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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.

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Aloha, everybody. Welcome to Your Heart Magic. This is Dr. Bethan Kapansky Wright, and I want to share a few thoughts on the concept of joy today and focus on that as a theme for today's podcast. I love talking about joy. It's a topic that I probably revisit every couple months because I think it's so relevant and it's something that we need right now. I think it's easy to talk about what's not right, talk about grief and personal transformation and going through struggles and challenges and how do we navigate those. But I think the practice of joy and treating joy is something that is available to us right now. And being joy seekers is one that is lovely and fun to talk about. It's a little bit lighter, and it's something that I found really helpful and still find helpful on my personal journey. So I wanted to share a little story today about joy. And that is back in the year, I think it was 2011. I had declared that year, the year of authenticity, and decided instead of resolutions or any goals that I was going to choose a word for the year. And I did that practice for about a decade. I still do it a little bit, but I honestly could not tell you my word for 2025 right now. So I haven't attached as much meaning to it in the last few years as I used to. But in 2011, that was my year of authenticity. And I wanted to live more authentically. I wanted to be more real. I was going through some personal changes in my life. And for whatever reason, I remember that I really felt that was a deeply meaningful concept to me. And it was an authentic year. It was a hard year. That was the year that I ended up going through my divorce. It was a year of reclaiming myself and really experiencing the concept of after breakdown comes breakthrough. And I really wasn't expecting that when I set out into the year 2011. I just like the word. I didn't realize that I was right on the cusp of this really profound spiritual awakening at the time. So I couldn't have known, perhaps intuitively, I knew a lot was being shook up in my life, but I couldn't have known how big that year was going to be. And it was a tough year, beautiful year, but a hard year. And as I was coming through it, I remember looking into the year 2012 and being at the vantage point of December of that year and thinking about my word for the year ahead as we got closer to the new year. And I'd really learned by then be careful what you intention. And I say that kind of jokingly, but at the time I felt like I am not choosing a heavy word. I am not choosing something that carries as much weight as the word authenticity. And so I decided to choose the word joy for the year 2012. And some of it was intuitive as well. And just feeling that after such a heavy year, I really wanted to focus on finding joy. And I was going through so much change in my life and still so much upheaval. A lot of the worst of it was over, but more change was to come. And so I felt like it was really important to rewild my relationship with joy. And I was also learning the lessons at the time that no matter how hard life is, that I still value finding happiness and joy. I value finding good. I value shifting my focus to try and find what's beautiful and what I can appreciate. So I'm sure prior to that that I cared about joy, but I remember that being a definitive moment in my life where I really wrote in the sand. I was actually vacationing on Kauai for New Year's Eve that year. And I wrote 2012, the year of joy in the sand, and I was ready for it and ready for a more joyful and lighter experience that year. So I want to share a passage today from Small Pearl's Big Wisdom. This is number 266, and it's called We Will Have Joy, and then talk about a few of the concepts in it. There are going to be days when, despite our best efforts, we just can't connect to that which is good. And that's okay. Especially when suffering and processing loss, it is important to know the scope of the darkness so we can learn to find the stars that guide our way. But when it is time, and those stars have led us through the worst of it, we have to make a choice on how to see this life and what we choose to nurture inside of us. If we want to find what is beautiful in this world, then one has to be rather persistent when it comes to joy and gratitude. These gifts can quietly start to dissolve when we are not actively tending to them. Over time, we'll notice a slow continental drift where gratitude diminishes and that leaves us with only tiny shards of good. Every day we are given a choice. Life asks us the question: Who do you want to be in this world? The way we choose to live is our response. Our perspectives, attitudes, thoughts, heart energy, that's all on us. Nothing external can change that. Change is an inside job. We are the ones who must insist on finding joy. Even when life has handed us a heap of gritty muck, at some point we have to choose to find the gifts anyway. To see there is always space for new ideas, new moments, new intentions, new loves, new letting goes, new skies, new experiences, new interactions, new beginnings, new moons, new creations, new imaginings, new places, and new heart spaces. All are just waiting for us to recognize them, grab onto them and shape them according to our energy, efforts, and intents, so