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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. This is Dr Bethann Kapansky-Wright and welcome to today's your Heart Magic episode. I am doing a Talk Story Time episode today and, if you're familiar with Talk Storytime or not, they are episodes where I share a few passages from my work that speak to some kind of theme or something that ties them together and just share some candid reflections on my thoughts and the inspirations behind it and reflecting on the symbiotic process of taking some of the things I might be experiencing or learning and putting them into words that often end up going beyond just me and creating meaning and speaking to something that touches on a similar theme for somebody else. Something I really love about being a writer and writing about life and transformation and spirituality and wellness and being human is that, even though we are all so different and we have our unique vantage points, there's these themes and archetypes and similarities that we also all go through and they're universal and I think it's really beautiful when we can see each other in those themes and see facets of each other reflected in that likeness. So today's topic is the transience of life and trying to find beauty in the transience.

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Something that's been relevant to me for a while is the gifts of impermanence and trying to make peace with the impermanence and peace with life. As it passes by and as I continue to age, I find this to be an increasingly relevant theme, and I really find myself drawn to philosophies and drawn to ways of thinking and developing a perspective that allows me to try and find more radical acceptance for the process of life, which can be so beautiful and so wonderful and full in its moments and the richness of its moments, and the other side of that coin, because life is both shadow and light. And so the shadow side of that perhaps is also the grief or this bittersweet tang that can come from letting go of something or releasing something, or finding acceptance for the form of something that is fading, and letting it be what it was, and not trying to necessarily recreate it or hold on to it or cling to it, but just letting something have a natural cycle of life. And so this is a deep topic, it's a rich topic, it is probably one that I will forever be writing about from slightly different angles, wherever I'm at on my timeline, and the first passage that I want to share today that speaks to this is from Revelations of the Sky, and it's called Finding Home, and I wrote this back in the summer of 2018.

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I had been living in Kauai for about one year at that point and I felt myself a little splenched between my old life and a new life, what once was and no longer was, and what was emerging but not quite grounded yet. And I was also going through loss at the time of knowing that our sweet dog Samwise had brain cancer and wouldn't be with us much longer. So this poem really touches on notes of yearning and wistfulness, and beauty and looking to nature to offer a language that spoke to some of the things I was feeling through elements in the natural world. Finding Home when did last summer become a fading memory and when did this summer become the days whose breaths I beat and breathe? I traded the blush of the lavender trees and the pink peonies and soft fireweed for the jungle green and the scent of the sea and the hints of tuberose which waft with evening's warm breeze. I traded the feel of summer's endless peaks, autumn's golden leaves, winter's silver freeze for ocean's blue eaves and sunshine dreams and an island of magic and mystery. I traded the grace of goose's, lake's geese and light's solstice sweep and bird ridges steep for the ooze of heat and a softer me and a chance to be bigger, to be more, to be free. Yet maybe there will always be a part of me beating in the earth I've left behind and the rosy tundra and shale gray mountains and the evergreens of arctic pines, even as I learn to embrace these days, create new ways and ride the waves of change that ring with hearts. Goodbye, finding my home in the seam of these times, I think the idea in life that for something to be born, something has to be cleared out in order to make space for that.

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And when I had made this shift from Alaska to Kauai, I wrote this line in here that says I traded it for a chance to be bigger, to be more, to be free, to be free. And it's like I'd let go of this old container self that was constraining me in some ways to come, meet my unmatched self and crystallize aspects of myself and experience me in different ways than I was having the opportunity to do, and the life I'd constructed. And it was a beautiful choice. It was a very soulful choice, one that really followed a heart's calling. I had to let go of so much in order to honor that choice and that particular summer, when I wrote that poem, we'd been here about a year and with the imminent passing of Samwise, who had come with us from Alaska and held so much of my heart, still holds so much of my heart, I think that I was missing home, but not in a way that I wanted to move back to Alaska or I felt like I made a mistake or anything like that. It wasn't about that. It was more this wistful yearning for a sense of belonging and the belonging that I'd created there and not quite being in a place of belonging in that particular version of Bethann.

