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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. Bethane Kapansky Wright, author, psychologist, and spiritual educator.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 0:32

Aloha, everybody. Welcome to Your Heart Magic. This is Dr. Bethane Kapansky Wright. And today we have a talk story time episode where I'm going to be sharing a few passages from one of my books and doing some candid reflections on the writing. The selection I chose today is from Revelations of the Sky. And a lot of times when I do talk story episodes, I will sometimes choose a topic like autumn, autumn equinox, or something like that. And I will find passages that maybe speak to me from various books that I've written that speak to that particular topic. But today I actually picked up Revelations of the Sky. It's a book that I wrote back in 2018, 19, 20. I think it came out in 2020. And it is the third book in the grief trilogy that I wrote after losing my brother Brent, which is so much more than a grief trilogy. It's really a trilogy that began with grief and the impetus of losing my brother and putting together a collection of writings about that is what began it. But it's really about grief and love and loss and finding one's purpose. And it carries me through such a transformative time in my life where I had moved to the island of Kauai a year after the loss, about a year and a half, and was opening up in bigger ways to a more spiritual and intuitive and creative path. So the trilogy itself encapsulates such a beautiful chunk of my life that I just could never write it again, not like that. It's the kind of writing that was written while I was living it. And I'm so grateful that I was able to put words to those experiences and capture them in these little gems to share with others. But I also look at it and know that it really reflects this very unique passage in life. And as I was flipping through Revelations today to get some inspiration for a topic to share, it just jumped out at me to share a few passages from there because the book itself is really a book on becoming. It is a book on self-determination and finding purpose and going through intense personal growth. I actually started to read an essay and it was almost painful to read. I wanted to go back through the pages and give myself a hug. I was in such a questioning and seeking phase of my life at that time. And something that often inspires me as an author is to write down what would I say to my younger self. And some of the things that I'm working on right now are the kinds of things that I might go back and say to myself five years, six years ago, seven years ago. So that time in my life is a gift that has kept on giving as a writer in terms of richness of experience and going back and retilling that soil and thinking, well, what do I know now? What might I tell myself now? And yet, the beautiful alchemy of life is that the only way to get to any wisdom that I might now have that I would go back and tell that younger version of myself was to live it and go through it. And isn't that part of what personal growth is about? Part of our spiritual wisdom is that we really can't access certain parts of wisdom without the life experience. We can study it, we can identify as being an old soul and feel like we might know more than our biological age. But there are some things that are best understood through living it. And I found that real wisdom is tried and tested. It's something that we know, but then we go through these trials or tribulations in our life, and that wisdom gets challenged and it gets refined and it gets tempered by that life experience. And we test out what parts of it are true, what parts of it might be an ideal, what parts of it might be true, but it looks different than how we expected. And so our treasure trove of wisdom becomes deeper and more nuanced, and our awareness around it becomes richer and more flavorful and multi-layered. And that is one of the beautiful things that I cherish about life wisdom and trying to be grateful for any wisdom that I have found on my own path. We all have our unique brand of wisdom, I think, and learn from each other. So, with that, this first passage that I want to share is called Your Heart is Magic, and it's passage 81 from Revelations of the Sky. I like to think of each of us as cosmic investigators, soul explorers, heart adventurers who get to play Scooby-Doo with the cosmos as we search for the clues that resonate in our heart and piece together our bigger picture of soul. Our life then becomes a patchwork of silk scraps, love notes, and starry truths, which help us make sense of who we are and what our purpose is in this lifetime. One thing I've learned is purpose is multilingual and open to many interpretations. It's not about one set path, it's about who we are, the choices we make on a daily basis, and how we choose to direct our energies. After all, there are many ways to be a light, or to be a motivator for peace, or to be an unruly heart who does things backward and out of the book, yet still states an elegant case for the cause of love. Purposes are like the stars. There are billions of them, which means there are billions of ways to shine bright and light up the night. Don't stop listening to the feelings whispering and calling to you. Follow them. Put on your spy glass and take a closer look at the things that make your heart sing. Collect those experiences and tapestry them together into the bigger picture of you, even if they don't make sense. They don't need to make sense to your mind. They already make sense to your heart. Allow yourself the grace to be a topographer of the universe. Take notes on the page of your heart of everything you find and see. You're not foolish for seeking more. You are big, bold, beautiful, intuitive, and your heart is magic. Hang on to that and let the knowledge be your boon travel companion. Trust yourself, trust your heart, and you can always trust your magic. When I look back on that time in my life, I think one of the gifts that I really see is