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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. Author, psychologist and spiritual educator.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 0:32

Aloha everybody. Welcome to your Heart Magic. This is Dr Bethann Kapansky-Wright and I wanted to talk today about the topic of what it is to go through a transformation process and to find ourself in that space in between where we are no longer who we once were. We have left something behind, we have shed an old identity. We've perhaps been through the ending of a relationship, we have maybe been through a metaphorical death of something. We might have been through something that created a real loss in our life and a physical loss of somebody or a physical loss of something, and we are trying to go through a space where we are reinventing ourselves and needing to create something new and needing to become something new. We are stepping into a new version of self or some kind of new reality or forming our life in a new and different way, and this can manifest in so many different ways. Like I said, this could happen through relationships, various kinds of losses. This can be identity and how we understand ourselves and how we understand who we are and what we're about in this world. This can be brought on by a health crisis, a spiritual crisis, some other form of crisis in our life. There's not any one way that personal transformation shows up for us. That's what makes it so personal. There are many ways it shows up for us and there's many times that we will go through this metamorphosis process in our life and that metaphorical process of being the caterpillar and going into the cocoon and doing all the incubation and the shedding and the unlayering and then beating our wings with force to try and get out of the cocoon and break open so that we can become the beautiful butterfly.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 2:37

I think it's often a misconception that we are only going to go through that kind of profound change once. I've found that it's something that can happen in many ways and many different levels of intensity throughout the course of our personal development. And oftentimes, I think what's not talked about as much is that in between space, when we are no longer the caterpillar, we are absolutely not the butterfly, and we're in that void space and in that space of limbo where we feel like we are waiting for ourselves, are waiting to receive a vision or we haven't quite carved out the path yet. But we also know, for whatever reason, we can't go back to who we were or how things were. So we're in this forest, no man's land. We're in this wilderness of change and wilderness of transformation and we're trying to find our way through, and oftentimes we're asked to see in the dark and to sense our way through this forest of self, this forest of transformation, without much of a map to guide us through, because we don't know what we don't know right, so we do not know how it's going to look on the other side.

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We often don't have a clear path for how to get there and it's a psychologically uncomfortable space that usually creates a lot of cognitive dissonance for ourselves, because our sense of identity can become very loose and how we were understanding ourselves and thinking about our life and thinking about the structures and the ideas and cognitions and constructs that held our identity and held our life in place. Something shifted in those and we haven't had the time to build the new way of doing things or the new way of being. Sometimes, if you're going through a physical process of relocation or a physical ending of a relationship or something that has required a huge external manifestation of change in your life, you might not have that new identity established, or you might be in the middle of it and don't have both feet firmly planted on the other side, and so that cognitive dissonance is still identifying with how things were, and oftentimes our brain takes a while to rewire itself and rewire the neural networks in it. So our brain has not quite got the memo that reality as we knew it has radically shifted and it's still trying to make sense of what happened and go through that rewiring process. And we don't have a firm sense of who we're becoming or what it's going to look like, and so we no longer identify with how things were, though we keep feeling drawn back into it and we don't have a firm sense, where it's gelled, of what or who or how we're going to be. And so that cognitive dissonance of wait, that's not who I am, but that reality doesn't exist for me anymore, I don't know where I'm going can create what can feel like such a big existential crisis of self when we're in that in-between space.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 5:47

So it's a value to better understand what is the space in between and how can we learn to deepen our awareness of it so when we find ourselves in that space we're able to say, oh, I'm in the in-between right now, I'm caught between worlds, and it feels uncomfortable. Because it is uncomfortable, and that's okay, it's supposed to feel uncomfortable. It's because I don't know and everything in me is shifting and changing, and so I don't quite feel anchored right now and I'm having a hard time knowing what to ground to. And all of these feelings are okay. Sometimes just those gems of knowledge can be enough to help us take a deep breath and find peace with where we're at, instead of going down this rabbit hole of what's wrong with me and I feel like I'm falling apart and maybe projecting or making an interpretation of what's going on with us that might not be entirely accurate. It might just be that we are mid-transformation, so we don't have the vocabulary to fully describe what we're feeling, or we don't have the right language to put to what's going on. And our soul knows we're just fine. Our inner self and our heart and our higher self and our spiritual guides and all of that. They are like oh, you're on the right track. This is okay that you feel this way. You are doing great, trusting in the dark and learning to become something more than you were before. And so when we can know and identify that that process is happening with us, it allows us to relax that mental grip of needing to know or trying to figure it out or over-interpret something before it's time and instead learn the value of surrendering and relaxing into it.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 7:33

I want to share a poem that I wrote. This is in my book Transformations of the Sun and it's called In Between, and I wrote this in the spring of 2017. It was such an interesting time in my life because I was still living in Anchorage, alaska, at the time and I had about three months left, I think, in my brick and mortar practice back up there and in my Alaska life, basically, and had plans to come to the island of Kauai and move there permanently in July of 2017. And that's exactly what happened. So the tickets had been bought, everything was set in motion, the house was going to be going up on the market in April.

