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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 have a talk story time episode where I'm going to be sharing some passages from my books and just talking off the cuff about some of the ideas that come through when I share them with you. I love diving into behind the scenes on my writing and whenever I do a Talk Storytime episode, I always pick a central theme, and today the theme is letting go, and this was inspired by the fact that I opened the book and just asked the universe help me find the topic, the theme that wants to be shared today. And it opened to this passage. That was all about letting go and I thought, oh, that feels lovely. I feel like it's a really relevant topic for all of us.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright : 1:24

We are always in a state of letting go, whether we know it or not, and shutting and releasing. And then for the month of May we are having the Scorpio full moon. That's coming up this weekend, so it will have passed by the time this episode comes out, but it is full moon energies. That's all about transformation and release, psychological insight, diving into our psyche and subconscious and emotional waters and finding new perspectives. And, of course, when we find new perspectives and we find new insights and treasures of self. Usually what comes along with that is an invitation to release something or change something and let go of a skin we were wearing that didn't quite fit anymore, or shed an idea. Sometimes it's an identity. Letting go happens in very small ways, where we don't always notice that it's going on, and sometimes it happens in these huge, revelatory ways where we obviously have a sense that we are in the middle of change. So I'm opening today with sharing a passage from Small Pearls, big Wisdom, and this is called Questions for Letting Go. It's the one that I opened to earlier when I asked the universe what should I talk about on the podcast. So we are going to start there today.

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How do we help ourselves when we realize we are clinging to something and we need to let go? How do we begin to create space and loosen our attachment? A good place to start is by staying curious and investigating our experience to find insight into why we feel stuck. If we start to understand our hesitations, motivations, fears and other unconscious patterns, we can find new awareness. We begin to see what's blocking us and how we might be holding ourselves back from experiencing greater freedom and peace of heart. This supports us in making more conscious choices to help us find a way to begin to let go For times of stuckness. Here are a few questions that might feel helpful to use as contemplation tools and journaling prompts to better understand your dynamics and find new insight. What am I gaining by holding on to this? What is stopping me from letting go? Who would I be without this? What am I afraid will happen if I let this go? How would it change me if I didn't have this in my life? How might it feel if I were to let this go? Stay curious. Start digging deep. Start finding your truth by figuring out what is driving you to hold on so hard. Begin figuring out where you feel stuck and take small steps towards softening your grip, doing release work and surrendering your attachment. As we work on loosening just one knot of our attachments, we find that other things that have been feeling knotted shift as well. We begin to feel more open, we start to see our way through what has held us back from release and feel more empowered to keep choosing new space.

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You know it's interesting, as I was reading that it always strikes me one that we live on a planet of change. Change is the constant and we resist it so much. It's such a strange paradox of being human. We're built for change, we're hardwired for it. We are creative beings, we evolve in our own self and we evolve throughout our lifespan. We evolve developmentally from being a baby to growing up, to becoming elderly, to going through death and dying and losing this form, and then crossing over into the mysteries and into the afterlife. And so we are built for change.

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We are constantly changing, the planet is changing around us, and for so many of us, the idea of letting go is so hard. And I think it's because we sometimes have a sense of what we're ready to let go of, or our ideas of what we want to let go of, as if we can control the letting go process. And so I think that's part of what's so scary about it that when we realize we're holding on really tightly to something and that we need to loosen our grip and let go, there's this fear of what if I have to give up this thing entirely? What if I have to give up other things? Who might I be without this? There's something about the unknowing and knowing that once we let that domino start tipping and it starts tipping into all these other dominoes. We don't know where they're going to land. Right, we can't control the process, we can't control change, we can't control development and who we're going to become.

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We can point our hearts in the right direction, we can invoke spiritual support and say I'm about to loosen my grip and I'm terrified and I don't know what I'm doing or where I'm going or how this is going to work out. So please help me every step along the way, please support me. We can do all of those things so that we feel supported and nourished in the process. But ultimately we can't go to somebody, even somebody who's incredibly psychically gifted, and say what happens if I let go, and could you give me a picture and a guarantee of what the future is going to look like? And it just doesn't work like that.

