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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 today's episode is focused on the words, the phrase, creative redirection and looking at what it means to creatively refocus and redirect our thoughts when we find ourselves putting our attention and our energy into something that isn't necessarily growing or serving us. And how do we find a way to redirect our focus, redirect our hearts, redirect our energy in a different direction? And this topic's inspired by the Akashic Records. Something that I've done for a while is I will often go in and look at the Akashic Records and see what's the collective energy for the month ahead or for the current quarter that we're working in, and what I've always loved about the records is they give such a beautiful overview of this energetic umbrella that everybody is working under and that's going to show up in different ways in our life depending on who we are and what our circumstances are, depending on who we are and what our circumstances are. But for the year of 2025 in general, and particularly for this first quarter, this first January through March of this year, the record said that this was a time where a lot of rewiring and remapping was taking place, and the way that that came through in the records was seeing neural networks in the mind, seeing these roadmaps in our mind and how we think about things and how we do things. And I had this really playful image that came through in the records of seeing new pathways being lit up and new roadmaps being created in the mind. And that was symbolic of the process that when we choose to do something differently, when we have a new insight, when we choose to make a behavioral shift or we have an epiphany and we have an expanded viewpoint on how we've been thinking about something, and so we start to engage with it differently and we build different thought constructs around it, engage with it differently and we build different thought constructs around it. We get rid of some of the old, junky ones that might not be serving us and we choose to see it in a new way and then that has this ripple effect that we act towards it in a different way. All of those things create these new pathways in our mind and in our energy system and our emotional response.

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And so we're playing with the idea this year of rewiring and repatterning and going through a lot of contemplation and self-examination and opportunities to test things out and do things differently. We might think of that as an obstacle course for the soul. If we are working on setting boundaries and we are doing our inner work and we're recognizing where we might need to tidy up some boundaries in our life or where we've been overly rigid with boundaries, or whatever the lesson might be for that person, if that is something that we're working on, then of course we are going to start having opportunities to practice start showing up and a lot of times in our human mind we look at these as unwanted challenges or unwanted events happening in our life. But from the perspective of the soul it's more like a playground, an obstacle course and oh good, here's a chance to practice this thing that I've been learning and roll up my sleeves and actually apply it. That's really the only way that we take something from theory to truly applying it and then being able to integrate it so it changes us is getting to practice it and getting to have some trial runs of it and seeing how it goes. And did we do a good job? Do we feel good about the change we made? Do we feel like we didn't do it very gracefully and we need a do-over and we want to try again. That is one way that we can look at challenges and obstacles coming up. We get to test all of this out and this repatterning and rewiring process. So that was this overview, this idea of new pathways and new direction in 2025. And there was a lot of exhortation from the records that for us, as individuals, part of what we're rewiring is our personal path to peace peace being finding our equilibrium and being able to maintain our sense of serenity and surrender and groundedness even in this shifting, changing landscape. And so that's what we're working on.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 5:13

And for February specifically, I was given the words creative redirection, with the idea that the month of February is an invitation that when we find ourselves wandering into territory of something that we're trying to change. So maybe we are focusing on an old story or an old attachment to something, maybe we are continuing an action or a behavior that we don't particularly like, maybe we are in a process of doing massive decluttering and getting rid of some things in our life or making some changes that the guidance there was to think about how can I redirect my energy and redirect whatever it is I'm doing and changing in a way that better serves who I'm becoming? And there's some wisdom there that this isn't about disowning how we did things or who we've been. It's not about judging it. It's not about rejecting it and saying that was bad or I did it wrong. It's not about self-recrimination or beating ourselves up or somehow shaming or blaming that area in our life. It's more about accepting it for what it is, recognizing that whatever that material is that we're working with, that we're trying to shift out of that, it held some sort of value, some sort of lesson, some sort of something that taught us something, and that we are creatively redirecting our thoughts, our focus, how we wish to engage in a new direction. So there's this emphasis on choice and an emphasis on seeing different choices and being able to make conscious-minded choices that serve us.

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And right before I hopped on the podcast, I actually opened the records again for the week ahead and just checked in on February's energy and I just asked for a simple message to share on the podcast today, like what do the records want us to know right now? And I just asked for a simple message to share on the podcast today, like what do the records want us to know right now? And I was given these words. We say them all the time choose love, and what I saw was millions of tiny little choices that we have every single day, every single moment over the course of a week and in every given moment we have opportunities to make a choice that moves us towards the light, towards love, towards choosing something that is in those loving vibrational qualities, whether that is self-love, self-compassion, forgiveness, doing the right thing because we know it resonates within us to do it, even if nobody's watching, choosing to take a deep breath.

