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: 0:32

Aloha everybody. Welcome to your Heart Magic. This is Dr Bethann Kapansky-Wright, and today we are talking about dreams and visions and what happens when you are following your dreams and trying to create a bigger vision for your life and it's just not quite going the way that you want it to. How do we interpret that and work with that and navigate that? And this episode was inspired because of the time of the year. It is Memorial Day today. As I'm making this. This episode will be dropping this week and for me, memorial Day is this really special holiday that has nothing to do with the actual meaning of Memorial Day and everything to do with my own journey and the fact that it is the anniversary of making this big decision back in 2016 that I was going to close my private practice in Anchorage, alaska, and move to the island of Kauai.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 1:34

I have told this story before on the podcast, but if you've never heard it or you don't remember it, really quick recap 2016 is the year that I lost my brother Brent. That was in January of that year and I've talked a lot about over those first initial few months of grief. Not only was I in the heart and the thick of my grief journey. But I could feel something changing in me and I knew enough at the time to know that I wasn't going back to the Beth Ann, that I was before this huge loss in my life, that I had just been through something that would be life-changing, and I had a sense, like this vision, that there was something hatching or being born within me. It was really. It's hard to put into words. I wrote about it a lot in Lamentations of the Sea at the time and tried to capture that felt sense into language. But part of what came out of that time for me was this desire to live braver and to be bolder and to not wait for life to happen to me, but make things happen in my life. And I really started to question stories. I was telling myself things that might be holding me back. It gave me a lot of courage to make me want to take a leap of faith in life sooner rather than later.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 2:57

So this idea of moving to the island of Kauai which is something that I'd kicked around with my husband at the time but that was like five or six years out it really got fast forwarded and I had this day of Memorial Day of 2016, that it was just this beautiful, wonderful day and I bought all these flowers and did a lot of art and I just had a lot of space to be me and to be creative. And I'd really been feeling stuck and a rut in my life in Alaska for a while, and that was more than just losing Brent. There's many pieces to that. My soul had been trying to urge me to move for a while, I think, and was really trying to grow and I just did not have space for it and that current version of Bethann. And so the next day, as I got into my car and I was driving for the office, I felt like I was on repeat. I was so ready for change and it was coming from this very deep, primal, soulful space within me and, I think, from this very cosmic, higher self, wiser self space outside of me.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 4:06

And I remember thinking I am not going to be doing this this time. Next year I will not be in my car, going to the office, feeling stuck and feeling like I'm in the movie Groundhog Day and just repeating the same things. I'm going to figure this out, like I'm gonna make this happen. And I just remember making this decision like let's do this move, let's do this thing, and starting those dominoes falling by saying I will not be here a year from now. And I've told this story quite a bit, that I did not manifest the move in 52 weeks, but I did manifest it in 56 weeks and one year and one month later we found ourselves moving to the island of Kauai.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 4:50

So that's my history of Memorial Day, and every year I always take a little bit of time to reflect on that as this personal, meaningful point in my life that helps me check back in with well, how have things unfolded since making this decision? And every year I will think about well, where are things at now? Where are things at now? Some years I might ask myself is it looking how you thought it would? What if it's not? How would 2016, beth Ann feel as she could pop forward and see where life is at now? What might this version of Beth Ann say if I could travel back to my younger self and give her a message? So it just is an interesting reflection point for me, and I always talk about something having to do with our dreams, our heart visions, on the podcast to celebrate this day, I want to share a story today that I originally wrote on my blog.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 5:47

I later scaled it down and turned it into a writing for my latest book, small Pearls, big Wisdom, which is available online on Barnes and Noble and Amazon and other major online retailers. But the original version that I'm sharing today came from my blog and I'm going to read it in sections and pause for a reflection in between to explore more of the topic of dreams and visions. And how do we stay with a vision when it doesn't look how we thought it would. So this is called Parachutes call to share that with the world. And how best do I direct my focus at this time in order to keep building my dreams of writing, speaking and teaching?