that I had stepped out of a lot of the structures that had held me in my previous version of self. And when I say previous version of myself, I just mean leaving my very well-set Alaska life, all the roles that I understood myself in. I had long-term relationships there. I had a lot of deeply grouped spaces that I plugged into. And I understood myself within the context of those spaces. And so transplanting and coming here, I took a little bit of that with me, but a lot of it I left behind, or I was allowing for a redefinition of it. What do I look like over here as a professional? What do I look like over here on my spiritual path? I had to start over and have new relationships and make new friends. And some of that wasn't at the forefront. When I first came here, I really craved a lot of solitude and time on my own. And so I didn't necessarily seek out relationships right away, but I did give myself a lot of permission to explore. And sometimes I felt really lost in that space. And I wondered if I was doing it right. And I really questioned myself and wondered if I had just really made this huge mistake. Basically, starting over midlife is how it felt, and not having a well-formed plan of what I was going to do on the island or what it was going to look like, but really allowing the path to direct me was such a leap of faith. But part of what I received from that time was the idea of self-determination, soul sovereignty, the right to know myself and understand myself on my own terms, and the right to unbox myself from these old constraints and old roles that have held me and be more exploratory and try out new shades of self and aspects of self and see, well, what happens if I step forward and call myself an intuitive healer? And I had intuitive gifts. I wasn't just slapping a label on myself without anything there to back it up. But as somebody who had been in a long-term field of being a clinical psychologist, that was very scary when I started allowing myself to bring the spiritual in and playing with words. And how do I identify and how do I shape my work? And how do I integrate where I've been with where I'm going and all of that? There was so much freedom in it. And there was a lot of soul exploration going on. And so when I wrote this piece, it was from this lens that each of us has the capacity and the right to get to know our personal spiritual path on our own terms, to move towards and be drawn towards the things that light us up and speak to our soul, to learn about something and say, oh, that's for me, or maybe that's not for me, to learn to embrace our unique intuitive gifts and our unique spiritual path and to give ourselves permission to play with it a little bit and to not have to worry so much if I'm getting it right, but more to be in that creative experimental phase where we step outside of the lines and step outside of the lines we previously maybe understood ourselves in and allow for this unloosening and repatterning of self. And so I really love this piece. And of course, your heart is magic. Well, this is the Your Heart Magic podcast. So for a while, I've really embraced the idea that if we can learn to listen to our heart and follow its inclinations, even if we don't understand how it's going to add up on paper, that we will take the more interesting, wild, uncharted, intuitive path, but we can trust it and it's beautiful in how it asks us to lean in and listen to what's inside of us and prioritize that, and then allow that inner wisdom, that heart wisdom, that inner guidance to be what informs our choices and informs our path in life. So this next piece that I want to read is called unpedaling. And earlier, when I said I like to sometimes write out what would I say to my younger self? Sometimes that's my younger self 10 years ago, sometimes it's my younger self from a couple weeks ago, where I'm integrating a lesson just learned. And I think this passage reflects that. Unpeddling. My dear one, I know the struggle is real. Sometimes there's a divide between the mind and the heart, which tells you to believe the fear over the love. It is a strange thing, this life. We move through it in accordance to what we're first taught. Then growing up allows us to become more true. We learn to open in the process and pedaling like a rose as our heart seeks to bloom. I cannot take the struggle away. And my dear one, I know you're ready to release the pain. But this I can gift to you to help ease the way. Your heart is a storyteller of worlds untold, words which speak love, and drenched thistles and silken breath. The pain you feel is the wound in the balm. Your soul is a wild creature who feels to your bones. Fleets of angels call you their own. Find the love, and you'll find your way home. I obviously wrote this during a time of struggle. From what I recall from my vantage point, now is at the time I was just really struggling with the dreams in my heart and bigger questions about my soul path, and why did I move here and what's next? And what is it supposed to look like? And all sorts of teeny tiny life lessons as well, where things weren't easy at that particular point in my life, despite the ease of being on this beautiful tropical island in my personal journey and my personal world, things felt quite hard. And I think stressors had come up as well that left me there kind of wringing my hand, saying, like, why is it all so hard? And this was this letter to myself, this idea to myself of you have to trust yourself and this recognition that you're here to experience life. I do feel things down to my bones. I think that is what it is to be an empath and a highly sensitive person and to be so sensitive. It's to feel things on this heart level and this reassurance that it's okay to feel things that deeply. That pain that you feel, it's the wound, but it's also the balm. And that's the line that stood out to me the most when I read this just now is the pain you feel is the wound and the balm. And I often think that when we can feel things in this extraordinarily in-depth way, then it means our heart is open. It is receiving, it is