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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 : 0:33

Aloha everybody, welcome to your Heart Magic. This is Dr Bethann Kapansky-Wright, and today we are focusing on the theme of joy in this podcast, and I'm going a little old school today and doing a bit of a talk story episode. For those of you who followed your heart magic for a while, I used to do episodes called Talk Story Time and in them I would choose some passages centered around one theme from different books and different writings that I've done and just share the words I wrote and some reflections from my perspective as a writer. So I thought it would be fun today to invoke that for this episode and celebrate a little bit of the earlier days of the podcast and focus on joy, which I believe is something really relevant to our souls.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright : 1:29

I think sometimes joy can feel like a bit of a privilege or a luxury, particularly if we are in a place of challenge or hardship in our life, if we are dealing with some sort of grief or chronic pain, and so I want to make the caveat that there might be times where we are really struggling with some dark stuff, hard stuff and some of the difficult things in being human, and so we might not always feel that we can access joy. But for myself personally on my journey, I'm a big believer in insisting on joy when I can and knowing that when life goes through those dark spaces, that there is new light and new life on the other side. And I love to believe that there is joy there as well. And some of the most beautiful joyful periods of my life have been after some sort of a season of challenges and riding out the storm and getting to the other side and it's like the sky opens up again and the world opens back up. And we always have growth when we've gone through those seasons and this appreciation of being able to connect with beauty again, connect with happiness, connect with bliss, connect with feeling more peaceful and at ease. So I love the concept of joy and I love the idea, too, that joy is something that really is an antidote to being in a place of fear or apathy or hatred or some of the tendencies that sometimes drag us down when we start to go backwards on our journey and get into a negative default space. When we can tap into the frequency of joy, we are able to come back into our center and reach for the light again, reach for love, reach for peace, reach for harmony, reach for beauty, reach for the things that fill our souls up.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright : 3:35

So I love joy, I love talking about it, and I'm going to share a few passages today that reflect some aspects and ideas on the concept of joy. This first one is called To Know Joy, and it is from a poetry book, cranberry Dusk A Journey of Becoming, that I wrote, oh my goodness, years ago, back in 2015, 2016. To know joy there are joys to be found even in the most ordinary of days. Sometimes we have to look a bit closer to find them. They hide in the heartbeat of the bluebirds and in the blithe branches of the trees. They sit quietly waiting for notice in our breaths and the clean slate of possibility that comes with dawn of day. They step out into the open through life's ability to carry on in a world that has the grace to keep spinning, no matter how much it aches and hurts. They unveil before eyes that will not see unless they have learned to gaze through the window of soul. You will know them by their gifts of love. You'll know them by their love.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright : 4:54

It's been years since I wrote this and reading it right now, this line about how joy unveils before eyes that will not see unless they have learned to gauge through the window of soul really spoke to me as I was reading it and I think part of what is so beautiful about the word joy to me is there's so much room for us to redefine that concept in a way that works for us. And when we are looking through the eyes of soul, which I think are the eyes of our heart our heart is the doorway to the soul, to our intuition, to our deeper self, to our spiritual connection and when we're really seeing through the eyes of the heart and the eyes of our soul, we see the tiny little miracles and gifts in the day-to-day. And part of expanding the concept of joy is the recognition that joy isn't always some big rush or euphoric moment or something that we feel just like filled with liquid sunshine. When I think about the essence of joy, if I could put it into a little bottle and put like essences of things that might invoke joy to me, I would put in like liquid sunshine and the scent of wild oranges and the essence of watching my dog Rosie run through a field of wildflowers and the absolute joy she has is like butterflies take off, like if I could take those word, pictures and those sensations and put it into like a little potion bottle or something and say here, here you go. This is for joy. That is joy in its purest form to me.

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But I think that oftentimes on a day-to-day basis we might not always have that rush of like total bliss and euphoric experience and I refuse to feel that joy is only accessible every now and then or like every blue moon or something like that. I think maybe it is the heart rubble in me that feels a little stubborn and a little recalcitrant and feels like I insist on joy and I will find joy, and joy is available if I look for it. I don't like thinking it's this rare thing that we can only experience when we are in a certain feeling state. I think we can work on training our nervous systems and training our mind and helping reset ourselves and teach our energy how to tune into the frequency of joy, and we are able to invoke that spirit and that essence a little bit more easily when we develop an eye for joy. And so that poem really reflects the idea that joy is happening all around and it's happening oftentimes in these really quiet ways and in nature's day-to-day miracles and in all these teeny, tiny moments of hope and life and the things that help us slow down and connect to our hearts and connect to interconnection and remember that we're so much more than some of the self-imposed limitations and perceived limitations of this human space. We are these extraordinary souls having this experience and we are in this extraordinarily creative planet nature and her endless artistry, and this idea that, no matter what happens, our world does keep going and grace is available to all of us and it softens the things that have pointy edges and that are hard. And that brings me to the next piece that I want to share. That speaks a little bit further to the importance of joy and this idea that we have to insist on joy this is from Small Pearls, big Wisdom and it is called Joy is Vital to Our Souls.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright : 9:00

