Intro/Outro Music: 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: 0:33

Aloha everybody. Welcome to your Heart Magic. This is Dr Bethann Kapansky-Wright, and happy middle of April to everybody. Today we are talking about the concept of metamorphosis and personal transformation and principles for embracing change. This is a favorite topic of mine to talk about and I tend to revisit it in many, many forms on this podcast because it's so relevant to who we are as human beings and spiritual beings.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 1:07

In our human development, we are constantly growing. We are in this world that is changing around us. We know that change is the only constant and, from a soul perspective, we are here to learn and grow and evolve our souls, and so that signifies change too, and I've always found it interesting that change is such a fundamental principle to our existence on multi-dimensional levels. And it's also so hard for us. Our mind can be resistant to it, and resistance can come in different ways. I think when we think about being resistant to change, oftentimes what is the superficial level of that or I guess the surface level is feeling like well, I don't want to change, I want to keep things the same, and certainly that comes up a lot for us, where we feel just really resistant and keep trying to go back to how something used to be, or put something back in a box, or we miss or yearn for how things used to be. But on a deeper level, resistance can pop up in other ways and I often think resistance to change comes out when we really go through these periods where we are changing and we have a lot of self-doubt and we question ourself and we don't trust our process and we think there's something wrong with us or that we're not reacting to the change going on in our life in an adaptive way and we can be very harsh or judgmental or non-compassionate with ourselves and I think that creates resistance too.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 2:45

These are very human things to feel, but at the same time, the more energy we spend on doubting ourselves and questioning ourselves and feeling like we're somehow doing it wrong, the more we are not leaning into the change and we're not open to the change. We're really close to it because we have fear there and I want to emphasize this is very normal, it's very human. We all go through it. So there's nothing wrong with this. We're not not being spiritual or good human beings, whatever that means. We're not being psychologically maladaptive when we feel that way. It's a really normal emotion. But I think that we can learn to continue to stay open to change by noticing those times that we are going through a change process in our life and we're starting to be really hard on ourselves because we think we should be adapting better and doing it better somehow. So those are the kinds of things that I want to talk about today and take a topic that we talk about a lot and put a little bit of a new twist on it and identify some of the sneakier ways that we resist change or doubt change in our own life, and how can we stay open and trust more. So with that, I want to share a passage from Small Pearl's Big Wisdom, and it is called Shapes.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 4:10

We sometimes forget that part of our personal growth and evolution is not just our ability to metamorphosis and change shapes, but our need for those things. This is a need we don't always understand, particularly if we believe our life path is meant to be fixed and that we should have ourselves figured out or have things more well-ordered, organized and tidy. Sometimes we get scared when we begin to question our path, and yet if we don't allow ourselves the space to question, how can we discover more about ourselves and learn to listen to our intuition and soul's urgings for growth. A person could live in a square hole their entire life and never realize they were meant to be round, expansive and growing upwards in gentle spirals of light, even as they do the inner work of spiraling downwards into self-discovery, healing inner wounds and old patterns that no longer serve who they are becoming. Our questions are clues. Our discontent is an invitation to sit with ourselves and reflect. Our urgings and yearnings are opportunities to seek new meaning and engage with the self with curiosity. We are meant for change, built for change, constantly changing, so we best learn how to better embrace change and work with our growth with constructive determination and curiosity. When we feel stuck, rigid or trapped in our lives, we can take a deep breath and allow for the possibility that we are trying to change forms and know ourselves in a new way. We can seek support from those who have walked the path before and allow space for our questions to flow. We can try to trust that through our process of living, we will gradually find the answers to ourselves and a non-linear, imperfect doodle of geometry, heart and alchemy. We too will eventually evolve into new shapes.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 6:22

The Akashic Record said that this entire year the year 2025, was the year of remapping peace, and remapping peace in the sense of I imagine that that is happening on a larger scale, collective scale whether or not things look like that on the surface right now, there's obviously a lot that's being shooken up but remapping peace within ourselves, within our understanding of how we are looking at the world, how we are working with the energies in our life, how we are understanding and expressing ourself and interacting with what's around us. It's a year of change and it's a year of rewiring neural networks and finding new pathways for doing things. It is a year where we thought we were going in one direction and we find ourselves in a completely other, different direction or somewhere very different than what we would have imagined for ourselves a few years back. And how do we make peace with that? How do we renegotiate our equilibrium and our sense of well-being and our sense of balance? How do we remap peace inside of ourselves? And that's the invitation that Spirit has from us this year.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 7:36