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And this is a strange place to be identity-wise. There's times that we belong to a time and a space and we really know ourselves within that context, and then life moves us along or change happens Sometimes it is a chosen change, sometimes it's forced change and we feel like the rug's been pulled out from under us and we have to reinvent ourselves. We have to find something within ourselves and reconstruct and repiece our sense of self together, our identity together. We have to learn to belong to that version of ourself, and that takes a while. We don't learn to belong to something just because we decide to make a major life change. Belonging is something that happens over many moon cycles and seasons, and learning to sink into who we are and listen to our hearts and have a sense of who am I, what's this version of myself at this point in time and what holds true for me.

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And so going through this imminent loss of Samwise was about to thrust me back into this grief journey and I was pretty upset about it. It had only been a little over two years since losing Brent and then leaving Alaska behind and going through all those grief and goodbyes, and now here is this anchor and this beloved animal companion who was a furry soulmate, and I'm being asked to let that go. And I was just really like in the feels. So I feel like this poem really represents that longing for something unnamed and so much of it was represented in Alaska and my relationship with the land in Alaska and yet fixing my sights on be here now and appreciate the gifts now, and that I'm learning to belong to this time and space. So this next passage that I want to read is called Dancing Leaves. It was originally published in Lamentations of the Sea and I reworked it and it enfolded its way into Small Pearls, big Wisdom. It's in the grief section in this book. Dancing Leaves.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright : 9:35

Any undoing, shedding or losing creates a space where life has room to pour new things into us. Endings are a genesis for potential. Metamorphosis happens in the void, when we must find a way through the darkness. It is the metaphorical space where the caterpillar reaches the end of his world and becomes a butterfly. Desperation provides the ingredients for inspiration. Chaos the material for creation, the space where the leaf learns to free itself by falling from the tree, returning to the ground so it can become the soil and seed for new life.

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It can feel terrible when life brings us to the end of the world as we know it, to the end of something inside ourselves, when we can't see anything but black space beyond our current space. We are left to trust that if we go forward, relinquish control and have faith in the process, we will discover our chrysalis. We all have our path to this precipice of change. We arrive through the loss of a relationship, through hardship and difficulty, through illness and injury, through the end of a chapter. We sometimes realize we were done writing long before we set down the pen. Sometimes we are deposited here unceremoniously when we suddenly lose something we never believed we would lose and we find ourselves at the mercy of life's forces. We are brought here so we can choose whether to contract in fear, trying to squeeze ourselves back into an old shell of self that no longer fits, or to expand in faith, venturing into the black space of the unknown, believing we will find new ground if we are brave enough to see the journey through. The journey requires a great deal of surrender, for it is only in letting go of how we think things should be that we can develop into who we are meant to be. A never-ending cycle of dancing leaves who learn to grow when it is time to grow and when to drop when life calls us to release. We are undone so that we can become.

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I'm fascinated with the void space and I think in that piece of writing I called it this blackness, this hole that's left when we let go of something and it leaves a void in us. It leaves a void in our life and we think what is going to possibly fill this? And I think a lot of times this is psychologically where it's really easy for people to wander into things that fill it that may or may not be healthy or constructive for us. It's uncomfortable to have that void space in our life and to be out of sorts and to feel sad and to feel grief and to weather the chaos of that the not knowing and trust that if we can stay with ourselves and stay with our journey and stay open to life, that life will pour something new into us, that our soul will help us alchemize the ingredients of whatever was and nourish it into something that helps create our present path and fully supports the self that we are becoming. It's so scary to trust that and I'm really fascinated with that space because I think so much of life happens here in that void, on that precipice of change between what was and what will be, and I think it's more comfortable when we're in a space of surety.

