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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 April to you. So April is National Poetry Month and I felt like doing a playful episode today on the podcast and celebrating National Poetry Month by doing a talk story time theme. If this is a new podcast to you, talk story time episodes are where I bring together a few passages from my work and talk story. It's always unscripted and I always choose a few passages around a central topic or theme. Sometimes it's just a word that they all have in common and I share not only the writing but a little bit of the story behind it or some of the inspiration. So I thought it would be fun to celebrate National Poetry Month and kick it off with some writing.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright : 1:29

Not everything I'm reading today is a poem, but when I started writing and I finally took it to publish writing and that was in such a small way it was just on a blog, my sunshineandwinterblog that I started years ago and every now and then we'll still publish a poem or a piece on just for old time's sake. But when I first started writing, I went through a big poetry phase and I think I found poetry so approachable as a writer and when I was struggling to find my words or tell the full story and really put it into more of an essay or a narrative form, I felt that I could put it in a poem and capture within a few lines aspects of something I was trying to tell. Or maybe I might be able to take and personify a spiritual, connective experience that I'd had, like if I'd been out in nature and really felt like I received wisdom from the trees. I could take a poem and maybe I'd call the poem the things the trees had to teach and write down those lessons that I received in my heart. And so it was a way of bridging this creative and more mystical realm, the realm of feelings, the realm of intuition, the realm of the psyche and subconscious. When we are working through some of our feelings and working through making meaning out of something in our life, and we don't necessarily have the full story yet, we might not be able to say chapter one, this is what happened and tell the full narrative and bring it through to conclusion and the end. And so a poem could encapsulate some of those things and give myself a language to express these fragments and these mosaic tiles of life that I was experiencing and sometimes I found oftentimes I found that through the act of writing I would start to see the bigger picture. And, of course, as any good writer will tell you, usually once you start writing your truth and telling your truth, it clears the space for more truth and more writing to happen. And so writing begets writing, creativity begets creativity.

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As I got going with it, I continued to develop all of that and over the years my writing practices have waxed and waned, but I love coming back to poetry when I'm feeling stuck or feeling like I need to get back in touch with my soul again. That is always my jumping off point. So today's Talk Storytime episode is a little bit poetry, but mostly passages of writing that are about writing, and I thought it would be fun and playful to share a little bit more about the creative process and my sense of what writing means to me. Something that I find extremely cliche about writers is many writers, especially poets, usually have some piece in their repertoire about, like why they write or what their writing means to them, or what poetry means to them, and a lot of times it's this dramatic I have to write or my voice will die. Put in poem form or something like that. It's so trite and so cliche and I am absolutely celebrating and rocking that cliche today and pulling together some passages on why I write.

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So, speaking of that, the first one that I want to share today is from Revelations of the Sky and it's called my Magic. And this is all about word magic and making magic out of words and one of the fundamental reasons why I love writing so much my magic. I like to think I have many forms of magic my heart's ability to feel, heal, tunnel deep, fall upwards, love, mend and bend. My soul's well-trained ear who listens to the in-betweens and hears the speak of angelic sings. My relationship with the natural world who constantly teaches me. The biggest miracles are hidden before our eyes. So we need to take the shells off and learn to see with a child's mind. But my words are their own form of magic.

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Writing transmutes experiences into alchemical gold. Diving into feelings creates new elements and compounds of sea salt and soul gold. We become the mystic shaman when we write, weaving stories out of the dreams of our lives, creating our own myths and mysteries, unearthing new prophecies, where we weave the elements of our histories to script a new future, to navigate by Sunshine, daffodil joy, future to navigate by Sunshine, daffodil, joy, caramel, autumn, bittersweet ocean, grief, blues, icy white truths. Words are the alchemist who emotionally evoke and transmute. When I write, I go into my spirit's apothecary shop where I can explore, mix, essence and brew A pinch of this, a dab or two. I string words like kite tails from alphabet soup healing and feeling and sealing anew, transcribing this life from observer's view rebirthing, reforming, rewriting the story from a lens drenched in love.

