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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 : 0:32

Aloha everybody, welcome to your Heart Magic. This is Dr Bethann Kapansky-Wright, and happy June to you. Today we are talking about the idea of holding space for complexity in our lives and specifically holding space for the full of our experience, for both sorrow and joy, beauty and awfulness, happiness, and when we feel challenged and we're struggling. At the same time and this is a little bit of a build on the theme of Gemini season. A couple episodes ago, in the archetypes of Gemini episode, we were talking about the idea that life is both and that Gemini offers us this invitation to bridge what might seem dichotomous, what might seem like it doesn't go together the light and the shadow, the feminine and the masculine, the spiritual and the human and to take those two experiences that can be really different and build a bridge between the two of them so that we hold space for both of them and that when we are able to develop the mental and emotional capacity to do that, we are supported in living with more peace and the nuance, with finding contentment in life's complexities and creating a set point inside of ourselves, inside of our nervous system, inside of our ability to ground and be centered within ourselves, of creating a set point that is more calm and peaceful and able to experience wellness in life. So I want to begin today with reading a really simple poem and talking about a few concepts related to the idea of holding space for our emotional and experiential complexities. This poem was originally published in May of 2016, and it's pretty short and it is simply called and. And it's going to hurt a while longer and you're still going to find beauty, and you're going to break a little and you're going to grow a great deal and you're going to discover that such is life Everything in the spectrum felt, live, experienced as a whole, joined together by the, and I originally published that post on my blog, sunshine in Winter, back in May of 2016. And I feel like it made its way into one of my books, but I sure couldn't find which one. I think it's published in my one book that I didn't check, cranberry Desk, which is a poetry book that I published back then and that is available on Amazon, if you are a lover of nature-inspired poems, and when I was writing this poem, I was actually in the car in Oregon, leaving Cannon Beach somewhere on the road, and it was this really profound time in my life.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright : 3:35

I've talked about quite a bit that 2016 was the year that I lost my brother, brent, and this Oregon trip was a trip to go see my husband's family and during the time there I was in such an interesting space of feeling grief, just drinking in the beauty of Oregon in the spring and the bright colors and the flowers and the trees. I had the idea for my grief book Lamentations of the Sea come through during that trip. It literally came when I was on this trail with these huge giant trees they have this very, very ancient history and it was on that tree-laden trail that I was hiking that I had this idea to do the grief book and to write it in such a way that I just did a collection of writings on grief, as opposed to this very formal chapter one through chapter whatever, and telling a more linear narrative. My idea was why don't you just put everything that you've done on grief together in this collection? And this idea for 111 passages came through on that trail that day and this is about four months, four and a half months after losing my brother, and so I was beginning to open back up to life a little bit, but I still felt pretty grief stricken and my nervous system and my emotional system still felt pretty pressed down upon.

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I remember laughing and having moments of goodness, but I didn't feel like myself. I didn't feel like I had that unfettered ability to feel good, to feel joy. I really felt like grief created this depression inside of me. And by depression I don't mean the clinical sense of being in a clinical depression, I mean like being pressed down upon. When something is pressed on and there's this hole or this void or something inside of you, that's what it felt like. And in that void, in that hole, a lot of the things that I usually would have experienced as goodness were just falling right through. I just could not feel them and I think my nervous system too was just absolutely exhausted. And when our nervous system is exhausted, when we have been through anything that has really taxed us any kind of tragedy, trauma, anything physically that has just taken everything that we've had in order to get through it, a lot of times the intensity of emotion and the intensity of feeling joy or goodness or beauty or some of those higher feeling states it's really difficult to access them. So I remember having these little flashes, these glimmers of hope and joy and goodness, and opening back up and feeling tired and weary of soul and also feeling hopeful again and feeling that I was starting to have creativity and books stirring inside of me.

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I was working on my book Freebird Fridays and that had come through at the time and I was just in this place of appreciating life's complexities that it's about, and it's about the good and the bad and the joy and the sorrow, and the beauty and what's ugly and terrible and wonderful, and the beauty and what's ugly and terrible and wonderful. And since I had so viscerally lived that truth, I felt inspired to write this little poem that sounds like such a simple wisdom. But even simple wisdoms can hit us in a really profound way when we are in the middle of experiencing them and living them, as opposed to just thinking about them or regurgitating them because we read a quote somewhere, saw a meme on Instagram or something like that. When we are experiencing a life's wisdom, it hits us in an all new way. That's why wisdom at its core is extremely simple and it's also incredibly complex and hard to embody.

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We come back time and time again to many of the same lessons in our lives and we learn them and take them a little bit deeper. We apply them in a more nuanced way than we did before. So for me at that time, learning to hold space for all of it and being like it's going to keep hurting and it's going to be beautiful and terrible and wonderful and you're going to keep growing and you're probably going to fall apart more and there's going to be good days and bad days. And it's all bridged by the word and was such a fundamental and simple truth. It's such a tiny little thing to apply to our lives to remember that it's not one or the other, it's both and.