Times of challenge and trouble will always offer us opportunities to return to ourselves. The nature of uncertainty is disquietude and unease. Finding ways to anchor into our deeper selves is necessary in our modern day world. Anchoring in is how we listen to our intuition, heed our inner voice, return to the wisdom of our hearts and make choices aligned with our truth. We return and anchor in many ways calm, rest, creativity, appreciation, joy, nature, loved ones, solitude, small comforts, simple pleasures, through acts of self-expression that circle us into our truth, through tiny comfort rituals that give us a sense of continuity, pleasure and peace. This is how we return to our soul, find the light within and move forward, feeling energetically nourished, intentional and aligned. In these spaces we feel brighter and centered. We shed the energetic debris we accumulate from life's stress. We find a newfound lightness of heart. We remember that joy is vital to our souls. Joy anchors us into our soul's natural condition. It cuts through the uncertain dark and returns us to a pure space of light.

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Joy is the currency of vitality. Focusing on joy is not trivial or frivolous. It is sustenance and a natural antidote to antipathy, fear and compassion fatigue. Joy helps us feel more energized to engage in the world with compassion, warmth and hope. Sometimes we must stretch a little higher to touch the good. Every time we reach up and grab onto peace, truth, beauty, curiosity and wonder, we tap into joy's golden veins. What a healing balm joy becomes in difficult times. Be a channel for joy today. Pour that frequency into the world through your words, energy and essence. Like daffodil yellow sunshine, let it seep into the places where fear and anxiety have crept, helping warm and soften them. We sometimes forget that simple acts can have a big impact. We don't have to hustle to keep up and prove our relevance. We can stand still and embody fierce change In a wanting world. We can allow joy to flow from our hearts and trust it to do the work of love.

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A few years ago, when I wrote the original version of that piece, which I think was an article that I published online at some point, it was during the time of COVID and it was during the pandemic, during the lockdown, and I was very fortunate to be in Kauai when all of that was happening and have access to nature, into the abundance and the beautiful gifts there, and it was such a strange time for so many of us. I think we probably each have these memories and experiences attached to that and things that were challenging and things that helped us grow, and for me, as an empath, I just felt really overwhelmed. That's my response a lot as an empath, when things are shifting in the world and big things are happening. I don't always know how I feel right away, and it is just my experiences and energy sensitive that, no matter how much I'm doing my energetic protection and maintenance and all those things that are so necessary to taking care of ourselves as a sensitive and as an empath and making sure that I'm feeling my own feelings and not everybody else's. I just can't help but spend some of that in when I'm trying to figure out my position with something so big and, as we all know, at the time the pandemic was going on, there was big feelings happening and lots of reactions and all sorts of perspectives that people were having and different vantage points, and so something that I really try and do when I'm grappling with finding how I feel and trying to separate my own point of view from the collective, while still taking in sources of information and remembering my innate interconnection to everything. I mean that's a lot to sort through, right. It's like finding my truth as an individual and then how might I think about this from the perspective of soul and a spiritual perspective, and making a little bit of space for how are others experiencing this, and so like finding my center in. That is something that has been a challenge for me and it's just a growing point. It's something I continue to grow in and anytime we come up against something really big and something that is I'll just call it like headline news, the kinds of things going on that impact all of us to some extent.

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I try and take time and I've learned not to rush my process of figuring out how I feel about something and to not come up with a position when I'm not sure what my position is yet. And so I remember going for this walk that day on Moa Lepe Trail, which was this lovely trail up where I lived at the time, and it was just such a beautiful day and you know butterflies and Kauai's red dirt and trees, and it's a really peaceful place, especially if you are fortunate enough to be on the trail by yourself and have it be really quiet. And so it was really this time of reconnecting to my heart and really asking, kind of opening my heart up to spirit and just having a dialogue and a prayer and saying like, help me make sense of this for myself right now. Help me figure out what can I do right now during a time where we're all feeling a little rudderless. What's my response from a human viewpoint? What's my response as a spiritual teacher and a writer? Help me feel into all of that and that's what came through is this idea of joy and the relevancy of joy at times where we might not feel particularly joyful. And I really had that sense of conviction in that moment of how vital joy is for our souls, that it's not something frivolous, where we work on cultivating joy, practices and fostering joy, it's not something that is wasted time or wasted efforts. It's actually something highly medicinal and something that helps support us so that we can find ways to stay centered, stay in our truth and fill ourselves up and move our energy and the world in a way that is aligned and in connection to our purpose and in service to love. And so the origins of that piece came through at that time, and something that I love so much about being a writer and listening to my intuition and opening up to seeing a higher perspective is I never quite know what twist spirit might give me to something and what inspired idea might come from that soulful place. And this idea of cultivating joy during that time of confusion and uncertainty was so powerful to me and reminded me that joy is a life force for us. We might not always feel it, but it is always available to us when we can stay connected to our hearts and stay connected to our hope and our knowledge that the light is always there, even in times that we can't see it, and we can work with the ingredients life has handed us and work with what is available to us and try and curate and cultivate ways to foster joy and to tap into that qualities and the ways that resonate with us.