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When I wrote Revelations of the Sky, I was going through a Dr Seuss phase in my life where a lot of my poetry rhymes and I'm amused by that. Reading it now, I don't necessarily feel the need to rhyme. Everything, and not everything in this book rhymes if it's a poem. There's a lot of other prose pieces and personal essays too. Poetry is just a small part of it. But I read this one and I thought oh yes, that was the Dr Seuss phase where it just came out of nowhere. I hadn't been a big rhymer in poetry. Poetry obviously can be like so many different things a free form, verse and patterns and beats and haiku, and there's so many ways to write it. But for some reason, all of a sudden I just started rhyming everything, and if I could find a way to rhyme a stanza, I would. So I read this and I thought, oh, look at that, it's the Dr Seuss phase.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright : 7:56

But I think that thinking of writing as a form of magic and magic being our heart, magic, right, our heart, magic being our gifts and talents and the things that are unique to us and things that are unique to us that we do in a way that nobody else does. So I write in a way that, even if there's other people who might have a similar voice, my writing is still unique to my voice and my vantage point and my life experience. And if you write, whether it's formal writing or whether it's something that you scribble in your journal and it's a self-reflection on who you are, then that is unique to you and your vantage point and your point of view and it's your magic. This is our word. Magic Words are our ability to tap into something more, to put our feelings into some kind of a compound element and string it together, and we call these things sentences and in those sentences and little phraseologies and all that, we put our emotions and we organize ourselves and we think about how we think or how we perceive the world. We get to be an observer of life and observe what's going on around us and notice things, and I think part of the joy of writing is training one's eye to notice something that others might miss because you're looking at it through an observer's lens. And if you've ever been looking around for inspiration and going out into nature or just investigating your own life and thinking what's on my heart right now, what do I feel inspired to write about? What kinds of themes or patterns and dynamics am I seeing in the world around me? What kinds of themes or patterns and dynamics am I seeing in the world around me, and what do I want to say about that? What voice do I have? What do I feel inspired to say? Then you notice that you spend more time noticing and less time reacting. When we write, we are often making space to observe something, to be mindful of something, to pay attention to it, and then the act of writing is how we synthesize the information and we share a reflection or some kind of a component of how we experience that, and so I think one of the things that I find so valuable about the writing process is that it dovetails so nicely with mindfulness practices and just noticing and being more present, and it helps us tune into what's going on around us.

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I love to put together tiny little vignettes of a day and I've talked about this before on your Heart Magic and suggested it as a journaling exercise where you just write about what happened in your day and it can be something really short, like she was grateful on a Tuesday morning and greeted the sunrise or greeted the gray skies or greeted the clouds above with coffee and a peaceful heart, or coffee and a contemplative mind. It was an ordinary day where not much was happening at all except the stirrings of her soul under the surface of her deep. I don't know something like that. Obviously I made that up on the cuff, but I love these little vignettes where I'll take a moment and find what's special about it and, if nothing was special, make it special through the act of words, through being a word alchemist and finding a way to use descriptives and colors and elements that evoke something in me and put them down on page. So words are magical. I'm very grateful for them and I'm grateful to be able to have a forum to use my voice.

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This next one that I want to share is from Small Pearls, big Wisdom, and it's called Write About the World we Wish to See. Write about the world you wish to see. Hold space for truth, hold space for peace, hold space for learning to dance with the shadows and find the light, hold space for courage, hold space for reinvention, hold space for evolution, hold space for change, hold space for love and keep following the way of the heart, for that is the path forward which will help us create a better way. I once wrote these words like I was spellcasting, creating a verbal vision board of a better world, a world where we grow love forward and find the creative courage to let go of what's no longer working and create something better in its place. I learned long ago that we can write our lives into being through intention, faith and words. Maybe we can't change everything, but we can change ourselves, and I think that is more than enough.

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I wrote my way through a difficult divorce, a shedding of an old self and a recreation of a new me. Each time I wrote my way through a difficult divorce, a shedding of an old self and a recreation of a new me. Each time I wrote, I found myself ending my words, with hopes and visions of who I'd like to be and what I'd like to dream into being. It might be too much of a stretch to say I authored myself into being, since I think there are much bigger forces like life, love, spirit and the intangible threads of fate and destiny. That also had a lot to do with it, but I noticed over time that I was becoming my vision of self. We can create millions of things in our lives, from the tiniest drop of gratitude to the biggest wave of grace and change. So why not save a little space to create a more beautiful world inside ourselves and envision a more beautiful collective world? Through tiny scraps of art, little love, notes of kindness and vision boards built of positive quotes, grand ideas and dreams, we can add more beauty to this vast universe, inspiring the greatness in each other, inspiring humble acts of change and inspiring ourselves to write about the world we wish to see. Those inspirations and words of love might feel nothing more than a dream today, yet they hold the potential to create the energy that builds the stepping stones to a better tomorrow.

