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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 are celebrating the equinox energies. Equinox just passed, on the 22nd. It is autumn equinox here in the northern hemisphere and it is spring in the southern. That's hard for me to imagine, having always lived in the north, growing up in Alaska, but I want to honor anybody who might be listening and understand that we are all tuning into this from our various points of view and no matter where you are right now, equinox is always a time where we celebrate balance and harmony. It is usually a time that represents for the northern hemisphere the halfway point between summer and winter solstice, and that's vice versa for the southern hemisphere. And so it's this honoring of not just light and dark but finding that equilibrium, that fulcrum point between the two. And I think that for us in the fall there's a little bit more of an emphasis on letting go and shedding and releasing, which echoes the turn of the seasons. In the spring, I think the emphasis is probably more on rebirth and regeneration and things coming back to life. But wherever we are, we really honor the full life cycle when we tap into equinox time and the solstices. The full life cycle when we tap into equinox time and the solstices, and I've always loved these as points on the wheel throughout the year because they are a wonderful time to stop, reflect, tune into some of the specific themes and energies and focus points that nature inspires us to think about or be more mindful of during those times. I also love nothing more than celebrating nature on the your Heart Magic podcast.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 2:32

I got my start as a writer focusing on nature, poetry and writing about nature and writing some of the lessons I felt nature was teaching me, and I've talked before as an intuitive that when I was first opening up my intuition, nature really spoke to me intuitively and without even realizing it. Some of the messages that I was taking into me is I would watch the clouds dance in the sky, or the light change color during a sunset, or the solidity and sense of breath that I would get from being in the trees. I really think I was picking up on the energetic realm and my intuition was helping me to perceive those messages and perceive the wisdom that was coming through, and so I always feel like I'm going back to my roots no pun intended when we talk about nature on the podcast and bring some nature wisdom through. So today I want to share a few poems that focus on the aspect of balance for equinox and celebrating the life cycle of release and death and letting go and the renewal energy that comes from that. I was thinking today as I pulled some pieces to read aloud on here and reflect on how much I need these messages at this time and how applicable they still feel, and I was thinking of my personal journey and some of the things that had been coming up with an invitation into accepting how life is, which isn't necessarily how I always want it to be. There are some things that have been changing in not just the bigger collective, but in my personal journey. I have been talking on the podcast about our dog, frodo, going blind and having diabetes and the challenges related to that and aging. Today we're celebrating my mom's 85th birthday. I am so grateful that she's still here.

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Anytime we have these celebratory moments in my family, it always brings up such a strange sense in me that the pattern didn't really shake out the way that I thought it would. In my family of origin and with losing Brent before my parents, it just is a repatterning, a readjustment. It is different things to consider, and so whenever we get together, there's always this bittersweet feeling because his presence is very missed, not just by me as the sister and the sibling, but by my parents, who have had to go through the loss of a child an adult child but still losing a child before they pass. And then this alchemy of all being on Kauai together and how myself and my husband and my parents have shifted into a unit over here, and I'm often awed and amazed and sad and joyful and thoughtful and like all the feelings when we have these occasions that we gather together and have a moment. It causes me to slow down and pause and think about the strange dance of life and how things have shaped themselves to be in this time and space and to have created these experiences. There's just a lot of feelings there, and so I find these poems today feel really timely for myself and my heart and I hope they speak to you as well.

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This first one is called Equinox. It's from my poetry book Cranberry Dusk A Journey of Becoming. This is the first book that I self-published and I actually wrote this poem back in Alaska in the fall of 2015. And it was inspired by equinox and this beautiful hike that we had done. That was up in the mountains of Eagle River somewhere and it was beautiful and cold that day and windy, and the tundra was this beautiful cranberry. It was cranberry dusk, the title of the book, with all these mahogany and burgundies and it had that quintessential Alaska in September feel when you're up in the mountains equinox.

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I would like to press my cheek against her frozen ground, hear her whisper secrets of the changing tides and molting leaves and what it means to be standing after so long. She would tell me of how many seasons she has watched churn, how the world doesn't stop for anyone, how, no matter what, life has a way of coming back round again. Whoever we are, whatever our prayers, may we be our own, offering the life we cast out into the world an act of worship as each steady breath invokes our belonging to this time and place. Even on my coldest of days, I still long for the press of that hallowed ground, so I can bury myself in the lull of cranberry dusk and rest in assurance of life's promises below the leaves rustle, as somewhere in me I can almost hear them say only love will win in the end. Only love will win in the end.

