Intro/Outro : 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. Author, psychologist and spiritual educator.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 0:32

Aloha everybody.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 0:33

Welcome to your Heart Magic. This is Dr Bethann Kapansky-Wright, and today we are talking about how to live at a more self-loving pace, a self-honoring pace, and why that's important right now. As I sat down to make this today, I was thinking about the heaviness of the world at this time and so many of the things that many of us are reading in the headlines right now and seeing as tragedies going on around us, and that's happening globally. It's happening nationally for many of us, in the different places we live. It is happening in our communities. I can think of so many things this week that I read and it just gripped my heart and broke my heart and I had that experience that I think so many of us might be having, where I just feel like utterly overwhelmed by the challenges that we face as a collective and that we're facing as humanity.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 1:43

And I think many of us have been sitting with the idea for a while now that when we fall into that place of helpless, hopeless, what's the point of any of it? I can't do anything to change this, it's not an effective place to be, and then we really run the risk of having our own mental well-being and our mental health start to topple into depression and anxiety and dysregulation. And then there's many of us, though, that also feel like we want to be conscientious. If you're listening to this podcast, you probably want to be conscientious. You want to show up in a way where you lead with love and you lead with light and you move yourself and move your energy in an effective way right now. And so it keeps bringing us back to this question of how can I work with this and what can we do, and I think that question is one that we're going to be living the answers of for a really long time. That is a primary question right now for the hearts of humanity, like how do we live open hearted right now, as our world is going through so many extreme challenges? And so bringing it back to the space of what we can control, which is ourself, and bringing it back to the idea that part of our heart magic and part of our heart wisdom is really looking at what am I able to work with when the world around me and things are going on and I have no control over them? What are things right now that I am able to tangibly work with and make choices around? And so I think, when it comes to our creativity and our perspective and working with our energy and our thought life, and how we choose to show up in the world and how we choose to develop a framework to see the world right now, our spiritual connection, keeping ourselves grounded, cultivating self knowledge so we feel like we are able to plug into the places that speak to us.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 3:58

So much of that comes back to learning to live at the pace of the self and learning to live at the pace of the self and learning to live at the pace of love, because when we are dialed into who we are and we are dialed into our authenticity, it allows us to feel our feelings and work with whatever's coming up, but to more effectively work with the idea of how do I feel called to move my energy around this? Do I feel called to pray? Is there anything I can do? Am I going to ascribe meaning to something? Because I might not be able to change X that's happening over here, but I know that I can make a tangible difference in this other thing over here. And when I'm making a tangible difference, I know that I'm in service to the light and that continues to be a perpetuation of hope in this world.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 4:54

Those are the kinds of things, when we are in a space of self-knowledge, that we are more able to effectively work with. And I think part of being in that space of self-knowledge and this idea of living at a self-honoring pace and living at the pace of self-love, is knowing ourselves and becoming an expert on ourselves, and this is something that I talk a lot about on your Heart Magic. One thing that each of us can do better than anybody else in the world is learn to cultivate such a rich relationship with ourselves that we become an expert on who we are and we take upon the act of continually mapping out and charting out who we are as a being and a soul and an evolving individual on our path and relationship to the world around us. We take that upon ourselves and say this is part of my life's work is to continually gauge in the act of self-discovery and to be a seeker of the universes of wisdom and treasures of richness that exist within me. So all of those ideas are umbrellaed under this idea of learning to become these experts on ourself, and as we do that, we are able to live at a more self-honoring pace. And I want to share a passage today that I wrote about this topic from Small Pearls, big Wisdom. It is called To Live at the Pace of Love, and then talk about a few more ideas on how we can take that idea and apply it to life right now.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 6:34