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Sometimes we have to jump, we have to release, we have to loosen our attachment, and we're absolutely terrified to or we don't realize that we're stuck and we're in denial about it, and so we won't even begin to ask ourselves those questions or we avoid those questions. We might know that we need to, but we don't want to do too much digging because we might feel, if I start to pull at the threads that are holding this together, this whole thing might unravel. And there are times in our life where we might feel that we are balancing on the cusp of something or not in a place for a huge letting go. I absolutely respect that. I think that's very true. Sometimes the universe might force our hand and it will happen anyways.

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But one of the reasons when I wrote this passage, that I wrote these questions to ask ourself, was this more gentle examination of just being curious about the letting go process and allowing oneself to contemplate the possibility. It can't hurt to think about it. It can't hurt to gently say what am I so attached to? What am I afraid of? What are my fears here? What's good about this? Is there something that I still like or something that I am connected to and I don't want to lose that? I want to let go of this one piece, but I really want to make sure I hang on to this piece. That's good, and I'm afraid if I release this one hand, the other is going to let go as well. Just being curious and compassionate in our process Sometimes, when we are going through letting go and going through release.

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It's not always dramatic as having to sever something entirely. I've often found that letting go happens in degrees and shades and if we ever reach a place where it's big, dramatic change, we might look back and say there was so many pieces along the way that I gradually loosened my grip and that finally allowed me to get to this place where I was able to walk away from this or release it entirely. So we don't have to be afraid to ask ourselves these questions. And that leads me to my next passage, because this is about letting go, but it's also about hanging on. And to give a context to this, I wrote this. It's in Lamentations of the Sea, and Lamentations is the grief book I wrote immediately after losing my brother Brent. It came out about almost on the year anniversary of losing him, and so a lot of the passages in here were written in the first nine months. So they were written in a place where I was still in the trenches of grief and it was so tender and close to my heart.

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I was living the process of letting go. It was forced change, right? Losing Brent was this forced change? I had no control over it One minute. I had a brother and I had a sibling, and the next minute I didn't, and it happened that fast with him. I've shared it on the podcast before. But he had a blood clot that broke off and so it happened that fast with him. I've shared it on the podcast before. But he had a blood clot that broke off and so it really was this instantaneous loss and it was forced change. But the emotional piece of grieving and choosing to let go, choosing to go through that process, that was something else entirely that was on me and that happens for each of us at our own pace and time when we are going through grief. So this is called Balloons and it's passage 96 from Lamentations of the Sea. As much as I'd like to be like the proverbial girl in the picture about to release the last of her balloons, I have never found release to be this easy.

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Letting go of something doesn't take place in one fell swoop or a single instance. It happens in small bits and pieces, the time you cried it out over there, the time you sat with your sad over here. It happens in the quiet of your waking hours and it happens in the deep of your subconscious as you sleep. It happens as you take brave steps forward and it happens as you create new memories to add to your timeline that help soften the distance between the immediacy of the things you're trying to release. It happens in giant bursts, in small drops and all the in-betweens where you find yourself just trying to do the work of living life.

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Letting go is a process and not an immediate one. We are best served by releasing all expectations of time constraints on when we should let go. 25 years might pass and your heart will still ache in that same spot, reminding you how great the magnitude of consequence that occupied that place. So hold those balloons for as long as you need and only release when you know good and well it is time We'll let go. When we let go and only if it's right for our heart. There are some things we're meant to keep forever, some loves that run so deep they are eternally bound.

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A couple things came through as I was reading that passage. One of them is I have been the girl in the picture with the balloons and I'm going to tell that story in a moment, but before I dive into that memory, I wanted to share that I think grief is a different layer and level of letting go. There's no rhyme or reason to what we hold on to. You can find people that are stuck in so many ways or hanging on to something that somebody else could easily let go of. So there's not some hierarchy or it's easier to let go of this versus this. But I do think when it comes to losing a loved one, losing a beloved animal companion, losing somebody that has passed over onto the other side they've died and they're no longer here, but we're here.