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I had been slowly getting rid of things and donating and starting to go through this huge shedding process, and that had happened from the previous summer into that year, and I was very aware that I was in this no man's land and I was in limbo and that it was such a bizarre feeling because I was looking around at my life as I knew it and had known it for quite a while, and it was still so tangible. Right, I was still living there, I could have put the brakes on it at any time, which would have felt like such a betrayal to my heart and my soul. So I couldn't really have. But I knew that I have control over this. I'm choosing this change, and yet to think about this won't exist for me. In six months I'm going to be someplace totally different me. In six months, I'm going to be someplace totally different and I'm stepping into this brand new reality. And I said I want to go reinvent myself. That was one of my intentions for this whole move and this whole manifestation and reinvention of self, and it was such a strange space to be. And so I wrote this little poem as a reflection on that time back then.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 9:24

I wrote this little poem as a reflection on that time back then. In between, no longer that person I used to be, not quite the one I'm stepping into. I find myself somewhere in between, broken but not irreparably damaged. I slowly unwrap, unlace, unbind. The more I let go, the more I heal, and the more I heal, the more I find Myself free to grieve what was lost, what's been found, who I was, who I'll be. The new moon peers out against her own darkness, dance of shadow, dance of light. I stare at her block and transition like she, then let myself free fall into my own change, unforming, reforming, transforming and then again until my feet find new ground with new pieces of me.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 10:19

I've spoken of my story so much on this podcast. So most of you know that I had lost my brother the previous winter, in the winter of 2016. And that kind of plunged me into a space of being between worlds. It was not a choice that I made. Obviously, moving to Kauai was a choice that I made and there was really a distinct difference between those experiences. Like life had made this choice for me. Brent's soul had made this choice for me and his own individual soul, timing and the health issue. He had a blood clot that had broken off and went straight to his brain and so his death was instantaneous and it was surprising and understandably very tragic and just put such a bolt of lightning into my timeline at that time and kind of severed this Beth Ann that I had been understanding myself as go into for this podcast episode.

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But even before that happened, I've been having what I thought of as these like soul rumblings that said change was coming. I just didn't expect it to be changed in that form. But that's oftentimes what happens with change we never expect those things. And so I felt like this part of myself had just been ripped from me, and this part of my life had just been absolutely ripped from me. And part of what came from that time period in my life was this eventual choice to say I want to live braver and bigger and I can't be the Beth Ann that I've been living in this space and those soul rumblings that I had had, where I'd already been feeling that, got even louder.

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And what emerged from that was this whole idea of moving and recreating and reinventing and understanding myself in a new way. And I had such a need and me to also better meet my more mystic minded self and understand my intuitive gifts and develop my spirituality and to take a spiritual journey that I wasn't able to take in the confines of my old life. I needed to loosen those constraints and understand myself in a completely different way, and so a year later, I found myself in such a different space because I'd been in transformation energy for, like the past year, ever since losing Brent, everything had loosened up. Talk about a loosening of identity and a scrambling of neural networks and having to see myself in a new way and having to see my life in a new way and having my brain keep going back to this reality, where he was alive, and reorienting myself to that's not where things are now. He's in spirit form and going through this really hard process of understanding physical death and what that meant and what it meant spiritually, but also what it meant humanly.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 13:20

So there was a lot of hard and rich and deep lessons in that time, lessons of shadow and lessons of light, and all of that amalgamized into this decision to really give myself a chance to make a break from who I was and start over. So when I wrote that poem, things had already been in the process of change and I'd already been in that no man's land for a while, but I hadn't made the jump yet, I hadn't come over here. So I had this psychological awareness that I didn't feel like myself and I felt very displaced from my life at the time. And I don't know that you would have known it if you knew me back then or looked at the outside of my life, and I was still doing some of the things I'd always done, but I really felt like I lost my place in line is what I called it.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 14:13

Like I had to go take this grief and death journey in the immediate months after Brent's passing and I disconnected from a lot of social circles and disconnected from things that I'd been doing and took it down to the bare basics of just going to work and being with my family and only staying in touch with maybe a few people I was very close to but just really had to take a step back from the rest of it. And when I returned to it I realized like whatever space I had been holding in those spaces, like I no longer fit it. You know, life had gone on and I hadn't been part of some things and even though I was welcomed back in, I could not fit into that line again. I couldn't fit into the old mold of how I understood myself. I couldn't fit into who I once was. And all of that again supported this decision that it was time to go and I had no idea what was waiting on the other side. I didn't know what I was looking for, I didn't know what I was being invited into. I wasn't quite fully certain of why this part in me said like you have to go do this thing, and why it felt so vital and so urgent to me and what was trying to come out and to manifest in the world and in my awareness. And so it was a really disorienting time and I'm grateful for my career path because I at least had the psychological tools to have that introspection and have that self-reflection. I had the gift of words and poetry to start to scrapbook myself together and use my words to at least write about my experience.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 15:56

And when I look back on that time and I look back on so many pieces of writing of Transformations of the Sun, you know that title just says everything. It's a book about personal transformation and what it is to be in the transformation and to be losing myself and feeling displaced from my life and then finding myself. And it's like I would find these pieces, something that felt like oh okay, this is me, maybe I'm this like. Maybe I'm supposed to be a poet now. Maybe I'm supposed to be an Akashic Records reader. Maybe I'm supposed to identify as a mystic. Maybe I'm supposed to like de-identify as a psychologist and re-identify as something else. Maybe I'm supposed to be this. And there was such a feel in this book of like are you my mother? Are you my mother? Is this it, is this what it is?

