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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 happy March. We are talking today about the themes of creativity and chaos, and how can we work with chaos, energy when it comes into our life and use it to inspire greater creativity. And I chose this topic for several reasons. First of all, it's March and I often think that March is big, transitional energy. Sometimes it can feel a little bit chaotic. So, first of all, march itself is named after Mars, the Roman god of war, and I've often thought that things associated with Mars can have that very big drive, energy, inspiration, energy. Mars is about taking action, but that war piece of things and I'm not looking at that literally today, more metaphorically and energetically and what it might mean for the energy itself I often see that as being energy that can be really scattered or disordered or things kind of clashing in order to try and find a new order, try and find peace or something like that, and I think the weather echoes that in March in many parts of the world.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 1:53

Growing up in Alaska, march was such an interesting month because that hole comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb. It didn't always hold true if you were an Alaskan kid. Sometimes it did and sometimes you would see like big snow storms in March and towards the end of the month the weather would start to mellow out and more sun would come out, which was absolutely not a guarantee that we were going into spring in April. It was very possible in Alaska that the snow would still come in April. I remember one year when it snowed in like the second week of May and just like standing out there in my spring heels and I had a flowered skirt on and it was gray and it was gritty and the snow was falling and kind of like shaking my fist at the sky and being like are you kidding me? You know we are so ready for sunshine and flowers. But I do think there is transitional weather, energy and a lot of places. I think that for many parts of the world that there is a shift going on during this time, and so there is always these energies of something ending, something else beginning. Last week on the podcast we were talking about the astrological new year coming up and Pisces being the last sign in the zodiac before we move into Aries, and then the last piece just in terms of the energy right now is the Akashic records talked about how this entire year is about creating new pathways and new neural networks and creating new ways of doing things, new systems of doing things.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 3:27

There is quite a bit of chaos just going on in general in the world right now and in world events and on the bigger scene, and so we're really seeing that happen and a lot of systems that are out there and the good order being able to reorder and make sense of it hasn't come in yet. Things just feel really disorderly and we don't have any control over any of that, but we do have control over ourselves and control over binding our pathways through. Well, how do we work with the shifting energy right now and how do we bring new harmony and creativity into a time when things are changing? And then, on that personal level, how does the Akashic message about new neural pathways and finding new ways of doing things and creatively redirecting our focus and our energy when we are working on creating a new story and moving away from something that we no longer want to invest our energy in? What does that look like? And so that in-between phase, when we are still establishing a different way of doing it, often looks chaotic. It often looks like the way that things were is no longer working. It doesn't exist.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 4:43

There's a lot of energy that can come from that and a lot of feelings, like big feelings, that can come from that when we've gone through some sort of upheaval or change in our life. And those big feelings can range from uncertainty to anger, to grief, to confusion. We can feel like we've lost a sense of identity. We can feel like I just want to go back to the old way of doing things I was. That was predictable, I knew what I was doing. I feel uncertain, I feel really vulnerable. Those are all things that I have felt when I have chaos type storm energy sweep through my life and of course, it takes time to establish a new equilibrium. We don't walk away from something or have it crumble beneath us or dismantle it on our own, make a big change in our life and say I'm leaving this relationship or I'm making this change, or I'm setting better boundaries, so I'm no longer going to do it this way. We don't do that and automatically feel at peace and have a new sense of being centered and where we're going.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 5:43

Next. There's this in-between phase that I love talking about on here. I love talking about sort of the magic being in this middle phase and that's where so much of the creativity comes in and we're invited to think about what do I want to create from this? So chaos and creativity go hand in hand because, on the one hand, chaos energy often feels destructive or deconstructing, it feels like it is disintegrating something somehow. But huge creativity can come from that and new, inspired action and feeling like there are opportunities to take our pieces and put them together in a new way or pick up new pieces. There's so much potential there and I love focusing on that potential when we have any sort of chaos energy in our life, whether that's big or small and I was thinking about that today and how it's applied to myself and what story of my own life I might want to share on here.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 6:44

I feel like I've spoke so much about losing my brother or moving to Kauai or these really big things happening, that of course there was chaos there and it just felt like something that had once been established and was once firm and understood a certain way was absolutely gone, and so all those big feelings that I was talking about, of course they came with those things, but sometimes chaos isn't always that dramatic. Sometimes it happens in ways where some sort of personal crisis or relational crisis or something happens in our life. It might not be a 10 on our personal Richter scale of how much something earthquakeed and shocked our life, maybe it's just a four or five, but it's enough that it's disruptive. Those things happen all the time where something knocks us off of our center and we get out of rhythm and out of routine. And sometimes when we have things going on in our life, life crisis kinds of things. I've had a few smaller ones happening lately and they weren't my personal ones, but happening to people around me that I care about and love, and it completely disrupted my schedule and how I've been doing things and needing to be really adaptive and really resilient and really resourceful.