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 6:49

I sense revelation and renewed vision are getting closer, but they're not quite here, and something I've definitely learned during my time on Kauai is you can't force a vision before its time. It is the act of sorting and grappling with our questions which helps clear our mind and heart to set the stage for when the bigger picture is ready to come into the light. It's coming, it's close. I can feel it through instinct, intuition, a felt sense, messages from spirit, signs and synchronicities, a resonance in my heart that says trust the timing, know it's getting closer and when it arrives, you will be asked to take a leap of faith. I don't know exactly what it is, but something else I've learned during my time on this island is that you can't control what vision you'll receive. Could be a new book or project. Could be a new collaboration opportunity. Could be a newfound sense of purpose. Could be bringing something that feels dead in the water back to life. Only time will tell. Something that feels dead in the water back to life, only time will tell.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 8:04

I have come to learn on this beautiful, terrifying, electric, kawaii journey of reinvention that I can trust whatever shows up. I've come to learn that each piece, each insight, each tiny epiphany and giant revelation is all leading me somewhere. Each losing of self, each newfound truth, each contraction and expansion is all leading me somewhere. Each doodling, each wandering, each confusing and musing it is all leading me somewhere. I wrote that about three years since I had moved over here, so it was a few years ago now, and at the time I was learning so much about trying to form a bigger vision for my life and I was winging it sometimes, and following these things in my heart.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 8:53

I knew that at the core of this vision that I had purpose teaching about heart wisdom, though it took me forever just to ground that language and realize that that was a calling of mine to teach people how to listen to their hearts and how to distinguish that wisdom and how to come into their hearts and learn the voice of their soul and learn the voice of their inner self. I knew that being a psychologist was still a part of it, but more so that it was not so much one-on-one work at that point in time but more to do with writing and teaching and speaking. And I knew that my spiritual connection and my intuition and my creativity, that all those things that lit my heart up, were all part of some bigger vision and purpose for my life, of some bigger vision and purpose for my life. And I'd been searching for it so hard, sometimes so hard, that I spent a lot of time getting in the way of myself and doubting myself and questioning myself and looking so hard for what was right before me. And what was right before me was just the next piece.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 9:54

And that's one of the most fundamental things visions that I've learned is that we often receive them piece by piece and you can't force them. You cannot force a bigger picture of a life purpose or a life vision, whether that is your big, huge life purpose and vision, or whether it's just a vision and purpose for right now, something that renews your heart and your sense of being in the world. You cannot force it before it's time, heart and your sense of being in the world. You cannot force it before it's time. You can be open to it, you can call it in, you can put your intention out there and say hello, universe, here I am, I am searching for this, I am ready, like, hit me, I am ready for it, bring it into my heart. You can do all of that to prepare yourself for it, but you can't make it happen.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 10:40

And I've learned that if we try and force it and make it happen and try and ground it or put language to it or interpret it, that it's a little bit like taking all these pieces of a puzzle and putting them together, except we don't know what the puzzle is and we're probably missing a few of the pieces. So we try and force things to fit that might not really fit and we interrupt ourselves and interrupt the process and the whole point of learning to dance with spirit and dance with the universe and be in relationship with life and let the vision show itself to us just as much as we commit to following the vision. It's a symbiotic relationship. It's a relationship that is alive and there's synergy to it and there's a lot of room for creative alchemy in the mix. So I was in the thick of those lessons and having to learn that the best thing that we can do is open our heart and trust what shows up and know that if we are searching for a vision, searching for an intention, looking for a purpose to ground ourselves in, and we're putting it out there like we are having our conversations with our spiritual connection, we're in our hearts and we are saying help me see my purpose right now, help me make meaning of this, help me understand this that we're not going to miss it, that we're not going to somehow pass by it and not realize that it was right there, that we are going to be presented with it piece by piece and divine timing and order and end the timing and order that's right for us and our journeys and the things that need to line up.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 12:19

So, moving on with my reading, back to parachutes, when I first arrived here almost three years ago, I didn't understand I could trust the alchemy of my process. I didn't realize all the small pieces, creative musings and questions of my heart were all working together to guide my steps. I expected specifics, concrete, a blueprint. I expected a strong sense of vision would show up, opportunity would knock and I would be filled with a sense of spiritual purpose and vigor. Then I'd get to work building this new thing that would set me on my new path.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 12:58