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It's so much more comfortable when we feel I like my version of self, I know who I am, everything in life is going exactly how I want it to. I don't know how often any of us feels that, but we do have these moments where it just feels like a blue banner day and being able to know that we can find gratitude for the times that we feel really in sync with ourselves and also find peace and acceptance when we don't and we feel really in sync with ourselves, and also find peace and acceptance when we don't and we feel like we're going through personal transformation. That is where so much of our growth and our soul work is at, and I think oftentimes, when things are going well, people might feel like they're waiting for the other shoe to drop, or waiting for whatever it is that's going to come along and mess it all up and we don't have to live with a negative sense of expectation about the future. I think that we can know that life likely will change, because the constant here on our planet is change, and so we have to find ways for our well-being, for inner peace, for our psychological wholeness, to accept and embrace the impermanence of things and accept and embrace change so when it comes and whatever form it shows up in, we are able to say, well, hello there, I have been waiting for you, I knew you would emerge eventually, and here you are, and let's figure this out together, as opposed to feeling like we're being punished by life or that life is somehow doing something to us. And so I'm really fascinated with this idea of how do we find philosophy for this in between space where we are just able to surrender when change starts to come our way, because things are constantly changing anyways, whether or not we want to acknowledge it. They change on a day-to-day basis, and so even when we feel like it's all come together and we're celebrating a moment of completion, things are still shifting behind the scenes, and that's not a bad thing. That's life, it is part of our soul's journey, is to have an experience, a really rich and nourishing experience of what it is to evolve and to go through creativity and chaos and construction and reinvention and all of those beautiful themes that have to do with becoming.

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There's a couple terms that are Japanese that really speak to this philosophy of finding beauty and impermanence and embracing impermanence. One of them is called wabi-sabi, and this was something that I stumbled across maybe a couple years ago, and it was the beauty of impermanence and accepting this very humble beauty and simplicity, of just finding beauty in the imperfection in life and embracing that imperfection, and embracing that hole, that void, that something might not ever feel complete, or we get to a place of completion and something falls apart, and so we're back to feeling incomplete, and when I stumbled across this word, it just spoke so beautifully to what I've been circling around anyways, in my own writings and my own thinking, without really having a term to ground it in. I always thought of it as being both broken and whole at the same time. We are whole in the sense that we are whole as a soul. We are already whole on our path, we are already enough, and yet some part of us is always seeking to grow. It's a little bit broken. We are whole as a soul. We are already whole on our path, we are already enough, and yet some part of us is always seeking to grow. It's a little bit broken. It feels separate from perhaps knowing ourselves in a spiritual form and perhaps feeling separated from love as a human, separated from that source and that collective. There's this part of us that might always feel a little bit messy, a little bit chaotic, subject to the conditions of being human, which is beautifully imperfect and mistake-driven. We're here to make mistakes and to learn and to grow, and so this idea of being broken and whole, this idea of embracing our perfections and finding beauty in them this term of wabi-sabi spoke to that so beautifully in me.

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And then I recently ran across a phrase. It's new to me, some of the listeners might have heard of it before, but it's called mano no awari. I'm probably pronouncing that a little bit off, but it's about this deep sensitivity and awareness of the fleeting beauty of things, the transience of things. It translates to the sensitivity of things and it speaks to that gentle sadness that we might sometimes have around recognizing as beautiful as the moment is, it's passing and I think many people can relate to that. But in particular I think highly sensitive people and empaths and energy sensitives can really perhaps relate to those kinds of themes, because oftentimes we have a deep sensitivity around what's happening under the surface and so we can experience this profoundness of beauty, but sometimes this profound bittersweet as well that speaks to life's ever changing currents and just being aware that they're changing and how we make peace with that and find peace with that.

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I believe it's not to resist it, it's not to give in to melancholy or to always feel sad that life is passing us by as we speak. It is to find a way to embrace that and to make friends with that and to accept it as a beautiful, natural condition of life. To look to nature Nature teaches us so much about letting go and having a brief burst of season that will sometimes pass. Flowers are such great messengers of that because sometimes they'll come out in this beautiful bloom and their season often doesn't last forever, it's just for a season, and when they wilt and fade they let go so easily, knowing that they will regrow again. Something new will be reborn, and so finding a way to be peaceful with that, I feel like for me right now, that's a really big soul theme. It is a profound life lesson. It's one I see myself working on for a while that speaks to where I'm at in middle age and some of the bigger themes that I see going on in my personal life and just going on as well in the collective and in the world. So this is an active soul lesson for me right now, and I recently wrote a piece this morning that was speaking to these topics because they were on my heart today and that was some of the genesis and inspiration for this entire podcast.