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And as things are calming down now and I'm having a little bit more time to integrate that, I am thinking about like what were the hidden gifts in this? What is it that? This chaos energy, the storm energy that came into my life? What was the invitation of what I can create from that? And right now, one of it was that it's an opportunity to really dive into. What do I value? How do I want to structure my time. Why do I do what I do and take a look at some of those core value pieces and my heart's desires in a much deeper way. And so something that happens when we have this chaos energy come into our life is.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 8:40

It is disruptive, but in that disruption we are knocked off the course of our daily routine and our daily ruts and our set way of doing things, and there is space that opens up. There's an opportunity to see something from a different vantage point or to look at it from a higher perspective. Maybe we look at it from a lower perspective and we feel like we're down in the mud and we're working through really hard feelings. Or to look at it from a higher perspective. Maybe we look at it from a lower perspective and we feel like we're down in the mud and we're working through really hard feelings and digging for our diamonds in the coal mine or searching for that proverbial hidden treasure buried in the earth, because we're having to like really be in the thick of it and go through hard things. Wherever we find ourself, there is usually some sort of seeking or questioning, there's an evaluation process, there's the self-reflection that we often have, and in that space, we can see things differently, we can notice things or realize things or contrast how we were doing life to whatever this new information is, that is shaking things up and making us think about it in a new way and that might be really uncertain.

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I think uncertainty is just a part of chaos, unless you are so grounded into your meditation practice that you just go through it in this very zen-like way. That is not me, it's not most people that I know. I think more of us than not really struggle with feeling centered when we are in those chaos moments and what's this unknown and we feel the uncertainty and it's uncomfortable because it's psychologically ambiguous. We don't know what to expect and we might have all sorts of feelings and they could be contradictory, and so that dissonance and that ambiguity in our mind feels uncomfortable. Emotionally it feels uncomfortable. That is something psychologically that's often difficult for us. And making friends with uncertainty and making friends with our contradictions and learning to internalize a perspective that how we feel from one moment to the next might not always match up, especially if we're going through change, and so if we can find some sort of comfort, some sort of peace in the middle of uncertainty, it helps us navigate it and find a mindset to stay more open during it. But there is space there and, as I said, in that space we get to examine and as we examine we might feel inspired to do something differently.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 11:11

It can take a while to look at those questions for yourself. The questions that I shared earlier that I'm asking those are big ticket questions. Those are not necessarily something when I'm thinking about. What is my heart's desire? What are my motivations? How do I want to structure my time? I am 47 years old. I hopefully have a good amount of years left. What do I want to do with them? What do I want to fill my days with? Like? These are not questions that I expect to sit down and answer in a journaling session, not questions that I expect to sit down and answer in a journaling session. They're not questions that I think I could answer even in multiple sessions or going away for a retreat weekend. There's a lot of unknowns within those questions to solve. But I can find answers for this life season and I can work on these bigger questions that I'm evaluating for my heart and my soul. Work on these bigger questions that I'm evaluating for my heart and my soul and I can come to the best resting place that I'm able to get to at this point in time, and it's going to take a little bit of time to do that. So for me, I have mentally set March aside as a month where I am continuing to question and soul search, and I've been doing that a while now with some different pieces and as these new things have happened some of the things having to do with aging, parents and healthcare needs and all of that with my parents, those kinds of things. That is new information. So I'm going to add that to the things I was already learning about myself during this time and take this new information in and continue to use March to really try and find that soul space.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 12:45

So chaos shows up in many, many ways. Chaos could just be. I'd hope to sit down and do this podcast much earlier today. And then my day went not quite sideways. It just ended up differently than what I thought. There were hyper dogs that needed walking and they needed a hike and all sorts of things have tied up my time and earlier I sat down and I thought, okay, I'm going to sit down and do this podcast now and talk about this topic. And then the dogs came running in and of course, they needed lots of love, and this was on my mind because I knew I was going to be sharing it, and I thought, okay, this is chaos energy. It's small chaos energy, but I had a plan. It's been interrupted and so what will I do with that? Well, I'm going to lean into it right now and try and create a moment of just appreciating that boy I am loved and adored by these fur beings, that is for sure and try and create a moment of just being surrounded by affection fur affection and being surrounded by love.

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So chaos shows up in many ways and what we can create from that can be something grand and big and soul-searching. It could be something artistic. It could be big life changes and it can be something small. It can be being more mindful about something. It can be thinking about how we want to move our energy and deciding to go in a slightly different direction or just try something out. It could be that we are off of our normal routine and so we're not going to the places we normally visit, we're not doing the grounding activities we normally do, and maybe we still have some pockets of time and we come up with something different during that time, we get really creative. We take a walk somewhere new, we play around with our meditation practice and try doing it differently. Try something.