What I found instead is that the path isn't linear. It's been a spiral of change, healing, manifestation, confusion, constant calibration and divine force that keeps pulling me deeper into the heart of the universe, asking me to surrender and trust on greater levels. Though I haven't always liked it, I've come to respect the journey and I've come to see how terribly boring it would have been if my original expectations were met. Sure, I have to admit there is some part of me that sees how the certitude and early success would have been wonderfully satisfying. Yet I've come to appreciate the wild ride life has taken me on, where I don't know what's around the bend, where I create each step on the path as I go and where I have acres of space to roam the cosmos of my heart in search of my ongoing questions of self. It is a gift to be able to ask the questions, a gift that I didn't have space for back in the structure of my old Alaskan life. I had stability, but I didn't have much room for expansion. Then I moved to Kauai so I could have room for expansion, and I spent the first couple years frustrated that I hadn't yet created a sense of stability. I kept expecting to land, to get my feet firmly under the, to create a new vehicle for my work, prosperity and purpose. Instead, transition, transformation and trust are the themes of the last few years.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 14:32

And something else I've learned in this time is if we are seeking a life of juicy, intuition, wild expansion and the creative freedom to fully express and live the dreams in our heart, then we are going to have to learn to find peace in the middle of flux and flow. Asking the questions and finding the courage to live the questions is part of a vision. It's part of what we're meant to learn as we dive into the heart of whatever vision spirit has for our life. Our higher self has for our life. Our soul blueprint holds for us the questions and grappling with the questions and searching for the answers is part of that vision. It's part of how we learn and how we grow. It's often part of where we might find truly delightful discovery that gives us these clues and insights into our soul path and helps us find this resonance of self and sense of not just purpose but a sense of certainty that we are on the right path.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 16:08

Questions are a part of the vision and it's a gift when we have space in our life to ask the questions. It's also a gift to know what questions to ask, and I wrote a line in there that I didn't have space in my old Alaskan life to live my questions. But as I was reading it today, I had the thought I'm not sure I knew what questions to ask, and I think that was part of what this move was for me, outside of Kauai being such a different atmosphere than Alaska and I spent almost 40 years in Alaska, so I had a lot of old, familiar ruts and grooves and things that really anchored me there and I needed to, I think, pop myself out of that and shake up life so much that I was out of my element and in a more vulnerable place and allowed to see things differently. And it was so funny because I left all this security and stability and some of it looked really foolish on paper and a move that really interrupted what I'd been creating in this middle stream of my life and was like, hey, you're going to start over and you're going to build life back up again and start from the ground up.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 17:20

And then I was out of sorts because I didn't feel stable and I was really missing some of the things that anchored me, and it was in that space of the nebula and feeling so uncertain that I had the most growth and I really learned you're not meant to feel certain right now. You're meant to continually surrender and you're not meant to know exactly what you'll be doing six months from now or how life is going to look. You're meant to follow this path and to have the space and the freedom to explore that, and that time was such a gift because it was a season. My life is no longer in that place. I still don't know exactly how things might look six months or a year from now, but that's true for any of us, right? Anything could happen in life. There's all these wild cards that we might get dealt that we didn't see coming, but I do have a sense of what might be happening in my work and where I'm living, and there are some things in life now that are much more set than they were back then, and so it was a gift to have all this space and a gift to live the questions. Living those questions are a huge part of our sense of purpose and the vision we often find so many things that help us build a foundation of soul, knowledge that we came here to discover and to live, and it would be so boring if we were to say, okay, I did it, I took my leap of faith and now can I get my instructions? Tell me exactly how it's going to look? I did the big hard thing. I leapt. I didn't know where I was going to land, I did it. Can I have my blue ribbon and my blueprint please? And it doesn't work like that.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 18:57

I've actually done quite a few Akashic readings for people that will sometimes come, and they are trying to manifest a bigger vision. For example, they might say I feel like I'm supposed to be doing more right now with my work and I'm really good at maybe spiritually coaching people, but I don't know exactly how to go about doing that. I don't know how to create that. Or maybe they have some beautiful, bold idea that hasn't been done and they don't know how to take some of their creative gifts and talents and ground that and channel that into, perhaps, an offering that they maybe feel called or like they're supposed to be doing.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 19:35

And so often when I'm in somebody's Akashic records, one of the pieces of guidance that I'll get is that you're meant to create this, you are on the right track, but you're meant to call it into you and to get to figure out the steps as you go. And if we were to give you this step-by-step instruction right now and say here's what you're going to call yourself, here's how you're going to do it and here's the next step that you need to take, like yeah, that would feel really good, it would sure make it easier right, talk about having certainty. But you would be so diligent that you would do exactly what you thought it was supposed to be, and you would have this fixed vision, this fixed idea then, of what your path was supposed to look like. And you would be this really diligent student and you would do it and you would miss the wild, juicy expansion of dancing with life and learning all these insights that are actually going to better serve you and help you figure out how to create this thing. You'd miss the lessons in trust and surrender. You'd miss the spiritual growth.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 20:41