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If we find ourselves in a negative spin cycle and we're really anxious about something and just say my thoughts are not my truth. I'm not focusing on that story right now. I'm focusing on finding the resilience I need to make it through this time. There's so many ways we can creatively redirect our thoughts. The idea of creative redirection isn't that there's one specific way to redirect. It's to create these ways to redirect and think about what does that mean to you and how could you do that in a way that feels loving and knowing that sometimes loving is not something we necessarily feel if we are in a rough patch in life. We might not feel this expanded heart chakra when we think about this idea of choose love in this situation, but we can think about how can I make this meaningful right now and find the love, find what is sacred, find what is beautiful, find what is growing me as a soul, find something to grab onto that makes meaning out of it and that creates something that helps transmute something that looks ugly into something where I can find some sort of beauty or some sort of growth or something that is nurturing and sustenance for my soul. So with that I want to share a passage from Small Pearl's Big Wisdom today that speaks to this topic. This is called Starlight and Strange Beauty and it is reflection number 345.

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Life is an ongoing process and with any process good and bad things will come. We keep learning that the true alchemy in life is how we choose to respond to life's processes. Whether we choose to find the gifts that exist, whether we develop a relationship of entitlement or appreciation for our life, whether we keep refocusing on what we can cultivate and create or fall victim to the old programs of despair, disconnection and hopelessness, the onus of choice always comes back to us. Though we may have seasons of grief or stress to work through, where we don't feel we can access our higher minds and stay open to life's gifts. We can still retain the knowledge that at some point the light will once again break through. When it does, we will reach for it. We can always work with ourselves. Wherever we are. We can always find a way to chisel away at the hard materials life has given us. See if we can create a malleable matter that lends itself to finding a more expanded way of engaging with our lives, with presence, creativity and grace.

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We can remember our true treasure lies within us and within our ability to cultivate inner wealth. Grow our hearts, do inner work, make love our purpose, stay open to receiving our soul's higher plan, dream our dreams, believe good things will happen and choose to seek the light in the dark when life calls us into submergence. Those things remain ours to cultivate, explore and own. They are the anchors we can bring ourselves back to when we lose our bearings and life's ups and downs. They are the tools we have that allow us to utilize the experience and wisdom we gain on the journey and build castles of compassion, grace and whimsy. So deep breath, dear ones. Keep returning to the treasure within and hold fast to the truth in your heart's sacred beat. Remember that even if you should find yourself in the vast darkness there is always a smattering of starlight and a strange beauty awaiting your discovery. So yesterday I was out running and I was looking down.

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I was looking at my feet or looking at the ground ahead of me and a lot of times for me when I run, it is how I get a lot of my process work done, smog in my brain and burn off any stress that I'm carrying, any extra energy that's cluttered it. Sometimes I think so much is happening in life so quickly and my experience itself is that I don't always have as much time as I would like to process things and feel my feelings and make space to acknowledge here's what happened and feel like I can really clear that and organize it and then mindfully move on to the next thing. And for me, as an empath and a highly sensitive, that is how I tend to work best, like that's my optimum, if I have lots of space and lots of time between life happening and a crazy surprise. Life is not here at my design and it certainly isn't responding to all my needs instantaneously. So I often find myself like many other highly sensitives and empaths do, living my life and managing all of it the best that I can.

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And sometimes things are happening at such a fast velocity that I'll get this backlog, kind of like if you've ever been on one of those water rides at a theme park and you sit in the log and they can get really jammed up at the top right before you drop down the hill, and so there's this like backlog, this traffic jam, and I often have that image in my mind of things are just logged and there's too many in the line right now, too many things in the queue, and so for myself I found that when I go running that sometimes that just helps free and open up a lot of energy, and if I'm still thinking about something after a run or it's still on my heart, I know that I can attach a little bit more importance to it. But sometimes things that feel problematic will just kind of burn off in the run and I'll realize that that was just stress talking or just my mind feeling a little cluttered. So I was out running and I was doing that thing that I do, where I was just letting my thoughts spin, and there's this woman who was out walking her dog and I see her and her dog quite a bit and she was just stopped and she was staring up in the sky and she kind of waved at me and so I came to a stop and I looked up with her and there was this tree and these beautiful pink flowers were in bloom on it. And this must have just happened.