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I think that is a different experience with letting go, and part of how I reconciled my experience of grief is not being black and white about it. It's not like you have this big release and all the sudden things are healed. It's more that we keep moving forward. While we grieve, we keep releasing something it could be something that belonged to them and clearing space. It could be freeing up a little bit more room in our heart and letting go of something that was an attachment to them so that we can step into a new space of self. It could be letting go of anger or bargaining or some of the feelings that we've held on to with our grief and moving into more of a space of acceptance.

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But I've often written about how there's some part of me that will always be unpeaceable with the fact that he's gone, and I think that's true. I think that the majority of me has acceptance, and just has this radical acceptance of this is what happened, and I've been living with it now for nine years. So I've been living with it for a while, but a little bit like the yin and the yang. There's this dot in me that feels like my younger self and she feels a little bit more like this is unacceptable and I am not okay with this and I just can't believe this happened and I had to make space that some part of myself, some part of my psyche, some part of my trauma from that might just feel stuck and that I can choose to recognize that and love on it and be peaceful with it. I don't have to force letting go to look like anything. I can make space for all experiences of self, and so when I wrote that passage balloons it was this permission to be where you're at when you're going through a very painful letting go and going through grief or something that has really caused you to say I don't know that I can do this, I'm forced to let go of it, but I don't know if I can and to say like there's no time limit to any of this.

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You get to work at your own pace. You get to figure out what this looks like for you. You get to be in charge of your own narrative around letting go and narrate your story and your life and find perspective that works for you. You get to do all of that. There's nothing forced here. So give yourself permission to honor whatever it is that you feel, and please don't rush that process. If somebody tells you you need to move on and you're not ready to listen to your heart on that, you'll know. You'll know when you're ready to release a little bit more, you'll figure it out. You'll know what that step looks like. And if you're really, really stuck and you don't know what it looks like, that's when you ask for support from somebody that is wise and trusted and can help you figure out what that step looks like for you, but there's certainly not a sense of false pressure or timeline that needs to be attached to it.

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As for my story about being the girl with the balloons, years ago in 2011, on the day that my divorce was official and we'd gone to court and signed the paperwork and everything about it was just awful. I anybody who's been through that process perhaps it's a relief and you were more at peace. But there's just so much about that time that's just surreal and sad and hard for me. Even now, after all these years, when life has moved so far on and I have peace with what happened. I look back and there's still a lot of emotion if I really let myself sit in that timeline.

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But I was really insistent that I wanted to try and do something positive that day and something to be constructive about what I was feeling, and so I got all these balloons. I didn't realize at the time that might not have been the best choice environmentally we don't know what we don't know and I marched up this mountain with all these balloons and a big garbage bag to keep them secure, because I was climbing Bird Ridge back in Alaska and it's a bit of a hike to get to the top. It's really steep, but I was into mountain running at the time and I went to the top of Bird Ridge. I went to the peak up there and I released the balloons and they were meant to symbolize letting go and letting go of so much of who I'd been and how I'd understood myself within the context of that relationship. This younger Bethann I was in the middle of, who I'd been and how I'd understood myself within the context of that relationship. This younger Bethann I was in the middle of, and I'd already gone through this initial awakening process and continued to be in a lot of transformation and awakening, and so it was this deeply symbolic thing. At the time I knew that it wasn't like this final release and everything was going to be great when I went down the mountain.

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But I do believe in being intentional about who we want to be in this world, and I wanted to be intentional about moving forward and saying I know I need to keep moving. I can't look back. I can't live in the past. We can't build a museum for ourselves out of our grief or our memories. And there's been times in my life that there are memories or identity of a younger self and I feel called back into it. It's like I want to like crawl into the recesses of something that felt happier or safer or warmer, more secure, crawl back into an old identity or an old space where I knew who I was or I have these positive associations with it. I've gone through some of those things when I have been going through grief, but I always try and compass myself to the idea that feel your feelings.