Perhaps you would miss spiritual gifts and opportunities to travel closer to the heart of the universe and to be closer to your heart and spiritual connection. You would trade certainty and the sense of knowledge. This is what I'm supposed to do. You would exchange that and you would give up the time that you're going to spend traveling in the wild unknown. And that's where the gifts are, that's where the magic is, that's where the excitement is. It is on that edge of knowing and not knowing and having to seek for it. That is where you're going to lose yourself and fall off the edge of yourself and question yourself is where you're going to lose yourself and fall off the edge of yourself and question yourself. And you're going to find oh, I've been traveling in the right path all along, I just couldn't see it. And you will miss that joyful adventure and the sense of wonder that will come from that, and we don't want that for you. There is no fun in that there's no life in that, there's no magic in that. So choose that path, because that is how you are going to get, to come closer to the heart of the universe, the heart of your soul, the heart of spirit. It's going to bring you into your heart wisdom and it's going to require you to live a much more radical path of authenticity because you're not going to know. You're going to have to trust and trust yourself and trust your path and trust your soul. We want that for you. So you're not gonna get the blueprint, but you will get whatever peace you need for this moment so you can keep following your path and keep surrendering to trust.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 22:16

All right, finishing this off, part three of parachutes. The closer we travel to and with the heart of the universe, the more we will be asked to keep leaping. Certainty doesn't leave a lot of room for spiritual growth. Leaps of faith are the only way. We are pushed so far out of our comfort zone that we are forced to expand beyond our previous ideas and understandings and seek higher perspective and new ways of being. During the leap, we likely won't know where we are going. We won't know quite where we'll be landing. Yet there is potential here for us to surrender the need to know in favor of embracing the soulful growth that comes from the process. We will be asked to trust the process in bigger and bigger ways, and though we may feel we are free falling through the cosmos, I have learned through experience the more we learn to trust the process, the more we realize we have a parachute on our back the entire time, guiding us safely into new terrain.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 23:21

All we have to do is pull the cord. We pull the cord each time we stop focusing on the feeling we are free-falling through air and instead choose to turn inwards. To turn inwards, we pull the cord when we tune into our hearts, our intuition, our spiritual connection, our instincts, our inner knowing and our feelings. We pull the cord when we open the eyes of our heart to the truth that the eyes of our mind can't always see. We are always supported, guided and held. The parachute is our truth.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 23:54

The free fall is just an illusion. It is the journey through unknown space that is our gateway to knowledge and our initiation to understanding our divinity and our unique relationship with the magic of the mysteries. It is through that understanding that we are then driven to create, build and manifest change in our material world that aligns with the truth of our soul In an effort-oriented, results-focused, product-driven society. I am coming to see we have it all backwards. First we receive the vision and new knowledge through undergoing the process. Then we create, align change from this space of new knowledge. What might life look like if we knew we were always carried? What might life look like if we focused on the parachute and not the fall?

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 24:48

I think a lot more space would open up for each of us Space to trust, space to be curious, space to recognize the subtle ways we try and control the outcome, space to seed our need to know for a more magical, soul-quenching life of mystery and wonder. There's not a lot of wonder found in certitude. There's security, there is a sense of predictability, and there are spaces in our life where it's nice to have a sense of certainty and predictability, but when it truly comes to the path of our heart and manifesting our dreams and our visions and the most soulful parts of us that require us to trust in the process and trust in something beyond just our own little efforts and our ego-driven stuff and instead open up to our heart connection, our spiritual connection, to dancing with the cosmos and the universe and being a co-participant in this creative life force and life flow. When it comes to all of that, no risk, no magic. There is no wonder found in certitude. Wonder is found on that wild creative edge where we allow ourselves to step off the edge of what we knew so that we can create a bigger pathway of expansion, magic, authenticity and daring to manifest the visions and dreams placed in our hearts.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 26:24

Thank you so much for joining me in this episode of your Heart Magic. I will be back next week and we will be talking about a topic related to my favorite things psychology, spirituality, creativity, heart, wisdom and storytelling. In the meantime, have a beautiful week and, as always, be well, be love, be you and be magic.

Intro/Outro Music: 26:52

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.