According to the Akashic Records and the wisdom there, and for this quarter specifically, one of the things that the records talked about was keeping our hearts open to our change. Keeping our hearts open to this remapping and rewiring process and to allowing ourselves to be different and experience ourselves differently. And I think this is exactly what we're talking about when we think about the topic of embracing personal transformation, embracing metamorphosis and being opening to questioning our experience itself, without resisting that experience and doubting that experience and fearing that we're doing it wrong and shutting it down and getting afraid and closing the door of our hearts on ourself and on witnessing ourself. Sometimes we try and shove ourselves back into an old mold because it's really comfortable and it's easy and it feels so scary, I think, to step into the territory of new. That can be really hard for our minds because it's unfamiliar and it's foreign and it can be highly uncomfortable.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 8:53

But we are allowed to change shapes, and that is what that passage was talking about and that sounds like such a basic thing to say that we're allowed to change shapes. I think that general wisdom people would say well, of course we're allowed to change. Change is nature's way, it's life's way. Of course we're allowed to change. I've often found that knowing that on a mind level, knowing that as a general aphorism or guideline to live by, versus truly immersing ourselves in it and experiencing it and allowing ourselves to be in the change. Those are two completely different things, and so this idea that we are allowed to change shapes.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 9:31

I think we need a lot of reminders of it, because we do keep changing over our lifespan and for many of us, I think, the change can feel very constant. I know for myself, it feels like there's just been one cycle after another, after another for the past few years, and maybe this is part of aging, maybe this is part of just where the world is at right now, where I think it feels like time is speeding up in the sense of the velocity of events going on and also our access to the influx of information. So we're dialed into the amount of things going on around us. If we choose to tune into those things, all of that feels like change is happening at this rapid fire rate, and when I look back and think about being younger, change was going on, but it felt like it was more spaced out or spread out or something like that. So I think it's probably a factor of all those things from some external, bigger cosmic energies, world energies, and then also just my personal experience of being at this current junction in my life, but I don't think that is unique to me.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 10:43

I think that many of us are experiencing this almost constant state of change and just when we think things settle down or are getting comfortable again, it's like more change hits and it's like, oh, now we're adapting to this and oh, now we're adapting to this. And sometimes we haven't fully adapted to something before the next thing's coming along. And more and more we have this invitation just to stay open to our experience and to stay really curious and to make peace with the fact that we're not going back to how things used to be. We're being asked to move forward in energetic ways and ways and in our outer landscape of what's going on in the world, but also in our understanding of how do we make peace with where we're at right now in our lives and in the greater collective. All of that continues to evolve. And so it's this constant invitation to continue to embrace change and, as the passage said, we best learn how to embrace change and work with our growth with constructive determination and curiosity.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 11:52

And that's the piece that's kind of the kicker for many of us, because going through a change process can feel really messy and part of change sometimes is destructive. It is the dismantling of things. It's something that comes to an ending or a completion, within ourselves or within our external world. It is something that sometimes will be disorderly or unruly or chaotic. It can feel chaotic. There's so many ways that change shows up in our life, and so those kinds of energies often feel like big tower energy from the tarot deck. This very destructive lightning hit and things are falling apart. It's not always that dramatic, sometimes it is much more subtle than that, but there is something about the energy of change that requires something to end so something new can begin. That is the dance and the rhythm of life Something dies, something else is reborn, and this plays out in millions of forms, over and over and over again, both literally and energetically and metaphorically.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 13:03

And so how do we stay constructive and curious with that, when part of the nature of change is this disordering, this dismantling of things in order to create a new order? And I think curiosity has a lot to do with it. I think keeping an attitude of play and openness has a lot to do with it. I think any time that we start to identify that we're falling into a fearful place, and fear can look like self-judgment, it can look like condemnation of self. It can look like feeling really frozen and paralyzed and like we can't move because we are overwhelmed. It can look like gripping something really tightly and holding it in our hands and saying I don't want to let this go, I can't let this go, and we do not have to rush these processes of letting go or our feelings or some of the things that are coming up.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 13:58