To live at the pace of love, what does it mean? To live at a self-honoring pace? I've been exploring that question for years and I've come to see that living at a self-honoring pace is deeply tied to trusting our intuitive self and our experience. We can't be self-honoring if we constantly judge, doubt, criticize or feel wrong about our way of being in the world. Being self-honoring means being self-loving and learning to live at the pace of love by listening to our hearts, trusting our internal rhythms and validating our experience of self, even when others and the collective voices of society don't understand. The Way of the Heart is all about finding our answers through the act of living and staying open to what life brings us. Learning to live at the pace of self-love reminds us that we don't have all the answers, but we can stay open to the process of finding out and learn to trust deeply in our inner voice.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 7:40

Start by listening to your soul cycles, ride the wave of energy and take inspired action when you feel nudged, when you feel called. Step out of this dream of life and rest for a bit. Allow yourself space to process, grapple and think. Seek out wisdom when it speaks to you, reflect on your wants and needs, know you don't have all the answers and be relieved. You don't have to have all the answers. You just have to keep showing up for yourself and trying to live a self-honoring path. Become an expert on you, your contradictions and expansions, your ebbs and flows, your shifts and growth. Refuse to give up on creating a life that profoundly honors the truth of your soul. This is what it means to live at the pace of self-love.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 8:38

I was thinking as I was reading this passage that, first of all, I think I wrote in here I've been exploring this question for a long time and that is true. It's something that I've really taken to heart and I've used this phrase for a while of what does it mean to live at the pace of love? And I had that written down in my journal from the year 2014 or 2015. I found it a while back and that has been a jumping off point for so many things that I've written since then. And if I didn't value that so much, I don't know that I ever would have found the courage to take my intuitive journey and to take my spiritual journey and to become the Bethann that's sitting here talking now and, you know, making this podcast recording.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 9:29

Finding the courage to share heart wisdom and to believe that people care about heart wisdom and learning how to listen to our hearts and learning how to lead in love, believing that there are people out there who care about spirituality and care about things like energy and the Akashic records. And how do we take psychology and spirituality and creativity and blend those together and develop a personal path of authenticity and self-compassion, self-acceptance and grace? And how can those things help us move ourselves in the world in a way that we feel that we are shining effectively and embodying our purpose? For myself, all of those things and so much of what I teach on is because I work a lot with the things that I teach and so I've learned on my path that there was nobody else that could come along and tell me about me except for me. It's been so helpful over the years to seek out wise teachers and to seek out mentors and to seek out intuitive readings from individuals that are gifted in that.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 10:47

I've definitely sought out various sources of knowledge and take the best of those things and put them together like a scrapbook, a collage of learning more about myself, but ultimately nobody can say this is who you are, this is how you're called to serve and make you believe it, make you take that self-knowledge into yourself in a way that you integrate it and apply it. The beautiful thing about self-discovery and self-knowledge is that somebody can spark an idea in us. Knowledge is that somebody can spark an idea in us. They can give us the ingredients and we can take it and run with it and make it into something beautiful, but we are ultimately the ones who work with that material inside of ourselves, who have to trust this process of really sitting with it and working with it like a piece of clay or something like that, and sculpting it into different shapes, and learning about the raw ingredients and materials we are working with and ultimately develop something from that in a way that we have claimed ownership over in some form, where we have owned our story or owned an aspect of who we are Even owning. The right to say I don't know, I'm figuring it out right now can come from a place of self-knowledge, when we say it, from an empowered space, and when we are able to come into that self-directed space inside of ourselves, it allows us to begin to live life from the inside out. So, instead of always allowing the world to inform us of who we are, we've really contemplated those messages and values and beliefs and the things we've internalized that we think we know about ourselves, and gone through that examination process, and that's not something that's a one-time deal.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 12:45

I think for many people, when they go through what we might call a spiritual awakening, a psychological crisis of self that leads to some kind of an awakening process, there is often a mass sifting that can go on, where somebody might shake off a lot of conditioning of who they thought they were and really go through a radical transformation and come to a space of saying this is who I am now. I know I certainly went through that back in the year 2010, 2011, 2012. I've talked about this before, and those were these years that I went through a really profound shift in my life and divorce had happened and a lot of questioning of self and values, and I came out the other side of it, and that's really when I not only started walking the path of the heart and truly understanding and thinking about this idea that the heart holds an intelligence all of its own, but it's when so many of my intuitive gifts and spiritual gifts started opening up in a way that I understood oh, this is something more, this is next level stuff. And I don't understand what this is. I'm just at the cusp of it, but I know I need to move towards this calling inside of me and I know I need to follow it, because there's something in this that feels so deeply resonant with myself I can't turn away from it. And so sometimes we do have these processes that happen and a lot of change happens all at once and we feel utterly transformed.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 14:23