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It can be hard to hold on to hope in this world, especially if you are looking around at what is happening on the surface of our world and just observing some of the things going on politically with people and the environment and relationships. A lot of people are really struggling and there's a lot of uncertainty in this climate right now and it's impacting people in all sorts of different ways and I think it's really easy to capitulate, to despair in that, to capitulate to hopelessness, to feel really small, to feel that we can't make a difference. I think it's also easy, empathically, to absorb some of that and to struggle to keep our frequency up and tuned into positivity and light and to get dragged down into some of the grief a little bit and there's nothing wrong with grief, work and feeling our feelings or any of that. But I think it's easy for hopelessness to seep in, or the gray to seep in, and we don't even notice it. And I think that a powerful practice is writing about the world we wish to see, and that does not have to be as grand as it sounds.

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It really could just be writing down in your journal the intentions that you might be working on towards yourself, and maybe those intentions are something like building peace inside of yourself, building more harmony, building more abundance, building more self-compassion, self-kindness. Those are very normal intentions that many of us, at any point in time, are working on some variation of. And to say and I send the same energy out into the world around me and hope that the world, that the collective, finds more peace, more harmony, more compassion, more kindness. That right there is writing about the world that you wish to see. It is always leaving space for hope, always leaving space for grace, always leaving space that whimsy and magic can still happen. It is not about magical thinking, but it is about believing that miracles happen and believing that when people come together with open hearts, we become the miracle. We create the miracle because we're holding so much space for love and when love is invited into a space, magic happens, sacred things happen, miracles happen, change happens, and so that is a world that I am invested in being a part of.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright : 16:53

It is one that I love to write about. It comes through in so many ways in the pages of my journal. I definitely see it reflected in bigger passages that I write, but, like I said, it doesn't have to be something big. It can be an easy practice, and I think that it is a wonderful antidote to despair because we are controlling what we can and, first of all, that's the space of ourselves. If we're struggling in any way, it can be really hard to put pen to paper and write some intentions or even write. These are the ways. I need support right now. Universe, I invite you to come in and support me in all ways.

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It is not easy to do, but it doesn't mean we can't do it. We can do things that aren't easy. We can make ourselves, push through resistance and do something that we know is good for us. We can hold space for positivity and hold space for gritty positivity, for positivity based in reality, and we can hold space for that and hold space for the light, even in times of darkness and even in times of struggle. We can do those things. We can push past that threshold. So I love doing that and I love the idea of encouraging others to take the concept of write about the world you wish to see.

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Write about the world that you wish to see in your own small way, right the microcosm that you occupy and then the bigger macrocosm around you, and do a little vision statement, a vision board verbally, of what that might look like and focus on that. See what happens. It's better than worrying. It is such a relief when you have exhausted your worries and you've thought about all the bad things that could happen and what if this happens, and what if this happens, and like all of that stuff that the anxiety mind loves to attach to and tell us stories about. And some of those things are legitimate, some of them are not as legitimate, and that is just our mind speaking. But one thing that I love doing is saying okay, well, maybe I can shift my focus now and imagine what I would like to happen. Imagine things going through with more grace and ease, imagine being supported in these challenges I find myself. Imagine a little bit more peace and harmony and all of that. So I love to write about the world I wish to see and I love to challenge myself to push through the gray default setting that's how I think of it kind of a just gray, hazy space that it's easy to find ourselves in, sort of like static, and to push through that and rehome and refocus where I'm putting my attention so that I can have energy flow into that direction.

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So this next piece that I want to share is called Recollecting an Ocean's Roar. I recently published it on my Sunshine in Winter blog, I think. Earlier I said every now and then, like once a year, I'll throw a piece up on there for old time's sake and it will feel right to put it on that as a platform. I don't know why, maybe it is honoring my younger self and honoring my roots. I don't write there very often but I've left it live and I've left all of those old poems and writings up and they're really fun to bring into talk story time and to read from them. And so this was one that I felt moved to recently publish, back in December, and again recollecting an ocean's roar.

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It was a quiet evening for tarot cards, musings about life, listening to the sounds of darkness and the faint roar of ocean and winter. Poetry was slowly stirring again, and she quietly observed the creation process, knowing if she tried to grasp the tender threads of words just rising. Grasp the tender threads of words just rising, force them into greater growth. Before their time they might snap and staunch that which was slowly coming to rise. We cannot force the quiet starts and small sparks within our hearts, but we can gently stay with our process and trust the soft seeds of new life. The sea crooned with muted roars, crickets and starlight hummed. The cards told a story of surrender and rebirth. It was a night for beginnings, recollecting, and oceans roar.