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Some of my favorite poetry was written in that time, when I was really into writing nature poetry. I still enjoy doing it, but I don't feel as organically inspired as I did at that particular time in my life and I often find myself going back to some of the words that I wrote then and rereading them and tapping into the wisdom that nature helped inspire. And something that I'm so grateful for is that we have nature's wisdom to teach us how to live well. There's always an insight, an answer, a solution, a sliver of guidance, something that we can find when we tune into nature's cycles, and some form of higher perspective that's not hard to access if we just take the time to shift our heart, focus and talk to a tree or ask what would the sky say about this or what does nature have to teach me about this, and maybe fix our attention on one of nature's elements to see if we can find the specific lesson it might have for us. But there's always something about living more harmoniously, living in cycle, knowing that, no matter what happens, things are cyclical and anything that dies will be reborn in new form. It might look very different, but from death life will grow and it will shape itself into something new and finding how to balance grief and love and joy and sorrow and hold space for all of that.

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To me, that's what balance is really all about. It's not necessarily being able to map out on a piece of paper a balanced life or a balanced eating plan or the kinds of ways that we might take the concept balance and try and quantify it and make it into a number or calculate it somehow. That's a slightly different form of balance. I think. In nature's balance it's more about looking at things holistically and knowing that over time things have a way of moving towards wellness, of moving towards balance. If something is really out of whack or something has been in one season for overly long, we can know that things will shift and something will come to help balance things out and to help move things back towards center and back towards that fulcrum point, that cusp of both shadow and light, life and death, chaos and creativity, love and grief, all of those things. There's a balance point and nature helps us find that. And on our individual journeys I often find when the world is so terribly complex with information and last week on the podcast we were talking about the guidance from the Akashic Records who invited us to cut through the noise and really look at the layers of information and the many things that are distracting us and pulling at our attention right now, and I love that guidance so much. And a really simple way to pay attention to that is just take it back to. What would nature say about this? What wisdom does nature have for my life at this time? And that will cut through all the noise almost instantaneously and take us into our hearts, take us into simple wisdom, take us into our truth and help us tap into whatever it is we most need as heart medicine for our journey at this time.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 11:44

This next passage that I want to share is from Lamentations of the Sea. I also wroteations of the Sea. I also wrote this in the fall. I wrote it in the month of October and I know this because I referenced the month in the poem. But this is called From the Ground Up and it's in the autumn section of that book, which I divided into four seasons, and it is about embracing the idea that when we let go, something new will eventually be reborn From the Ground Up. I think perhaps October is the most beautiful yet saddest month of all. Her trees drip leafy tears soaking the ground with her loss. The more she tries to grasp loss, the more she tries to grasp to save, to hang on, the harder they fall. She doesn't yet realize she is watering her own roots, strengthening, lengthening, nourishing the space she inhabits so she can rise up and be bigger, be taller, bloom anew, then fall in love with life. Taller, bloom anew, then fall in love with life. Fall in love with herself. No-transcript. I wrote the original version of that poem back in the fall of 2013.

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And at the time I had been through a lot of heartache. The summer prior to that I had had, I think, a breakup and a heart betrayal. I'd lost somebody that I really cared about to cancer. There was just a lot going on that really put my heart in a space of grief and it was an interesting summer for me because I remember the summer of 2013. It was such a summer of becoming.

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When I look back at some of the poetry that I wrote and it's interspersed through some of my later books, I really see this grief inside of me that was coming out and a lot of mourning, but I also see this heart wisdom that came out of it and this realization of how big my heart must be my capacity to love, that I could grieve so hard and grieve so much. And for me that was such a revelation to flip the script on grief and to realize that I was in such emotional pain over these betrayals and losses and griefs because I love so much and I love so hard and I really went all out when I care about people in my life. And realizing that helped me see what I was feeling from a place of strength. And that was really when I started to see love as a superpower. I think I had already been tuned into that concept some, but it's like it clicked in my mind in a really different way than before and I thought, wow, I am grieving and mourning from such a deep love, all some of these things and I'm writing this poetry that some of it was beautiful, some of it was just kind of miserable and bad breakup, bad love poetry, bad grief poetry, and all of it was a reflection of this deep ocean of feelings that I carry inside of me. I could see that as an asset and realize that it takes a really strong heart and it takes a special heart, a sacred heart, a light-filled heart, to love that much and to hold so much space for both love and grief. It made me stand up straighter and it gave me back this piece of myself that I didn't even realize I was missing. It helped me take myself back into myself and really come back into a space of belonging to myself.

