staircase structure where there was people standing at the top looking down. And I chose that to go with the Akashic Monthly message, because the records had called that month this upward spiral repeating things from the past, having things that were an echo of the past come up, but that if we looked carefully we would realize that we weren't repeating something from the past, that things weren't coming full circle, in a way that we were stuck in the same old cycle, that they were moving on this upward spiral where we were encouraged to look at our lives from a higher vantage point and if something had come back around to us to see our growth, to realize that we were no longer looking at that same situation or energy or circumstances from the same perspective that we had when we originally encountered it, that we had had growth and wisdom and learning and were on that picture of that staircase, standing at something from a higher vantage point and looking down and seeing it differently. So we were able to have a deeper sense of wisdom and understanding from that vantage point, and that, to me, is a beautiful way to think about the idea of finding transcendent perspective. It is seeing something that has come full circle in our life and we are afforded the experience to see it from this perspective of more wisdom and learning and we see things differently. There is often an objective point of view to it. When we are in our wisdom, we are not in the wound of something. We've released ourselves from some of the painful attachments that we had. Maybe we've done a lot of raw process work around it and we are able to see what we have gained from that experience. And so judgment is that metaphorical staircase of standing in that upward spiral and looking down at something that we've passed through and we're able to see it from a higher lens.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 18:01

The last thing that I wanted to share about judgment today that is such an important idea of this card is it also has this huge awakening rebirth energy to it. Judgment really represents the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth, and the emphasis is on the rebirth. It is on that resurrection type energy of shedding and saying goodbye to an old self, an old cycle, an old year that we're about to wrap up and being prepared to resurrect into a new space and go through that rebirth experience and to move into new ventures and new territory. And so that rebirth energy is a beautiful emphasis of this archetype, and there are other archetypes in the tarot that examine different parts of that cycle. Death is the big one that's coming to mind right now, and death being the necessary shedding of self before we go through the rebirth process. And so a lot of times when we pull that card, it will be an invitation to let go, to release, to grieve, and we understand it in the context of knowing that rebirth is coming. But typically, if we are working with that archetype, we are in the middle of the loss or letting go and we might still be in the middle of some of that raw process work. Judgment would suggest that we've done a lot of that and that we are ready to step into whatever is next. There is a huge forgiveness energy and acceptance energy, self-forgiveness, self-acceptance, self-compassion energy around this card. It is being able to look at what happened through the eyes of love, through the eyes of wisdom and the higher self, and we've somehow found a way to make peace with it. And so we are ready to step forward and to reinvent and to rebirth and to step into something new and say I am ready for this next phase, I'm ready for these new lessons. And again, this is not necessarily a linear thing where we are afforded an opportunity to do that Years ago when I moved to Kauai, it's probably the closest thing I have in my life that there was such a definitive cutting off point to something leaving Alaska and leaving my long-term home, closing a practice, alaska and leaving my long-term home, closing a practice.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 20:34

Coming to the island, physically packing up a home, getting rid of a lot of stuff, moving things, selling the home. I think the house closed like a day or two after we left. Everything was timed out and kind of universally orchestrated in this way that there was all these completions and ending, and I remember going through it thinking you will likely never experience something like this again. I remember my dad drove my husband and I to the airport and our animals were in a carrier case and we were going down Northern Lights Boulevard and I thought this is it. This is the last time that you will ever be this incarnation of self, and might be the last time you drive down Northern Lights Boulevard.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 21:17

I've returned to the state, I think, one time since, and likely went down that road, but I didn't know at the time. Would I go back? If so, how often? And if I go back, I will be changed. I will not be the same Bethann, who's been a resident here.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 21:32

And so there was this very bizarre, surreal energy to it. It was in July, so it was still that midnight sun where it was light out at like 1030, 11 o'clock at night and we are driving down and it was like passing through this threshold with this awareness that I was going into this absolute blank page energy. I've spoken about that and written about it quite a bit where I've talked about when I arrived in Kauai. It was this blank page energy and it was beautiful and bizarre and very disorienting and a very unique time in my life, though I did find, as time went on, that things that I had still been working on, not necessarily physically, but in terms of my inner work, in terms of my inner landscape of self.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 22:22

There was some grief I still had to do for my brother, some life themes that were still in the middle of a cycle, but a lot of the externals had wrapped up. And that's a very rare occurrence. Usually we are not afforded that kind of an extreme to say goodbye to something and do mindful release work, and sometimes we have an extreme like that but we don't have the time and thought and energy to fully process something. So that's a rarity. I think that's more of an exception than the norm. Usually.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 22:53

The norm is is that the externals of our life might not change quite that dramatically and yet we are still invited to find that archetype of judgment and rebirth and releasing and shedding and incarnating into a new version of ourselves and reinventing and integrating and moving forward with the wisdom learned, letting go of what doesn't serve. Usually that happens more humbly and it happens more quietly and it is just as meaningful and just as beautiful as those bigger moments where we see our external circumstances reflect the changes that are happening in our life. So even if there's nothing huge happening in your life right now, your sense of your inner shifts and your inner seasons, your settings and releasings and growing and whatever's happening in your inner landscape and your soul work is just as significant and just as meaningful. We don't always need that external representation to tell us I've changed, something's changed and I am ready to awaken and rebirth myself into a new form. So I love this card.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 24:04

I could talk about judgment probably for a whole other podcast or a couple of them. There's just so much good energy around this card and it's an archetype that I love working with, but we are out of time for today, so I will simply say instead thank you so much for joining me. I will be back next week with a new your Heart Magic episode. It is the beginning of a new month, so we will be doing an energy update for the month of December and looking at so we will be doing an energy update for the month of December and looking at what the Akashic records have to say about the month ahead and the moon cycles and any other relevant energy that wants to come through and share itself with us. In the meantime, have a beautiful week. Happy Thanksgiving to you For those who might be catching this on Thanksgiving Day or the day after. Here's to the start of the holiday season and, as always, be well, be love, be you and be magic.

Intro/Outro Music: 25:06

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