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So this last piece that I want to share it's a fun one. It's from my book. It's a poetry book called Freebird Fridays A Love Story, and a lot of the poetry in this book was inspired by a couple of things. Some of it I wrote during the time period right after my divorce and a time that I was going through. So many lessons of growing up and learning about what love is, tapping into the path of the heart, really learning to follow my heart I have in my later work are in this book. I can see, as a writer that I'm tapping into ideas and themes that I still feel called to write about them. I just have a even wider vantage point at this point in time because I wrote a lot of these 12, 13 years ago, so it's been a while. And something else that really inspired this book is a lot of the poetry in here is around the time that I had met my husband and we were in the dating phases and falling in love and getting to have all those beautiful experiences at the time.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright : 18:35

And then this book in general, free Bird Fridays is something that was inspired and it was the first poetry book that I ever put together and it was actually after the loss of my brother and I'd been through so much grittiness and hardship and life going through that grief that as I was coming out of it and really finding my zest and this movement in me that said I want to live braver, and for me I was like so that means I want to write a book, and I had all this poetry scattered in different places and so this was a really beautiful way to bring it together into a collection and I wanted this book to feel joyful. I wanted the poetry in here to spark love and to spark joy. I think I just been through so much pain that my antidote to that was pouring a little bit more love into the world and exploring different expressions of love. So this is a very simple poem. It is called Peach Cobbler.

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They had barbecue and peach cobbler and made easy conversation about blue skies, cloudy days and spring dreams. She told him about the time she lost her joy and how she'd searched so hard to find it. He told her that she was his joy, how he'd searched so hard to find her. They swung on the swings and let it all wash over them the blue, the clouds, the losings and the findings, the joys. I used to write these tiny little vignettes where my husband is from and I was visiting him and this captured this day that we had. We did have peach cobbler and barbecue and we'd gone to some playground somewhere and swung on the swings. And we're having these heart to heart conversations and doing that thing that you do when you're falling in love and you share your life story with somebody else. And it was a beautiful little snapshot of joy and having newfound hope and joy in my life. And there's a line in here she told him about the time she lost her joy and how she'd searched so hard to find it.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright : 21:07

I don't think we can actually lose joy, but what we can lose is feeling like we can access it. Joy is always available to us, but there's times on the human journey when we are going through grief or trauma or something just really heavy and we can't feel like we don't feel the good vibrations right, we don't feel joy, we don't feel really connected to things and during my spiritual awakening process and the subsequent years and on my own journey, I'd had some like really dark moments in that time and really beautiful moments. I look back on the time period between about 2011 and like 2013 and think, oh, my goodness, they were such rich years of really learning about the shadow side of life and the light side of life and just coming alive to myself and coming alive to my heart in a new way and coming alive to my spiritual gifts and everything about that time when I look back just feels very heightened and I remember going through some really big challenges and big betrayals of the heart and going into these periods of feeling depressed or feeling kind of what's it all about? And really struggling on my journey and then having to fight my way back to a place of accessing the good again and accessing what was beautiful and accessing my ownership of my own life and trying to create a life of beauty and meaning and joy. And so I had come through one of those stages and come through the loss of something really dear to me and was sort of emerging from the other side. And as all that was happening is when that poem was written, I was also falling in love and getting to know this person in my life, and so it felt like I emerged from this dark tunnel and all this light was opening up to me and there's just a lot of happy memories attached to that time. It's lovely to go back and read those poems because they are very much the voice of my younger self. But I'm so glad I took a little word snapshot at the time and wrote it down.

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And if you are looking for a takeaway from today's podcast and a way to integrate some of these ideas that I've been talking about, you might try, in your writing practice or in your journal, writing a little vignette about your day, writing a little poem about it. It doesn't have to be fancy or poet sounding or anything like that. Just take the day that you've had, or take a moment that beauty was somehow happening and see if you can capture that in simple sentences. See if you can see the joy. Take a moment to notice. Where do you feel that joy in your body? What does it feel like to you. I think we have to remind ourselves joy is happening right now and keep training our mind and training our eye to tune into it.

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And going back to what I said at the beginning of this, I'm a believer that we have to insist on joy because it can feel elusive if we don't insist on it.

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If we wait for circumstances to line up so we have a natural feeling of happiness or euphoria, we're going to probably have fewer and further in between experiences of joy, and I want a bigger concept. I want joy to work for me. I want it to be abundant in my life. I want to be able to access it every day, even if it's a hard day or a sticky day or something that feels a little bit gray. I want to know that it's there and that, if I can work my joy practices and remind myself these were the good things today. These are the things where joy was showing you its face and tap into that. I am there for it. I insist on that. So I hope something in this today has inspired and sparked some joy for you and your week ahead. I will be back next week with a new episode on spirituality, creativity, storytelling and heart wisdom. In the meantime, have a beautiful week, have joy and, as always, be well, be love, be you and be magic.

Intro/Outro Music: 25:33

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