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And we were talking about this in the archetype of Gemini episode, where I suggested the journaling prompt of just sitting down in your journal and writing out the contradictions in your lives I'm struggling and I'm content, I am sad and I am happy, I am restless and I'm finding inner peace. I am concerned or worried about whatever it is, and I'm working on feeling peaceful and feeling centered and feeling supported. It's all of those things. It's not predicating our sense of goodness on what we might feel are bad, challenging things being cleared up in our lives. It is insisting on finding goodness and also holding space that life's challenges will probably keep happening, because that is just life, it's part of the human experience and it's part of the world that we live in. Right now. There's not only a lot of challenges, but they're very in our face because of the sheer velocity of information and access to data, information that we have. It's hard not to see and be aware of those things, and we can keep bringing it back to the space of ourselves and finding what's good and beautiful and noble and intentional and purposeful and heartfelt and all of those good things in our life.

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So this is such a simple concept, but it's a really important one and I think the idea of being able to hold space for both and helps us develop mental flexibility. This is a really important tool for our mental health toolbox the ability, when we find ourselves falling into this fixed thinking pattern or a really rigid thinking pattern, or going to that place of like everything's terrible or anything, that is, this exaggerated sense of how life is. It is reminding ourselves of like well, sometimes that's true and life can still be beautiful there is a flexibility and the ability, I think, to create neural pathways that support ourselves and having a wider lens, a wider perspective on life. That absolutely supports us when we are working on creating a set point inside of ourselves that is balanced and that's peaceful and that's centered. We want that mental flexibility. Mentally flexible people are able to adapt quicker, they tend to be more resilient, they are able to find optimism or at least neutrality.

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I always feel that if I'm having one of those days where I am in the weeds and I'm having a difficult time focusing on what's good, I will often say to myself Bethann, can you at least aim for neutrality? If you can't feel good about this, can you at least find a way to take a step back and be in the observer role and try and have neutral thoughts or peaceful thoughts or be like water and not necessarily attach a judgment to this situation, just find that radical acceptance, let it be what it is. Can you at least do that so you're not nursing and feeding on toxic negativity inside of you and seeding your mind and your neural pathways with that? So when we have that mental flexibility we are much more able to retain hope. And if we can't find hope, if we can't find the optimism, if we can't find what's good, then at least we can aim for being neutral and being like water and just flowing and surrendering and trying to find acceptance for what is, without attaching to it or trying to change it. Something else that I really like about this mindset and the idea of holding space for both and is that I think it helps us claim our right to be happy, claim our right to have a life of purpose, claim our right to experience joy, delight, pleasure, whatever it is that we want to claim our right to do.

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I've never loved the idea that we have to predicate our well-being on circumstances being different. There are times that we are not in good circumstances or we face challenging circumstances. I absolutely acknowledge that, and sometimes radical acceptance is all we can find for it and we can't paint it any other way than what it is. But oftentimes in life I do think there's a way to reframe our circumstances if we're feeling discontent or feeling feeling restless, are feeling unhappy about something, and find a way to say yes, this is going on and I can cultivate gratitude. Anyways, I can look for what's good. I can look at how was I supported today, what went right, what do I have that I might feel is a gift right now, or something good that's going on.

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I just hate to give my power away to life circumstances because life is going to do its life thing. It's going on. I just hate to give my power away to life circumstances because life is going to do its life thing, it's going to happen and there's so many things that are unpredictable and uncontrollable, no matter how much we try and cultivate serenity and cultivate life routine and events and really create a life for ourself that maybe feel supportive and whatever that means for us. Life can change on a dime. Things can happen and sometimes that can feel really anxiety provoking to people, but it's also the truth. Life can change on a dime. The constant is change. We are living on a creative planet that is evolving around us. We are evolving with it from the moment we come out of the womb to the moment that we pass through the other side. We are in a constant process of change. So change is the constant. So life is going to do its life thing.

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And when we predicate our sense of well-being or our sense of peace on predictables, then we are really limiting our ability to experience peace and challenge ourselves to how do I create peace and uncertainty? How do I create effective tools that work for me so I can stay centered, even when life is changing around me and unknowables or unpredictables come through. How do I develop an attitude of curiosity, self-forgiveness, adventure, self-discovery, wearing the world more loosely and finding ways to laugh at how absurd it can be, finding ways to laugh at myself, not taking myself so seriously? We have the capacity to grow those tools inside of us, to develop those mindsets. We don't have to stay and fix mindsets. That says that life should look a certain way and we should look a certain way in life. We can find ways to give ourselves more grace when we challenge ourselves to do so, ways to give ourselves more grace when we challenge ourselves to do so.