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And as the summer went into the fall, I found more healing and I started to find some revival again. And so when I wrote that poem it was this symbiotic reflection of seeing the leaves falling from the trees and I had been in an autumn and winter of my life during that summer and then, ironically, in the fall. It's like I was coming back to life and going through this spring, awakening in my summer season. So I was really off with what was happening in nature at the time, but I appreciated this idea of seeing that the leaves are so beautiful falling from the tree and it's also so sad and yet there is this alchemy going on that they are going to nourish the ground and go into decay and rot into the soil but that gets fertilized somehow to help feed the ground and nature's mysterious ways would be recycled into new life in springtime, and I really related to that. I so love that wisdom. The last passage that I want to share with you today is more of a reflection from Small Pearl's Big Wisdom and it's passage 144, balance an Ongoing Renegotiation.

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One of the tricks to learning to be at peace with life is learning how to be at peace with our ebbs and flows. Learning when to act, move and push ourselves to show up and create, endeavor or produce. Learning when to be still and receive and rest instead of a step. We are constantly invited to keep learning how to interpret our moods, emotional states and life's ups and downs in a way that supports our expansion and compassion and keeps us growing on the journey of self-love. Finding balance in our lives is often fleeting, because life's change is constant. When we think we have it figured out, or everything juggled, or have created a new equilibrium of steadfast circumstance, then something is bound to change and we will find ourselves renegotiating our relationship with the energies in our lives. This requires a lot of shifting and fluidity learning to step when we feel called, slowing down and resting when there is nothing else to do, giving ourselves permission not to know, and finding a new rhythm of motion and receptivity. Asking ourselves how can I best love myself in this season. What do I need to support myself right now? What's my best course of action or conscious receptivity in this moment? Then we do our best to listen to what comes through and stay with our process of self.

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I absolutely appreciate this idea that balance is an ongoing renegotiation. So I often think it's unobtainable, like maybe we'll have it for a hot minute and then something changes and things are out of balance again. So I love this idea of looking at balance as moving towards wholeness or more of a greater arc, that we can't always judge balance in a single moment, but we can look at the pattern over time and see where we have moved into greater harmony in our lives, see where something has perhaps gotten out of balance or out of alignment and think in terms of long vision of how can I move towards a space of rebalancing these energies right now. And I also love the idea that sometimes we are completely at odds with what's going on in the external world and we are having our own season and that's okay. I really appreciate that in so many ways.

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Nature works in this harmony and this symmetry and everything feeds into each other and it's interconnected. And yet if you break down individual elements, they are independent and they might be interdependent on what's happening around them and part of that whole, but we can almost always find an example where something is marching to the beat of its own drummer in nature or doing its own thing or growing outside the lines or not doing what it's supposed to do, and I think that's inspiring too, and it's really a profound reminder to know that we exist independently and autonomously within this greater whole and this greater interconnection. And so this idea that, no matter what else, we can always come back to how do I love myself in this season? How do I find my next step or my next rest, if we're being invited to rest in this season? And what element of nature might hold inspiration for me right now? Maybe it's something that is really different than what the seasonal change or seasonal shift is doing outside of you.

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We are always invited to come back into our space of heart, wisdom and soul sovereignty and think about what is right for my authenticity at this time, and I think that's really celebrated and I think that's really honored by the patterns that nature reflects.

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We are meant to be these glorious, fabulous individuals that are unique and beautiful and are change and awkward sometimes and going through growing pains and shocking sometimes and how we might try and renegotiate our life, and other times stagnant and mundane, where we sort of blend in and nothing extraordinary has happened and then somehow, maybe we have an epiphany and breathe fresh energy into something and we rebirth ourselves anew, and I'm here for all of it. So I hope, wherever you're at right now on this Equinox week, that you are listening to your heart, asking yourself what rhythm am I in right now, at this time, and staying with your own magic and, of course, being inspired by nature's magic in whatever way speaks to you. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. I will be back next week with a new your Heart Magic episode. As always, have an amazing week and be well, be love, be you and be magic.

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You've been listening to your Heart Magic with Dr Bethann Kopansky-Wright. Tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your light.