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It's okay to acknowledge all this but bring it back to a space eventually of saying but life isn't lived backwards, it's lived forwards. And though we might be infinite souls and energetically and spiritually, time is limitless, our time here on this linear timeline is limited and we don't get to do a repeat, we don't get to go back. There's no life there. Life is lived forward and if you feel like something's dying in you because you are releasing something and it's painful to let it go, you have to trust that when something dies, something else is reborn. We see this all the time in nature. We see this in our life cycle. We see this in so many ways when we shed something and we end up birthing something else in its place. We are constantly in that transformation process and I love the metaphor of the Phoenix, of just igniting and burning and shedding and it looks like all is over and the Phoenix hasenix has died, and then it rises from the ashes and comes back and new form and it's stronger than before.

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I have always found this to be true and I put my faith in that. And at the time when I was going through my divorce, I was really at the beginning of that journey. I didn't have this stockpile of experiences. I think I was 34 at the time and I'd been through some things, but I hadn't been living life in such an awakened heart place, and so I'm not sure if I consciously would have had the knowledge at the time and said when something dies, something new is reborn. I think I was really in the middle of that lesson and learning what that meant to me, and in the middle of learning about transformation and that something new will always come. There's always new life on the other side. And now I'm further down my journey, more time has passed, and so I put my faith in that, because I've seen it time and time again.

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It does not make it easier when I am facing a passage where I feel like I need to release something and I'm scared and I don't want to and I don't know what it's going to look like and I feel lost or confused. It doesn't really make it easier, but I can use that knowledge to say you have to trust, you know something good will come from this and you don't get to see it right now. That's part of the leap and the allowing ourselves to let the universe support us and dive into the mysteries and be in our hearts and step into the wild unknown. It's to not know and to take the journey anyways and see what happens. It's to walk into the darkness without a guarantee of what it's going to look like and where we're going to end up, who we'll meet as travel companions. It is to allow ourselves to feel foreign, sometimes in our own lives or our own bodies or the journey that we're on, and there is an element of trust in there and surrender, and maybe even knowing that there are going to be times where we want to lose faith and say I'm terrified, I don't know what's coming on the other side, and that when we are asked to let go, those feeling states are part of the process. But feelings are fluid and they don't last and we always figure it out and find our way through, and that is so beautiful about the mystery of change and the mystery of letting go.

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The last piece I want to share today is not one that I'd originally picked out. I had a different one that I was going to talk about, but, as I was musing out loud right now with all of you, about letting go and trusting the wild unknown, trusting this mysterious process that when we release something, something that we're being called to let go of, and we dare to venture into the unknown space, that we will find our way through and something will be waiting on the other side. And as I was saying all that, I saw this passage from Small Pearls, big Wisdom flash in my mind and I'm going to share that instead, because it speaks to my heart today and I hope it speaks to you the Ongoing Unknowing. It happens in layers and waves, over many moon cycles, sea tides and the turns of the season's trees. We peel back old pieces, release mistruths and shed pale imitations as we move closer to our authentic selves.

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It's not a one-time process but an ongoing unknowing of self so we can know ourselves in more soulful ways.

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We unbecome to become.

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We unknit old threads to knit the new. We wander outside old lines to discover new terrain. We heal in small, intentional increments, big messy squiggles and little grace notes that help us patch together a bigger, wiser mosaic of self. We lose ourselves to find ourselves and then find ourselves again ourselves to find ourselves and then find ourselves again, all of it working together in a gorgeous alchemical process of soul as we keep moving closer to love, our purpose and our truth. If we can find joy in the unknown, embrace our void, trust things to unfold and remember that love knows us and we know love, then love becomes the thread that keeps leading us through the labyrinth of change and bringing us to a new beginning.

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This is one of life's greatest mysteries and endless treasures the ongoing unknowing I will never be able to put language to the infinite mysteries of the heart's ability to be perennial. Something dies and something new is reborn. We grieve and our grief waters the grounds for a new life, and somehow grace wraps around it all. But I will gratefully put my trust in this bigger process, stay my course and put my faith in the path of love. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. I will be back next week with the new your Heart Magic episode. In the meantime, have a beautiful week and, as always, be well, be loved, be you and be magic you've been listening to your Heart Magic with Dr Bethann Kapansky-Wright.

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tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your light.