When we talk about how do we handle change constructively and how do we identify resistance and fear and work with that in a constructive way. It's not about eradicating it. And when we see that in ourselves, saying that's wrong and bad, you're in fear. It's not about judgment. That is the antithesis of what we want to do. We want to introduce compassion, we want to introduce breath, we want to introduce space into that place. We want to step into the role of being the observer of our process.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 14:35

Part of curiosity is being a good observer of our process and so if we notice a place that we have a lot of fear or doubt or big feelings coming up around something, it's being able to move into the role of the watcher and it's being able to access our wiser self so we can say, wow, look at those big feelings there. Look at that big fear, look at that big self-doubt or I'm really judging myself harshly today, I'm being really critical of myself or really critical of other people, and how does that feel to me and how do I feel in my body and how do I feel emotionally and being able to investigate and ask ourselves questions, and it's really hard to remove that self-judgment piece. But that is really the alchemy, I think, of embracing change, if we can take out that voice of criticism, because that's what's really destructive. It's that voice of being self-critical and being judgmental and being really fearful and, in our fear, being very condemning of ourselves. And when we do that, that's usually when we're inflicting self-injury and we start to beat up on ourselves or trash on ourselves or feel really bad about how we're reacting to something, and that's not very useful for overly long.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 15:59

It's maybe useful if we observe that we're starting to go down that road. Maybe in our observation it allows us to ask the question like, wow, I'm hearing a lot of negative self-talk coming out today and is this really how I want to spend my time? Is this really a good use of how I want to direct my energy today, and is there a different way to think about this? Is there a different way to frame this? Is there a different way to stay curious? If nothing else, if we really can't snap out of it and that's valid, sometimes we can't at the very least, maybe we can connect with the desire and say, right now, this is really hard and I acknowledge these big feelings and how difficult these feelings feel and I'd like to believe differently. Please help me, universe. I'm not even sure how to shift this. I don't know if I can shift this right now. This feels so overwhelming, but there's enough of me that would like to that I invite spirit into the mix, or invite higher perspective into the mix, or I invite some form of higher energy into this and please lift me up above the fray.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 17:09

If we can connect with any of that, it's often enough to put breath into that space and invite grace into that space. And grace is this softening energy. It's the great equalizer. Grace just takes over everything and covers it all and smooths it out and brings more peace and harmony into the mix. Grace takes something gritty and ugly and softens it. Grace is like this golden energy, like this layer of gold magic that covers everything and it just makes it a little bit more gentle.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 17:47

Sometimes, when I'm working with my own life and I'm doing some visualization work and I'm working with something in my life that might be a hard situation or something that feels challenging, and I think about, like what do I need in this, what could I use right now? Grace is often something on my list and since I'm big on visualization and I'm a really visual person, the way that I sometimes picture that is, I will think about the week ahead. Let's say I've got a big week and I'm going to need a lot of grace to do all the things that I need to do and to show up and show up in the world the way that I want to and to meet the challenges that I see coming. And I will picture, like these streams of golden light going out before me and just weaving into my week and leaving these little Easter eggs, these deposits of softness or kindness or support or whatever I'm going to need in that moment, and just kind of leaving them ahead like a drop off point for whatever I will need to access in that moment, and just kind of leaving them ahead like a drop-off point for whatever I will need to access in that moment and I just see this golden light just smoothing everything over, and often for me what I'll feel like is that I might not have all the answers, I'm not even sure I know the questions to some of the things that I'm working through. But when I allow grace and work with the energy of grace and invite grace in and allow for its presence and that energetic support and that divine loving alchemy to infuse itself in my life, somehow everything just eases, it feels more peaceful. It feels like I'm remapping peace in my week and I'm looking at a week that might be slightly chaotic and I'm already inviting those energies in so that I'm able to get through it in the most peaceful, easeful way possible. So I think having grace for our change process and working with grace and working with the energy of grace and creative ways is such an integral part of embracing change.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 19:51