But I've often found that the true path of self-knowledge, even when we've gone through that kind of a process, requires a lot of ongoing self-examination and self-contemplation. And something that I wrote down today to share with everybody is that part of what we need to live at a self-honoring pace is to develop a deep relationship with self-trust, and the only way that we develop a relationship with trusting ourselves and having self-trust is being willing to go through an ongoing examination process. Ongoing examination process and what that looks like is the ability to sit down in our journal or go out to nature or spend some time contemplating and meditating and asking ourselves questions. Why does this feel so important to me? Why am I reacting this way? Am I making this choice because I value this and this is coming from something authentic inside of me? Am I making this choice because I'm trying to live up to something somebody else wants me to be?

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 15:29

When we come to places in our life where something feels kind of sticky to us, where we can't quite figure out what our motivation is, or we start to feel lost on the path or something feels wrong, maybe we have a feeling inside of us that something is off or something doesn't feel good, or we notice that our heart feels heavy about something, or we have a pit in our stomach about a decision we're trying to make. There's so many different small cues that let us know hey, take a step back and reflect on this. What is this about for me? Where is this coming from? What is this feeling trying to tell me there's no right or wrong way to do self-examination. I'm such a big fan of the journal and oracle cards and other contemplation tools working with dreams and working with the symbolism and dreams. There's just so many fun ways that we can develop a really rich and juicy relationship with ourself. I love listening to podcasts or reading a great book and taking notes on what resonated with me and then thinking about like, why does this resonate with me, what is it and what this person said in this piece of wisdom that's sparking something inside of me and how can I take that and make it my own in a bigger way? All of those things are self-examination work, and when we do that and we continually create space to engage in the act of self-examination, we embark on self-discovery and we start to gain more knowledge into who we are. And as we gain knowledge, we learn to trust our experience of self. We learn to trust our inner seasons better.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 17:14

For example, I know that if I am going through a creative dry spell where I am not feeling particularly inspired to write about anything or to speak about anything, that it's probably a time for me to take a step back and to take some rest. It might just mean I'm tired or worn down. It might mean that I'm in a winter season and that I am gathering energy internally and that it's not a time to burst out of the gate running with all these ideas, but it's a time to slow myself down and allow whatever content I'm writing or sharing to perhaps reflect that slowing. I might take that and do a little bit of self-examination work and ask myself is this just a slowing season? Am I tired out? Why am I tired out? Does my tiredness make sense right now? And if it doesn't make sense, what might it be telling me? Where might it be coming from? All of those things are how I might work with a simple reflection on noticing where I'm at and tuning into my inner soul cycle and reflecting on what is this showing me right now? And so, again, this is very fluid work.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 18:34

When we talk about the path of self-discovery, I like to think of it as if we were charting a map of self or drawing a landscape of these beautiful lands inside of us, and each time we go inward and we reflect, we learn something new about that landscape. Maybe we see that something shifted, maybe we notice that something has revealed itself and our internal imagery feels different than it does before. I'm a very visual person, so your process is very likely different than mine, but when I say, internal imagery for me, I often imagine that I'm walking into the woods of myself or traveling through some land, adventuring through some land, some part of nature, traveling through some land, adventuring through some land, some part of nature. And I might ask myself the question how do I feel right now? Do I see myself on a snowy mountaintop? Do I feel like I'm in the desert and the hot sun is beating down and I can't get out of it? Do I feel like I'm in an underground cavern and I'm traveling through some rite of passage of self? What images come up when I think about my internal experience? And so all of those ways are things that help me to have a sense of where I'm at.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 19:51

