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: 0:34

Aloha everybody, welcome to your Heart Magic. This is Dr Bethann Kapansky-Wright, and Happy New Year to everybody. 2025, ready or not, here we come, and I was thinking about the new year today as I sat down to make this podcast episode and I thought about what message I wanted to bring to the podcast, and I found myself writing the following at the top of my little note sheet. It says approaching the new year with Grace and that's what I want to focus on in today's episode is how do we approach the new year with grace? But before we dive into that a little bit more fully, I'm going to share a poem that I wrote a while ago to welcome in the new year.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 1:23

I wrote it back on the first day of January in 2018. And it's just something simple that I think speaks to the energy I always feel around this time of year. It is simply called new. There is something about the word new that encourages crisp hope and our desire for better. New season, new month, new cycle, new year. We send our dreams for new up into the sky, tied with tails, a fairy, dust and starlight. Our wishes for our lives create our pathways of decision, and our dreams can only be as big or small as we envision. We cannot stop the turn of time, but we can embrace the change of these days, each step forward, a step closer to new hope, new love, new truth, new ways. There's something about turning that blank page of a new calendar year and having this curiosity of what will fill the next 365 days and that wonderful, open beginner's mind that all of us have right, we all have beginner's mind of day one in the new year, because nobody knows how to answer that question. We are beginning a new year again and of course it is a beginning according to a calendar date. We are still in the middle of our lives. Things don't just press reset just because the calendar page turns.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 3:02

But I do think there's something that is innate about a cycle of something new that speaks to us on a soul level. We are surrounded by beginnings all around us. In nature there is always the beginning of a cycle. There's the first bud of spring, the first bloom of summer, that first tinge when fall starts. The moon goes through the new moon phase and that happens once a month, twice a month, if there's two new moons, like there was back in December. And I think there's something about that internal, innate rhythm of nature. You know, we have our own sleep cycle, and we wake up and it's a new dawn, it's a new day. After every sunset, there's a new sunrise, and we start the day anew, and so, to me, there's something about the idea of a new beginning that just speaks to something inside of me, and so I always love this time of year, and I also think, though, that there can be such an emphasis on goal setting or new year, new you, or what intentions do you have for the year 2025?.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 4:17

I used to choose an intention word every year, and I don't particularly have one this year. There's just nothing that I've connected with that feels like it wants to set the tone of the year, and more and more, I have been leaning into this idea that it's okay to approach a new year with grace, and it's okay not to know. In fact, it's vital not to know if we want to stay in a malleable place and remain teachable and remain open to allowing life to unfold, and so I think part of having grace for the new year is if those things feel good to you and you are in a place where there are goals or intentions or vision boards or any of that. Oh my goodness, do that Like do what makes your heart feel delighted, do what makes sense to you, structure your life in a way that gives you what you need to keep moving forward on your path. But if you're not quite there now and you are still blinking and thinking wait, the holidays are just barely behind us. How are we already in this new calendar year and now I'm supposed to be working on self-improvement or something like that for the month of January? It's all good.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 5:28

Part of having grace for our process and grace in approaching a new year and grace around anything in our life is softening our approach to something and looking at where can we ease up, where can we give more permission, where can we allow ourselves to do a little bit less or approach things in a simpler way or to find more peace for where we are at. And I think oftentimes in our individual soul cycles we don't always sync up with what's happening in the world around us. We might not always feel festive on a festive-minded day. We might not always feel joyful and abundant on a full moon celebration day. We might not always feel like we're ready to hit the ground running on January the 1st. And part of listening to our intuition and trusting our process and learning to live at the pace of love, learning to live at the pace of our hearts, learning to trust our own heart. Magic is trusting in our own timing, and so I often think that this first month in the new year is one that is best met with curiosity and grace and giving ourselves a lot of space to let things unfold.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 6:45

It was interesting because I was in the Akashic Records earlier today and I was looking into the energy of 2025 and some of the themes that we might expect this year, and one of the things that the records was talking about for the month of January and for the year of 2025 as a whole was this idea of rewiring and remapping things and allowing ourselves to remap how we're going about doing things, how we're going about thinking about things, how our neural networks perhaps have created pathways in the mind and allowing for new pathways on a mental level and a relational level and in collective levels as well, and so there was this energy of not knowing and permission not to know and to not have to have a rush to figure it out or to be too anxious of what it's going to look like, but instead to lean into the energy of self-trust and to lean into the energy of trusting ourselves to respond appropriately in a given moment as we meet things on our journey and as we go through the adventure that's going to be the year ahead. And I thought that was such a beautiful message and and it was so grace-filled it is allowing ourselves to go through the suspension of certitude of here's how it's going to look and I have it all mapped out and instead staying very open to how things are going to unfold. And in that space we have a lot of room to do exactly what I was talking about in that poem, with envisioning dreams and taking time to maybe think about. Do you have intentions for this year? If you haven't figured out what those are yet, that's cool. You have so much time. This is such a malleable time where you're taking in information and those things might help you shape your vision of who you would like to become this year. What might you like to grow in your life? What might you like to develop within yourself or develop creatively, or develop professionally? Maybe you just want to develop more patience or finding more peace with the process.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 9:06