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I run the same place almost every day, I go to some of the same places in my town and I hadn't seen those pink flowers open up on that tree. So it had just happened, seemingly overnight, and there was bees buzzing around it and pollinating it and she was so enchanted by it and her enchantment and her curiosity and her wonder just ground me to a halt and helped me look up as well. And we had this beautiful exchange, this little connection about this tree and these flowers and looking up and seeing the beauty, and it made me think so often that in the stream of life that those tiny little moments, when we can find them, they are such medicine for our soul. Sometimes that's all we need to shift our focus, to creatively redirect, to remember to look up and to focus on the beauty happening around us, to take the time to notice something good going on in the world, to see how nature is still constant. No matter what else is happening, nature just keeps doing her thing and creating and growing and creating beauty.

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And it was so affirming for my soul and such a simple reminder that when we get this fixed focus, even when we feel like we have to have that fixed focus on something, that sometimes creative redirection is as simple as taking a pause and looking up and noticing that smattering of starlight and strange beauty, of seeing the colors in the sky, of seeing the phase that the moon is in, of knowing that even when life is in a place where we might feel like we are going through its storms, or in the darkness or in a place where the path isn't clear, that all we have to do is stop looking down at the ground and focusing on that and just look up and begin to notice what we see around us. That there's always something beautiful to be found, there's always some sort of gift, no matter where we are in our situation. And absolutely sometimes we have to work hard to find our creative redirection. Sometimes it's not hard and it's just a matter of being mindful, or if you are trying to take more time for yourself to make sure that you carve out that space and if you find yourself getting distracted with life, creatively redirect and refocus your energy and say, oh yes, I'm trying to develop this new pathway for me where I practice better self-care and here's a small way that I can do this. So sometimes it's just a matter of refixing our attention, but sometimes it is a challenge and it's hard for us to see the light. And I think in those moments when we are able just to look up and start noticing and take in something bigger than ourself and be supported by nature and be supported by spirit and be supported by interconnection.

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And what I love about this topic and why I chose to share that particular passage, is just to really emphasize that the matter of choice is on us, and I think that can be both beautiful and terrifying, because there's such a big degree of responsibility and perfectionists start to get really caught up and, well, maybe I'm doing it wrong and I'm not choosing the right thing enough. And it's really not about that. This is an empowering thing. The onus of choice is on us. It's not about doing it perfectly. It's not about choosing love every single time and somehow beating ourselves up if we think we didn't choose love and we should have done something differently. It's more about continuing to be a participant in our own growth and, when we can, to mindfully empower ourselves and say I'm going to make a different choice, or I do have a choice, and how I want to respond to this. And here's what I'm going to work on right now, and it might be a little bit challenging for me.

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It might not come easily that I am going to try and choose to find the gifts in what I'm going through or choose to see the grace in something that doesn't feel particularly gracious, but I think I'm going to choose that anyways, because that is the mark that I want to leave in this world. I want to be a person of grace, or I want to be a person of light, or I want to be a person who seeks growth, or I want to be a person who doesn't give up on myself. And so I think what it comes down to is a recognition that all these little, small choices that we have on a daily basis, they are empowering to us because we have these choices and they add up, they create the new pathway, they create the new direction. Do one small thing differently and over time, you formed a new habit and you formed a new way of thinking about something or doing something, so that's a very empowering thought. It doesn't have to be something huge Small little acts of love, small little acts of goodness, small little moments of looking up. They add up.

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And I think there's an exhortation to this month to just continue with persistence and belief in our inner work, to not give up on ourselves, to not give up on mapping out and rewiring and finding this new direction and finding ways to create peace and cultivate it in the middle of whatever else is happening in life, and to keep creatively redirecting our focus when we find that we are looking down too often or looking at something or focusing on something that isn't serving us, and finding ways to expand and to open our gaze. Thank you so much for joining me today for the podcast. I will be back next week with a new topic on psychology and spirituality and heart wisdom and creativity and some storytelling. In the meantime, have a beautiful week. May you choose love in the ways that you can, in whatever way speaks to your heart and, as always, be well, be love, be you and be magic.

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