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So I want to close with this piece today. It's unpublished. I was just writing it just a few hours ago with my morning coffee and I had my little iPad out and was typing on it and this piece rolled off, and so it's not super polished, but I think that's kind of beautiful too, when we're talking about wabi sabi and something not being complete and just finding beauty in the imperfection and appreciating the roughness of something and accepting it for what it is and seeing the simple beauty there. So this is untitled. We'll call it Unpublished Works from the Journal of Bethann.

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It is a brave and bold thing to face our own becoming, to allow ourselves to leave the nest and containers that have held us and risk letting go, to continually release as often as we need in order to become, to become at home and one version of ourselves, only to find that it shifts and we no longer quite fit our old understanding and are once more called to voyage the seas of soul, venturing into uncharted waters. We cannot exist in the moments of our past. We can remember, we can honor, we can learn from what was, but we cannot live there, nor are we meant to, for the vibrancy will forever be here and now. We can know, though, that each piece of who we were still travels with us, each good thing and loved moment and aspect of self that felt authentic and beautiful and true. It is all still there inside of you. You cannot lose the love you've poured into your heart, even after the goodness of a moment is past. And to belong to oneself is to love. So any moment you feel you've belonged to, any love you feel you belong to, is still within you, helping keep the fires of your soul ignited and alchemizing the ever-unfolding essence of you. We cannot always see the form or appreciate the carefully crafted beauty of our soul's orchestrations reweaving our past into our present to create a healed and wholer future self. But we can find courage each time we're called to leave an old container of self. We can learn to contain and anchor into something real and true inside of ourselves that holds the essence of truth. We can appreciate and celebrate the art of becoming and remember that all of this transience is a beautiful dance of evolution and we take with us the love we've collected along the way and the experiences that enrich our wisdom and being. You cannot lose what's in your heart. Hold fast to that dear one and remember, no matter how comfortable a nest might seem, the truth of your wings, bright soul. Remember the truth of your wings, your wings.

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Something that I have found so helpful throughout the years is this idea of knowing that I can't take, I can't stay in a moment, I can't take it with me, I can only experience it. But I can think about pouring what's best into my heart Almost. If I could take this liquefied or elements of the energy, of whatever it was that I loved about a moment, whatever a moment, or a love or a relationship or a version of self, whatever energies and essences and beauty and wisdom and growth, whatever it represented to me, I can pour that energy into me and I can know that it still travels with me and I like to think of this as just pouring it in, like this ingredient that is going to keep mixing with all these other pieces of myself and brewing and bubbling and alchemizing and my soul's helping create this potion, this composition, this masterpiece, and it will use it somehow and I might not know exactly what form, but I can know that the love that I have, that it goes with me, the wisdom I've earned that goes with me, the gift of an experience that goes with me, so I don't have to hold on to it in tangible form. I can trust that it's in me and the treasure box of my heart and I will imagine sometimes just pouring it into me like a liquid energy and sealing it away, not to try and grip it or control it, but to honor it and say, well, I don't have to lose this. You can't lose love, right? All the love that we've had just becomes a bigger part of our mosaic and our collection, and we grow as a soul that way and add more love into us. So I have found that beautiful and comforting.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright : 24:51

I hope it offers some perspective to you, and I think that note of incompletion today is a beautiful way to end this podcast. These themes that I'm sharing there's not a resolution, there's not a punctuation point for what we should do with them. It's a human theme that we're all figuring out how do we find ourselves and make peace with the beauty of impermanence. Thank you so much for joining me today. Every passage that I read, other than my unpublished one, and the books that I mentioned are all available on Amazon and, I believe, barnes and Noble as well, and probably some other major online retailers, and I hope that you have a beautiful week. I will be back next week with an all new episode of your Heart Magic. As always. Be well, be love. Be you and be magic. Love, be you and be magic.

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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.