we can choose to find the gifts of each day, the gifts that increase joy, love, happiness, and gratitude. Some days we just need to work a little harder for it, but we all have the capacity inside of ourselves to do the work, to change our set points, to challenge ourselves to be more than our circumstances, to insist that in this moment, on this day, no matter where we find ourselves, we will have joy. I've often thought over the past few years, for a while now, when we look at the world around us and look at all that is hurting, all that is broken, all that seems to be wrong, all the wounds that are bleeding out all over the place in so many different areas in life, so many individuals, that it's easy to wonder about the relevancy of joy and how does joy relate to all of this? Is it even relevant right now? And I think the role of joy is more important than ever. I keep coming back to the idea that joy is medicine for the soul, that it is this vitality, this vitamin D that we need for our hearts at this time when we are able to connect with joy and connect to things that help us feel appreciative, help us feel harmonious, help us be in a space of contentment, help us focus on what is right and what is beautiful and what is magical and miraculous. Then, as an extension of that, we are a better Us. It's always easier to make better choices when we are in a good heart space. We're more readily able to access love and compassion and kindness and positivity, appreciation and gratitude. All of those things are easier to grab onto and to create from that space when we are able to connect with joy. Joy fills us up. It helps balance out some of the darkness and the heaviness and some of the challenges that we have in our day-to-day life. It is not easy being a soul and a spiritual being on this human journey. Just the act of getting out of bed sometimes and humaning is hard. Some days more so than others when we're really in the weeds or if we're going through something. So when we're able to work on finding joy and work on the cultivation of joy, it brings a harmony, a wholeness, a balance into us that we really need. And it helps fill us back up so we have more of a deeper wall to draw from. I also find joy to be a very transformative energy. It can instantly take something that feels heavy or dark or hopeless, and it can help us transform our perspective around it. It might not change a situation itself. It might not change what is and the facts of something, but it changes us and it changes how we look at something and it helps us find higher perspective. It helps us find a bigger perspective. And so I think joy is a very transformative energy. It's the idea of taking something that is pain to us and drawing it out or coloring it out or using creativity that's transformative. And when we are able to transform our experience and bring joy into the mix, it helps us shift some of the heaviness inside of us. It's interesting. I've talked a little bit on the podcast before about being a choreographer and how I grew up a dancer. And it's a hobby of mine and interest, something that a lot of people might not know about me if I haven't mentioned it to them. But I've been really fortunate to have had some really cool choreography opportunities over the past few years for musical theater in particular. And I'm working on another project right now, the Rocky Horror Musical, and we opened this weekend. So that's really exciting. But something that's been really wonderful for me to observe this last season is how I can have a lot of heaviness or stress that I'm carrying. Sometimes just the act of making it to rehearsal and getting through traffic during rush hour and getting there at the end of a workday has felt a little bit stressful, but it never ever fails. I can be in the worst of moods or I can feel super stressed out. And the minute that I walk through the door and I start to move and start to dance, things start to shift. And I've had so many experiences when I am dancing, where I walk into the studio or the rehearsal space carrying something really heavy inside of me. And I walk out feeling significantly lighter. It's like something not only changes in me, but there's this release that happens. And some of the heaviness that I might have been feeling before, or things that might have felt problematic, all of a sudden shift. And so nothing changed, but I changed. I changed my being, my resonance, my frequency, and my vibration. I changed. And in changing, everything feels a little bit easier, a little bit lighter. I usually find that whatever it is that I'm turning on, if something's on my mind and I was stressed out by it, I feel a little bit more equipped to show up and to address it from a better frame of mind. And so when we seek joy, it helps us shift our energy. And when we do that, it's a game changer. And for me, dance is probably one of the number one ways that I found to do that. Not everybody's a dancer, but you don't have to be a dancer to dance it out and to take a page from Christina and Meredith or all the Gray's Anatomy fans out there. You can dance around your own house if you want to. But there are other ways to find joy as well. That's just the quickest one I found and helping shift myself. But I think anything, whether it's going and spending time in nature, doing something that lights us up, taking a moment of intention when we're doing something enjoyable and