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If we don't have the 15 minutes we normally have, we decide to do a 60 second meditation and think well, this is better than nothing. It's not about what it is that we're creating. It's more that energy of inspiration and creativity and looking at chaos as an opportunity to create, and not just create with ourselves, to create with life and what life is presenting us with and what the moment itself is presenting us with. And we get to decide do I superimpose how I wanted things on this? Do I lean into this and just go with it and see what happens? What feels right for my heart today, and see what happens what feels right for my heart today? So it's being in that partnership with what is coming into our path and figuring ourselves out the best that we know how and, through that, seeing the potential for creativity and framing it like that. So we have a positive way to anchor into ourselves and to think about things. When it shows up just messy and disorganized and you have a crisis going on, to remind yourself like yes, this is difficult, this feels chaotic right now. Yet I'm also a very creative being and I'm going to use this to create my path forward. I'm going to use this right now to create, fill in the blank, more peace in my life, more resilience or adaptability, more wisdom in my life. More resilience or adaptability, more wisdom, so that empowering piece of seeing our creativity and owning our role as a co-creator in that moment is so powerful. So with that, I want to close today and share a passage from Small Pearls, big Wisdom. It's called Come Together, and I feel like this sums up all the concepts that we're talking about and encompasses all these ideas Come Together.

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Life is not a controlled environment. It is an ever-fluctuating terrain governed by a constant rule of change, with millions of variables and unpredictable outcomes. We lay the groundwork for our best plans and sometimes they work out, but often things turn out much different than expected. We are left trying to navigate the unexpected and often feel frustrated, uncertain and confused, learning to surrender to an alchemy greater than ourselves and how to become part of the greater flow, when we feel caught up in its streams and need to allow our path to unfold instead of trying to shape our path. During these times, we learn a great deal about patience and change, and we often forget as much as we often say we don't like change.

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We are built for change. We are built with the capacity to create, develop, grow, evolve and adapt to change habits, thoughts, perspective patterns, love, lose and learn to let go. We are built with the capacity to create something out of whatever resources we've been given, with the capacity to create something out of whatever resources we've been given, remembering that all the goodbyes, all the voids, all the chaos and everything that falls apart in our lives are simply part of the ingredients we need for new creation. Life is in a constant state of creation and, whether we realize it, we are in a relationship with life and therefore part of its creation. Best, then, to release the reins of control, learn to trust the process and give life a little space to do its thing. You never know what the two of you might create when you come together. Life is always happening and we live on such a creative planet, and part of creativity is that chaos, energy, that sometimes seeming destruction that takes something apart so that something new can come through, and I think, realizing that that's just a principle of life. Chaos is a principle of life, no matter how much we really try and value our inner peace.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 18:55

I always see these little memes on Instagram and little graphics that say released from you anything that threatens your inner peace, and I agree with that to a certain extent. I think there's a lot of things that we can release that create more drama or an ease in our life or interrupt things, and I think sometimes life just happens and we're walking along working on nurturing our inner peace and we're just doing our thing and we kind of get smacked by life storms or smacked by chaos. When I think about some of the things that have brought more chaos, storm energy into my life over the last couple years, they are not something that had to do with anything I had much of a choice over. It's more like life happened and it showed up and I found myself intersecting with it and saying, oh wow, like what do you want to do with this? Like this is such a threat right now to enter peace.

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I am not that meme on Instagram. I'm not whoever that person is throwing out love and light and just be peaceful. I am in the chaos energy and how can I choose to work with that in a way that opens my heart further, that serves my soul, that helps my soul have joy over a new experience that I'm going through, even if my mind right now isn't such a big fan of these circumstances. What can I do with that? And, of course, as a writer, I usually at some point in the process, sometimes after the fact, will write a reflection about it or use that as an ingredient to come up with a poem or create something.

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And I am so grateful for that very tangible way that I can take chaos, energy, storm energy, challenge and difficulties and actively work on transmuting it, when it feels right, into something that offers some form of true soul nourishment to other people and some form of light or some sort of offering a service of love to others.

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So that's a beautiful thing to be able to do and, no matter how you direct your creativity, no matter what practices you have, like you to have the ability to work with the chaos energy in your life. Think about what can I do with this and create something new and use that to continue to spread a ripple wave of kindness or love or compassion or just keeping your personal space as harmonious as possible through your willingness to work with that when it shows up in your life and do your inner work. So, no matter what you're creating, it is an offering of light to the world, because anytime we invest in growing our light and growing our energy, it is going to radiate out from us on an energetic level. So you are a light artist in your own right. You are a creator of beauty and magic and transmutation, and I hope you have an absolutely amazing week seeing what you can create. I will be back next week with a new your Heart Magic podcast and we will be talking about 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.