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 16:48

And that story continued into the following book, the third part of that trilogy, revelations of the Sky, where I was still looking, and when I look back on that arc of that time in my life and that transformation, I can really see that I was just taking these pieces of self like soul retrieval, retrieving these bits and pieces that resonated with me, that helped me piece together a bigger sense of my identity and more fully understanding myself as both a human and a soul and having a broader scope of language for my spirituality, developing my intuition, becoming more comfortable with that, becoming more comfortable being seen for that, reclaiming the part of me that was like well, of course you're still a psychologist. You never, ever left that behind. You could not be that if you tried to. It's been in my bones since I was 20 years old or whatever, and declared at my major back in school and that was 27 years ago. It's just been such an integral part of who I am and so all of that was going on for me.

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And when we talk about this idea that it's psychologically uncomfortable to go through this process. I share my experience with you, hoping that maybe it sparks something in you and perhaps helps shine a light on the idea that very valuable alchemy is happening when we're in that in-between space and that part where we are understanding who we no longer are and why it doesn't fit for us right. There's some psychological work to do with that and some insight to be have. How did I change? Why is it that these spaces that once held me, this identity that held me, maybe a relationship held me, these things that created a container in my life, like, why don't they fit? We have to be able to accept that something's not quite right and understand what the hell happened. And how did I get to where I am now? Even if something was taken from us and we weren't anticipating an ending, and the ending happened from something that was very sudden, we still have to make sense of that ending in our life.

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Then there's the process of thinking about well, what direction do I want to go if I'm being either forced to reinvent myself or I'm choosing to reinvent myself and I know that I can't go back and I need to go forward? What does forward look like is not something that we know right away. It's not something that we usually have an immediate vision for. It can take us weeks, it can take us months, it could take several years or longer to find that full vision. It doesn't mean we won't receive parts of the vision if it's taking longer than a few months, but it might mean that it takes a really long time to find that full reinvention, that full recreation process, and that we might feel in limbo for quite a while.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 19:48

So that whole piece of taking responsibility for the vision and thinking about what do I want, and then there's a whole piece there about trust and just surrendering that we don't know what we're becoming, we don't know where we're going, and learning to be okay with that psychological discomfort and learning how not to force something but to allow for it. That's a whole thing and a whole lesson. And then as we build that bridge and we figure out the direction we want to go and we learn to cross that bridge and start living and moving on the other side of it. That feels new and foreign as well and it takes a while to get our firm footing in that. So this can be a lengthy process, but that in-between stage where we are re-identifying and understanding what didn't work and how we want things to be different. There's so much value in that and there's so much value in learning to trust our intuition, to listen to our heart, to trust the process and to check in with ourselves and say, well, I think I've done as much as I can with where I'm at right now and so I'm going to have to take a deep breath and I'm going to have to trust and breath and I'm going to have to trust and we learn to find anchors in that space. We might not feel completely grounded in a core vision of self if that's what we're searching but we learn to take refuge and friendships that might feel connected, people that might feel familiar. We might learn to form a new friendship or a new relationship. We might reach out for help to somebody who could be a trusted guide and help us make sense of what's happening with us emotionally. We might appreciate the comfort of books and our favorite mug of tea or coffee or something like that, and an animal companion and the constancy of nature. We learn to find these things that anchor us and that give us a sense of staying grounded and staying connected to our hearts, even when we're in this massive amount of limbo, so there's so much value and so much beauty in that space, and many of us might relate to that.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 22:03

As we move through January of 2025 and move into this new year, the Akashic Records talked about this being a year where we are actively rewiring our neural networks, we are remapping how we're doing things and we are remapping peace. That's what they call this year, this year of remapping peace and peace being, I think, applicable in many ways. But I look at that is finding our own path of peace and our path of authenticity, and finding our path in this time of great trouble and great turmoil, where we can stay connected to our hearts and connected to our core self and connected to our values and our spiritual connection and connected to our sense of purpose. And so we are remapping that path of peace. We are relearning what that looks like for us, and so when we're in that process, we're in the in-between, we're not going back to how things were. We are moving forward into something new.

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Some of what was will still hold true, some of it won't hold true at all, and some of what is to be, we don't know. It hasn't happened yet, and so we're doing this collective surrender of just taking a breath and trusting and trying to stay connected to our hearts and connected to the light within, and trusting that if we can come back to that space, even when we can't see where we're going, that light will guide us and it will help see us through. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I will be back next week with a new topic on psychology, spirituality and heart wisdom. In the meantime, have an amazing week and, as always, be well, be love, be you and be magic.

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