And one of the last pieces that I wanted to talk about today is that we cannot rush the process of change. We truly do just have to trust. And that self-trust piece to me is part of the nuts and bolts of how do we keep our hearts open to change, like, how do we do what the Akashic Records said, where they just talked about keeping our hearts open to the change process going on inside of us right now, not hiding away, not judging ourselves, not feeling like we have to fix things or make it better or sort ourselves out, but just staying open and staying curious. I think trust is a very integral part of that and it's something that many of us are challenged to do, because we don't know where things are going and so it can feel like this blind trust, this leap of faith into something unknown, and we don't know how things are going to look when we come out the other side.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 20:47

I can think of a lot of times in life where I felt like I'm standing at a crossroads to solve and sometimes there's a big dramatic decision to make, like leaving a relationship, leaving one place and moving to another, leaving something career-wise and making a big change. Sometimes the crossroads is something that's more internal, where I can feel something shifting in me or I'm realigning values or going through something inside of myself, where I'm shedding an old identity and I'm actively choosing to open to something new. So this energy has shown up in many ways and many forms and I can think so vividly of how many times I've felt this sense of I really don't know how I'm going to look when I come out the other side of this and I don't have control over that. I've been through enough change processes in my life that I've allowed for that evolution of self, that I know enough to know what I don't know. And what I don't know is how it's going to look.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 21:50

I know that in a change process we can keep coming back to our core values and recentering ourselves and coming back into our hearts and listening to whatever wisdom is there. I do think it helps to have something to anchor ourselves to so we don't feel totally lost. So sometimes anchoring is just coming back into our values For me, reminding myself that I trust my heart, I trust my soul, I trust the direction. My life path is unfolding. It hasn't let me down so far, so I'm just going to keep sticking with it and hope that it all works out.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 22:27

I trust my spiritual connection. That connection has been tested and tried and tested again many, many times over and I do trust that there's spiritual support there. I trust my relationship with nature and that nature always feels supporting and always feels uplifting, and nature can sometimes have some harsh conditions within itself, but its wisdom is steady and its wisdom is consistent. And so there's these things that I trust. And then there's these core values, these things that are kind of the essence of Beth Ann and they're just aspects of myself. But I always come back to a place that I have an innate whimsy about me. I like to laugh at life, I love to wear usually bright colors, I am given to creativity, I love to dance. Elements of me that might look like their personality, but they feel more like these weavings and the alchemy of who I am that have changed form but always stayed the same at the same time over the years. And so I'll just come back to those things, things that light me up, things that I value, any attitudes and beliefs that have stayed consistent for me. So that acts as an anchor. But the rest of it, we just have to trust and we have to let go, and we have to trust our soul, trust our heart, trust our future self, trust our spiritual connection, trust life, find something to trust and to work with that energy of trust. And when we are able to dip into the energy of trust, I think it allows us to better embrace change and to better embrace ourselves and trust ourselves.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 24:13

I love the concept that I can trust my future self to figure it out, Because who I am now was my future self five years ago. Six years ago, when I was probably sitting at a crossroads of change and thinking I don't know what's going to happen. Can I trust this? And if I could travel back in time, there's some words of wisdom I would have for my younger self. I think many of us would, but probably one of the things that we would say is I love you, you're going to be okay, you will figure this out, you are a survivor, you're a thriver, you are transformative, you are magic. We would give ourselves something that helped us connect with self-belief and self-trust, and so I love the idea that future Bethann, six months from now, one year from now, five years from now, is in the realm of multiverses, traveling back to me right now, in this moment, and saying stay with yourself, just trust. You can trust me, trust us, trust your soul. We've got this. So with that, I'm going to close today with a little poem from Things of this Nature, words for the Mystic Heart, and it is called you Are the Universe, and I think it sums up what we've been talking about today.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 25:36

I know this is a hard one. It's hard for me too, but sometimes we have to trust in our own higher plan for self. You are part of this universe, are you not? An equal participant in this time and this space? You help speak your life into being. Each day, the lights of one trillion orbs of stardust are running through your veins. You are here, you have purpose, you are powerful, you matter, my dear one. From time to time, everybody loses their way, but though we can't always see the mysteries, we can choose to believe in the power of self and keep learning to be the light that we seek. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. 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: 26:51

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.