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So having that mental flexibility and space to hold room for all of our complexities is so fundamental. We can say I'm working on being a good human and I am working on growing and being my best self, and some days I have days that feel really stuck, or I take a few steps back and I choose to see it as progress anyways. I choose to see all of it as part of my journey and part of steps back and I choose to see it as progress anyways. I choose to see all of it as part of my journey and part of my growth. I choose to see value in all of my experiences, even the ones that I might not like. I choose to believe that it's part of my soul becoming and part of the experiences that I came here to have as a soul. I choose to see it as opportunities to learn something new about myself or the world, or about love. I choose to see it and whatever light we want to see it in, we are able to develop that inside of us.

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And so when we have this mental flexibility and we can hold space for both and I think it really helps us claim our right to peace right now, contentment right now, joy right now, or whatever it is that we are seeking it helps us to step into that energy and say I'm going to embody this right now. I can be working on changing things in my life, I can be working on bettering some things. If I don't like my circumstances, and I can see the value and choose to feel good with where I'm at right now. So that kind of thinking really helps us hold more space for life's complexities. It helps us feel better equipped to deal with life's complexities when they come our way. It allows us to release expectations that things have to look a certain way and instead be more expansive in how we think about life.

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And we want that energy right now, at a time where there is so much change happening on the planet and so many transformative possibilities. We see them happening in the external world, the world of humans and what's happening on the surface, and many of us that are tuned into energies and cosmic cycles and all of that fun juicy spiritual stuff. We know that things are transforming, that there are things that are shifting and opening, that new energies are coming in, are things that are shifting and opening, that new energies are coming in. And so we want to be able to work with transformative possibilities. We want to allow ourselves to be more fluid. We want to allow ourselves to have creative courage and the capacity to adapt. We want to take on the archetype of being the soul traveler, the soul on a journey, who's just having all these experiences without necessarily having to attach to our experiences, needing to look a certain way. The more we do that, the more it supports us and being fluid and malleable.

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And when we feel stuck and something really big happens or something feels high stakes to us and we have a huge feeling, a huge life experience attached to that. That's okay. We're asked to attach as well on our journey. We attach our hearts in order to learn about love, we care about stuff and we have things that are vital and important to us. So the idea of this isn't to move through all of it with no attachment at all. It's just to find ways to work with life as it happens so we can keep staying adaptable and not get stuck.

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And when we're able to say, wow, I'm really upset about this and I don't know how I'm going to make it through and I choose to believe I'm going to be okay, I choose to still believe that there's some hope on the other side. I choose to believe I have the capacity to transform. When we do that, instead of resisting feeling states that feel hard or challenging for us, we embrace them, but we embrace them in a very adaptive way, so we don't limit our vision and get stuck in them. We choose to hold space that life can still expand around us, even if we're going through something challenging and we can't see the way through. And when we do that, we are able to create so much more emotional space, so much more mental space and spiritual and psychic space inside of us to hold room for life's complexities and feel more peaceful as life's complexities happen. We are less likely to attach a negative judgment to life doing its life thing. We are less likely to take things personally that we don't necessarily need to take personally. They're not happening to us, they're just happening because it's part of life.

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Move through challenges with more equanimity, with more peace, a little bit more play and trying to find a way to flip it a little bit and say, well, this is just one moment in many moments that I'm going to have. I can choose to see it as just one pen prick and the bigger canvas of the story of my life and I can find perspective in that. I can find ways to both attach and let go. I can find ways to care deeply about my life and deeply about the people and experiences and the moments in my life, and I can take a step back and realize that it's all part of my greater journey of soul. Part of my greater journey of soul. I can grieve and I can be angry and I can be in the weeds and I can find a ladder and climb on up to the clouds and look down on things and find a higher perspective and find a little bit of peace. I can hold space for all of my experiences of self and in that space find peace in the nuance.

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I want to close today with a passage from Small Pearls, big Wisdom, called Brambles and Roses, and this is actually in the grief section, so it is focused on grief, but I think the principle holds true for life and life's challenges, and not just the experience of grief, brambles and Roses there is always joy among the sorrow and roses among the brambles. Our emotional experience isn't relegated to just one thing when it comes to loss. It is relegated to all emotions joined together by the word and helping us hold both love and grief side by side in our hearts. Part of grieving is the work of clearing the brambles, pulling them out in thorny lots and dealing with the pricks and wounds where they've made us bleed, as we allow ourselves the time and space to mend and heal. Our roses are never any lesser for the brambles, but we will find that when we clear them out, the roses become even more pristine, pure and distilled. Our enjoyment of the rose is that much more intense because we know the stinging rub of the brambles. When you know the sting of the thorn, you learn to value the roses with the ferocity of gratitude that can only come from learning about pain from the inside out.

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Life's gifts become a testament to grace when we have experienced the knowledge of the wound. Grief then becomes the catalyst for distilled joy. Sorrow is a doorway to goodness. For distilled joy, sorrow is a doorway to goodness. The work of the heart in this space of loss is to acknowledge all the beauty and all the ugliness in this world. Then join them together with the and Thank you so much for joining me today in this episode of your Heart Magic. I will be back next week with an all new episode. In the meantime, as always, have a beautiful week, be good to you, embrace the complexity of your experience and be well, be love, be you and be magic.

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