So we develop self-trust through self-contemplation, self-discovery and taking the time to go within. And as we develop that self-trust, it allows us to become self-directed, and that's an important part of living at a self-honoring space. And I need to be clear self-honoring and self-directed it's not selfish. That's a completely different thing. Selfishness is about living a path that disregards others and there's a lack of awareness for anything or anyone oftentimes anybody's feeling or anything going on in the world. We don't think about our impact that we have on the spaces we occupy. We don't think about the impact that we have perhaps on when I talk about the spaces we occupy, on the environment around us or the rooms that we might walk into, where we're just being around people. We just don't think about things like that. It's very self and I in a way that isn't about moving our light and working with our heart, wisdom, but that tends to be more about self-indulgence and self-gratification. So that's a different thing entirely.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 21:04

Being self-directed, being self-honoring, being self-loving, is just learning to turn our attention inward so we are able to stay on top of where we're at and have a well-ordered heart. And when we are able to do that, it allows us to move our energy more effectively, so that when we do feel called to show up in the spaces around us, we feel like we're doing it with more intentionality, we feel like we're doing it with more confidence, we feel more empowered to move our energy and to know that it feels right for us to step in this direction, to perhaps help out in this way, to speak up over here, and maybe that self knowledge and self direction also helps us know when it's not right to do so and we need to take a break and step out of the stream of life for a while. When I think about right now, the multitude of challenges in our world and how do we pace ourselves so we're able to sustain an open heart and sustain our energy, to me it seems vitally important that we are really able to grab onto the idea of being self-directed and having spaces where we slow down and self-focus on what's going on inside of us so we're able to honor our pace and move our energy in a way that is going to keep our flame of light and our purpose that we're serving lit and not burn ourselves out because we're overdoing or becoming disengaged or becoming jaded or having total empath, highly sensitive overload because we're doom scrolling on social media or something like that. So just being able to come back and ask what do I need right now? I wrote down these three C's today that I wanted to make sure that I shared.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 23:02

We talked about contemplation, but the other two were curiosity and creativity, and when we are looking at living at a self-honoring pace, I think curiosity is so vital to that, because being our own expert is not about knowing everything about ourself. That goes against, I think, the eternal nature of the soul and this idea that if we have a universe inside of ourselves and we have this cosmic connection and a spiritual connection and this beautiful connection to the energetic realms, when we talk about the idea that, yes, we might be here in the vehicle of our bodies and our individuality on this human journey, but that we're also interconnected and we're connected to all things. And so that means we don't know everything, and that was a really important piece that I talked about in the passage I read there's so much that we don't know. What a relief we don't have to hold all those things, we don't have to hold all the knowledge. We can stay open, we can stay curious.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 24:11

We can develop the expertise that we develop within ourselves about ourselves by being curious, by asking ourselves questions, by engaging in the act of self-reflection, when we are working through something in ourselves and trying to figure out why do I feel this way and where is this coming from and what's my best path forward. There's curiosity in that process, and curiosity keeps us engaged, it keeps us interested, it allows for new information, it allows for new discovery, and then that brings in the creative part of the process, that it allows us to see ourselves as creative beings who do go through transformation and do go through metamorphosis and constantly want to create. The soul wants to create. Our soul wants to create in as many ways as it can, and creativity is an ongoing process. It's never something that's totally finished. It's a story that's unfolding, a beautiful soul collage and a piece of art that we continue to add to, and so these ideas of being fluid and working with ourselves in a way that allows for the unfolding of the art that is each of us are so vital to the concept of being self-loving and being self-hon, honoring and learning to live in accordance with the art that is each one of ourselves.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 25:45

With that, we will wrap up here for today. I will be back next week with a new your Heart Magic episode and in the meantime, I hope you have a beautiful week. May you stay grounded, may you stay in your heart and may you keep learning how to listen to its wisdom. And, of course, until next time, as always, be well, be loved, be you and be magic.

Intro/Outro : 26:18

You've been listening to your Heart Magic with dr bethan kapansky right tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your light.