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Back in December I had just finished a really busy season in life. I took on a lot in the year of 2024 and had a lot happening, not just in my private practice, but I did back-to-back choreography projects, which was wonderful. I'm so glad for those opportunities. But it was a lot on top of work and then in the middle of all that, I released Small Pearls, big Wisdom. So I'd been working on this book and I published that and I got through that time and I thought, oh, wow, that was too much. And it was one of those things that you get into the middle of everything and you know it's too much when it's too late and you're not going to quit on anything. And so the only way out was through At least that's how I saw it at the time and I had just wrapped up the project Small Pearls, big Wisdom.

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It came out back in November and like that was off my plate, I'd wrapped up the last choreography project and I knew that I was going into a winter season. The holidays were coming up, I was going to have a little bit of time off and it was just a time to catch my breath and I had this really nice evening of just being with my tarot cards and my journal and feeling like I wanted to write again, writing down little fragments of poetry and my journal, and feeling like I wanted to write again, writing down little fragments of poetry and my journal. That was. This piece was inspired by all of that and just reflecting on how we do go through creative ebbs and flows. There are times where we can't force our words.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright : 22:39

As much as I love having a writing practice and I think that ideally I'd love to write every day, it's not always realistic for me, or maybe I should say I've not made it realistic because I don't necessarily prioritize that. I do write every day in my journal. If nothing else, I write down the date. I at least get the date down and I'll usually write a reflection on how I'm feeling. So I'm going to count that as writing, because I do think that those self-reflective writing practices, I think they feed our creativity. Contemplation feeds creativity. So I do write every day, but I don't necessarily have a practice that I say I'm going to write a poem a day or I'm going to write a little mini story or something like that, to work on the craft.

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As a writer, I usually will wait for inspiration to come and I love the idea that, even if I don't feel inspired, that it still can be really nice to sit down and write something, to stay in practice. But I'm also an advocate that there's times where, like nothing really great is coming out and we're just doing it to maybe keep our skill set sharp but we don't feel particularly inspired and we might be in a lull or in a time in life where our words and our creativity however you might self-express, your creativity just doesn't feel very reinvigorated. And that's okay. There's a reason for that sometimes. Sometimes we're busy, sometimes our soul is under construction and it's got bigger stuff going on in our river, beneath the river, and we're not ready yet to bring together whatever wants to spring forth. There are times that we are creating life and using that energy in other ways. We might be working on some other project and our creative outlet is being channeled into something else, and so our usual artistic practice, our writing practice, feels a little bit quieter. There's a lot of reasons that we go through ebbs and flows.

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It echoes the process of expanding and contracting in life. It echoes the process of expanding and contracting in life. It echoes night and day and life cycles of there's times that we're really active and times that we're in a yin phase, a rest phase, a receiving phase. So that was a time where I was in a receiving phase and I could feel everything stirring again and I was like you don't want to force this, you don't want to make yourself sit down and say what this is before it's time. Just let it happen, just let it unfold.

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I always come back to that when I feel like I'm in a lull phase or an ebb phase and nothing's really flowing is just trusting that I'm receiving and trusting that my words will come together in time and they'll show me what they want them to be. They will help me to feel inspired to do something with them, and I can trust that. I can trust that creative process. Creativity is its own alchemy, it is its own magical brew and, if you noticed, I use a lot of words like elixir and potion and spellcasting and these sort of magical words to describe the writing process.

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It doesn't always feel magical, especially once you've done the magic of writing and you're in the editing and refining phase, if you're publishing, that's a whole other ballgame.

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But that initial spark of writing and where words come from, there's something about that that still feels so beautiful and mysterious to me that sometimes a wave of an idea will just hit us and we'll channel these words or have them pour through us and we can't say exactly what's musing us, but we feel moved by something bigger than ourselves to sit down and put pen to paper or put our fingers on the keyboard or use our voice and speak it into a microphone so we can record it, and we feel moved to create and tell a story in some shape or form. So I hope this April National Poetry Month that at least once you sit down and do something with writing write a little poem, write two lines, make a rhyme, write a haiku, write something, write a vignette of your day, write down your intentions or your vision for your life. Use the inspiration from all the writers and poets out there this month who are engaging in practices and it's at the forefront a little bit more, since it's National Poetry Month. Use that and let it inspire the writer in you.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright : 27:10

Thank you so much for joining me in today's podcast episode. I will be back next week with a new your Heart Magic on psychology, creativity, spirituality, heart wisdom and storytelling. In the meantime, as always, be well, be love, be you and be magic.

Intro/Outro Music: 27:38

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.