There's so many things that we can set as a goal and invest in within ourselves, and so we can dream and envision, while also remaining malleable and open and having that beginner's mind and allowing things to shape around us and learning how to let ourselves be shaped as well and work with that raw material. And so there's so much grace in that and there's so much space in that and there's such a beautiful invitation to step away from this old model of trying to have things figured out or having to make our lives look a certain way based on how we thought they were going to be, and instead giving grace for the process and allowing for the process to happen and receiving the process as it comes and allowing ourselves to work with that and to be changed by that and to think consciously from a heart-based place about who am I becoming and who do I want to continue to become. So that's where I find myself as we began this new year is having grace for the process and thoughtfully reflecting on who do I want to become in 2025. And I did take some time to write down some personal goals and personal intentions. Some of those are really easy for me. They've been on my mind for a while so they immediately came through when I thought about different areas in my life and what I did is I broke it up in my journal last weekend and wrote out personal growth and spiritual development and home life and relationships, professional life, creativity and writing and just kind of looked at these different areas and set down some things to point my heart compass in the right direction. But there's also a lot of things right now that I'm allowing to take shape and I'm really listening to the direction that I want to continue taking this podcast.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 11:11

If you follow this all the time, you will notice that this is the first week in January and usually I do an energy update the first week of the month and I didn't do that this month. I am looking at making a shift where I don't necessarily have a structured each week is for something on a monthly basis, but instead every episode is a combination of psychology and spirituality and storytelling and reflecting on some kind of wisdom to share with everybody and weaving all the things I always talk about anyways into more fluid episodes. And I'm allowing myself not to know, I'm allowing myself to not come on and put pressure on myself on this first week of January to say this is the direction your heart magic is going in the year of 2025. And here's what I've decided and to just allow this month to be a little bit more fluid, and there's some shifts I've been making in some of my other creative offerings and some of the things that I was doing on a regular basis that I'm looking at changing as well and giving myself permission to have grace, to take the necessary space to not know and let things rewire, let things remap, to go through that period of not having to figure out right away how is this going to look, and be a good student of receptivity and a good student of these things. I'm teaching and experience them myself in various areas in my life.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 12:50

So, wherever you're at today, as you're listening to these words, wherever you are on your journey, whatever things you're felt very complete as we were rounding out 2024. And you said I'm so glad I had this lesson, but I don't want to repeat it. I'm leaving it back in the old year, or things that you say. I wish I could leave this back in the old year, but that's just not where life is at right now and I'm kind of carrying this clunky baggage forward. I'm still trying to sort it out, and I'm still working it out and I'm ready for my fresh start, but my circumstances don't support that. Wherever you're at, it's all good. Experiment and stay open and allow for whatever shows up and not force ourselves to be somewhere other than exactly where we're at, and lean into trust, and lean into trusting our journey and trusting that we are exactly where we need to be. So, with that, I'm going to sandwich this episode today in between two poems. We had one at the beginning and there's one that I'm going to sandwich this episode today in between two poems. We had one at the beginning and there's one that I'd like to close with. This is called Better Things, and I published this in my book Transformations of the Sun 122 Passages on Finding New Life After Loss, and this was written as a New Year's reflection as well. It is called Better Things.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 14:26

I woke to the scent of Palo Santo on the breeze, the faces of my ancestors etched into my dreams. We grieved together for all that's been lost and the clip of this world's broken wings, then turned our faces towards the sun and dreamed of better things. Dreams of hope and healing where love prevails over hate. Dreams of illumination when reverence for life becomes our sacred way. Dreams of grace and tenderness where shadows are washed and transformed by the rain. Dreams of new tomorrows where we see the divine in humanity's veins. Dreams of new tomorrows where these days fall behind and we've reached for better things.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 15:18

I think it's always a very good thing to end on a note of hope. I love that last line. We've reached for better things and I think that, no matter what this new year brings, I always love the intention of leaving a year a little bit better than how I found it and keeping hope no matter what. So with that, happy New Year. Once again, happy 2025. I will be back next week with a new Heart Magic and an all-new episode on psychology, spirituality and heart wisdom. In the meantime, have a beautiful week and, as always, be well, be love, be you and be magic. Empower your light.