processing, it is giving us feedback of, oh my gosh, this hurts. It's letting us know that it is vibrant and alive. And those who can feel things so deeply tend to have a lot of intuitive intelligence and creativity and mystic-mindedness. They tend to have some kind of sensory perception that informs their experience as well. And so there's gifts in that. They might not be the easiest gifts, but if we can learn to work with them and harness them and see that our pathway through is not to shut down our heart or not to feel as much. It's to recognize their strength in being able to feel so much. It means that I am emotionally big. I am a live wire for love. I remember one time I got through a season of heartbreak where the other person had moved on and I felt like I was still like hard on the floor, kind of ripped out of my chest. And I remember thinking, how can you move on so quickly? And then it really struck me that my ability to love and to feel and to attach and to really truly care about something is such an asset. And sometimes it might hurt me, but it also means that like love is my superpower. And I've told that story before on the podcast, but I found such strength in that and really conceptualized it, like taking my love and kind of wrapping it around me, like my superhero cloak, and being like, I'm a badass for love, that I can feel things so deeply. And so I like to play with that. I like to take something where sometimes we say, Why is it so hard? And it's like, well, it's hard because you feel so much and you attach to things deeply. And I have a very idealistic side of me that has absolutely been tempered by life. And when I talked about wisdom earlier, that's some of the tempering and the challenging process and this exfoliation of my ideals against what's real. But very grounded wisdom can come from that. And I wouldn't change that about myself. Maybe it's made parts of the journey harder where I feel things so deeply, but I also think it makes it so much more beautiful. And then the capacity to experience joy and magic and finding the sacred in the everyday is so rich. This last piece that I want to share today is called permission to shine. And part of what came through some of the struggle of what I shared earlier was a lot of courage and really seeing the strength in myself of undertaking this journey and trusting my heart. And a lot of what we do in life that is so meaningful, it's invisible. We can try and put it into words to share with somebody else why something meant something to us to such a degree. But it is hard to translate our experience in a way that sometimes resonates with others. It's almost like words make it one-dimensional when the richness of the experience itself is so like 5D, 90. It is multidimensional. And part of what came through that time of struggle in my life that I did my best to capture into words is this real radical abidance in myself and belief in for better or for worse, I can trust myself on this path. I can trust my heart, I can trust my growth, I can trust my mistakes, I can trust the imperfect perfection of my life and see the whole of it. And that gave me courage to be braver and to be stronger. And at some point on my journey, I started to stop doubting myself as much and stop doubting or worrying about how my work might be received, or if I shared my words via writing or speaking, what might happen. Because my own journey had given me a lot of confidence that I will walk the long road when it comes to the matter of my heart and the vision of my heart. I will walk there, I will walk back again, I will stay on that journey for as long as I need to. I'm still on that journey. But this kind of encapsulates a part of a cycle of that journey. And as I was coming through some of the struggle, there's always the gift on the other side of struggle. There's always a growth, uh, wisdom learned, some new jewels of the heart and gems of the mind if we are paying attention and listening. And so part of the gift for me was this greater sense of expansion and more freedom of self-expression. So this is called permission to shine. A voice floated in on a tangerine dream, confetied with flecks of white and gold. It is safe to become and be seen is your highest expression of self. Words of growth and change which say trust is key when we are fully ready to commit to the sensitive knowing in our contrary hearts who refuse to fit the boxes this world has carved out. Trust can be hard. Unpealing fears like onions sheds our old skins and ignites us to live life from a deeply vulnerable space. But this space is where your magic is found. This space is where your heart cries and soul sighs, sigh the loudest and can tip your life upside down in dazzling spirals of adventure and grace, should you have the courage to follow. Doubts are human and valid, reluctance understandable in the face of brave change. Take all the time you need, dear one, to go within and let the amber flames of your life force refine such things. But please don't let yourself be steeped, stopped, or stepped by others' careless words and blind opinions who judge what they do not see or know. Because they smother their heart cries and soul sighs long ago. You were meant to experience the world and celestial technicolor and symphonic symphony, bright soul. So let yourself grow. Let yourself move with the trees and listen to the music of the elven beats. Let yourself see the sky pink and hear the world and dreams. Let yourself keep tunneling into your most authentic, exquisite, soulful being. If anyone should look at you askance, keep on with your dance and joyfully say, It is safe to become and be seen is my highest expression of self. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. All of those passages were from Revelations of the Sky. And you can find that on Amazon and other online book retailers. I will be back next week with an all-new Your Heart Magic episode. In the meantime, have a beautiful week. And as always, be well, be love, be you, and be magic.

Intro/Outro Music: 21:46

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