reminding ourselves this is joy. This is what joy feels like. Joy is happening right now, and I don't want to miss it. I have often found that I sometimes have to pause and remind myself that something is joyful, especially times where it's a little bit harder to connect with those lighter feelings. I like to still do the practice of reminding myself joy is happening right now and to try and receive the goodness that I can from it. And I've often found that when we've been through a real challenge season in life, it might be hard for us to receive something to a full capacity and really feel that full resonance with the idea of joy or feeling grateful or happy in the moment. And that's okay. Do what you can. There are times as I have cultivated joy practices over the years and tried to focus on doing something that brings me joy or brings me pleasure or delight. There have been times where I am very aware that I'm just not able to feel something to the capacity that I would like to because some form of stress or grief or something really hard is taking up a lot of my attention and a lot of my processing. And so we just receive what we can. When we make a date with joy and we create opportunities to meet with joy, the idea isn't that we have to feel blissed out and ecstatic all the time. If we can only have a few drops of goodness and that's all we're able to get out of something that day because of where we're at, I still find it a helpful practice to help continue to teach our nervous systems and our brains that joy is important and that we are worthy of creating opportunities for joy and reminding ourselves that joy is happening right now. And that brings me to the last point I wanted to share today. And that is the idea that joy is meant for the present. It's not meant for someday when X, X, and X have happened and placed an expectation on joy and conditions on when we can feel joy. It's not meant for the past. I think sometimes we look at the past with rose-colored glasses and that we all have these certain memories in our life that we might go back to and remember as like the good days or a particularly wonderful time in life. And sometimes it's easy to look back and feel like life was better then, but joy isn't alive in the past. It's only alive in the here and now, it's only alive in the present. And I think so often it's found in the little small things, the tiny miracles, the tiny magical things every day. I'm smiling saying this right now. I'm making this podcast, and I've got two dogs that are sitting close to me. Rosie, our big wolf hound, is on her back and she has her paws stretched up straight in the air. And Frodo, our little elderly blind gremlin dog, is on his side. And he's just this little ball of white fluff right now. And they look so happy and so content and so peaceful and so joyful. And I just happened to notice them as I was talking about this, and it flashed in my mind, this right here, this is joy. It's a gift to be here on this Saturday afternoon, recording this podcast, getting to speak these words and share my ideas and thoughts with the audience, having these two little companions by me who are safeguarding the space and are just happy to be close by and to be right by me. This moment right now, there's joy in it. And if I can take the time to notice and to pause and to think about this moment right now, there's joy here. And if I can pause and appreciate that and receive it, then that is me being a good practitioner of my own words and receiving the medicine of joy. I've always been a big believer that no matter what is happening, that fighting for joy and insisting on our right to feel joy, to experience happiness, to find what's good and beautiful and artistic and creative and bright and lovely in this world is so important on our soul path. It's part of our heart magic because we're always going to be aware of what's not right. The challenges and the growth and the mistakes and the struggles, all of that is just part of the journey. And so we can't help but run into it. We don't get to bypass that. It's just part of what we came here to do and to learn and grow and experience as a soul. That will be there. But there's joy on the journey too. But when we can keep working on the act of cultivating joy and learn to prioritize joy and see it as something that is necessary and vital and life-giving for our soul, I think it helps give us more grace and ease and creativity, resourcefulness, and overall helps us feel more equipped for navigating the day today. So I wish you a week of joy with that. I think a lovely practice is to take time at the end of a day and think about what was joyful today, what happened, whether or not I was able to receive the joy in the moment that I can reflect on and say, joy happened in that moment. And in retrospect, we can look back and just be grateful for something that happened that might have meant joy for us that day. And I think it's a beautiful intention at the beginning of a day to say, I want to take time today to experience joy, to set that as an intention and see what shows up and see how more mindful you might be and what you might notice when you set that as an intention. So, with that, I hope you have a wonderful, joyful week. I will be back next week with a new Your Heart Magic episode. And in the meantime, as always, be well, be love, be you, and be magic.

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