How can we better listen to the dreams in our heart and find the courage to follow them? Join us in this week's episode, Following Our Dreams, for a special Talk Story episode, where Dr. BethAnne shares selected passages from her books and offers dialogue and wisdom inspired by her journey.
Key talking points include:
- Personal reflections on lessons learned when we follow the dreams in our heart
- Why our dreams change over time and how we can work with their evolution
- Inspiration for radical acceptance and surrender of the form of our dreams
- Live poetry readings, storytelling, spiritual wisdom, and candid reflections
Tune in next week for our next episode, June Akashic Energy Update. New episodes of Your Heart Magic drop weekly on Thursday evenings at 6 pm.
Selected Readings/Books Shared in Episode:
52 Weeks from Lamentations of The Sea
52 Weeks Part II from Revelations of The Sky
The Time I Chose to Follow My Dreams, reflections from the blog
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Your Heart Magic is a space where heart wisdom, spirituality, and psychology meet. Enjoy episodes centered on mental health, spirituality, personal growth, healing, and well-being. Featured as one of the best Heart Energy and Akashic Records Podcasts in 2024 by PlayerFM and Globally Ranked in the top 5% in Listen Notes.
Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright is a Licensed Psychologist, Spiritual Coach and Educator, and Akashic Records Reader. She is the author of the Award-Winning Lamentations of the Sea, its sequels, and several books of poetry. A psychologist with a mystic mind, she weaves perspectives from both worlds to offer holistic wisdom.
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Below is a transcript of the episode as generated by Otter.ai. (*please note, this transcript has only been edited to put in line breaks for easier readability and may contain errors where a word or phrase got lost in transcription.)
[0:13] Finding the courage to follow our dreams and what inspired mine.
Aloha and welcome to Your Heart magic and illuminating space where psychology spirituality and heart wisdom meet. Here's your host, Dr. BethAnne Kapansky. Wright, the clinical psychologist with a mystic mind.
Aloha everybody. This is Dr. BethAnne Kapansky. Wright. Welcome to Your Heart magic. Today we have a fun episode. It's called Follow your dreams. And it's a talk storytime episode where I'm going to be sharing a few passages from my work. But it's all centered around the idea of following our dreams and my journey of following my dream and moving to the island of kawaii and this episode is inspired by the timing that is coming out. It is the Thursday right after we have had Memorial Day weekend in the United States.
And outside of the historical connotations of what the weekend means. On a personal level. For many of us, it represents the beginning of summer. Growing up in Alaska, it represented the time where anchorage finally looked like it was going to have summertime come and greet us. And I always remember that at the beginning of May, it would be so gray and gross.
And it's like you were never going to see green again, everything like dirty and gritty. And then it's like this alchemy happened towards the third or fourth week of May where all of a sudden everything was green. A lot of times there would be these trash pickup volunteer movement.
So the city got cleaned up. And almost overnight, things turned beautiful before your eyes. And so this was a weekend where people would go and they would buy flowers for the garden, they would get their hanging baskets, maybe that you would break out the barbecue. So there's these nice connotations around this holiday. And this episode is inspired by that. And this time period in my life where this weekend marked a very pivotal turn back in the year 2016.
After this is the year that I had lost my brother Brent, and had been going through the heart of my grief journey, and really was thinking about am I being who I'm called to be in this world? What are my dreams? Am I following my dreams? And if I'm not following my dreams, how can I make a change to live more authentically, in order to do that, and to show up as my highest expression of self.
So I shared this before on your heart magic. But just as a little recap, we had been talking about moving to the island of kawaii and it wasn't an imminent move at that time in my life. It was something that was like three years from now five years from now, not quite a pipe dream, but not ready to be an actuality. And that particular Memorial Day weekend. I had a really beautiful weekend.
All I remember about it is on Memorial Day itself going and getting all these baskets of flowers and putting them all around the front porch and the back patio. And wanting to surround myself in color and life after what had been a very heart starved, difficult winter of grief. And I made art and I planted the flowers and the homemade pots where I found old tents and pulled out chalk and did chalk art on the driveway. And it was just this beautiful day of peace and freedom. It was such good medicine for my soul.
And I remember driving to work the next day feeling really trapped in my life at the time. And really kind of stifled with the circumstances and the patterns I'd created for myself which looked just fine on the surface but underneath it I had a soul calling a part of my inner self that was dying to get out and be bigger and express myself and know myself in a different way than what I was able to do in that current incarnation itself. And I had this insight this epiphany where I was like a year from now I am not going to be feeling this way.
[4:50] Moving to Hawaii and facing challenges and letting go.
I will not be trapped. I will not be driving in this car on the way to my office feeling kind of stuck in these patterns we are making Seeing the radical change. And we're going to do it in a year's time. And I think I probably went home that evening and said to my husband, let's move to Hawaii a year from now. So this first passage I'm going to share is simply called 5252.
The number of weeks I have left in Alaska, well give or take a few since life can sometimes have its own timetable. But approximately one year from today, we will be pulling up stakes and moving on across the waters to kawaii I drove to work this week thinking of the number 52.
And my mind that if things do fall out the way we've projected, the end of May will be when I formally close my practice. And we will go jump on a plane with a couple of dogs and a temperamental calico cat, an image that has me shaking my head, when I think about all the hoops needed to jump through to make that happen. Moving is hard enough. But moving to an island feels extra challenging. It's huge, massive change.
So much so that it's hard to wrap my head around the amount of letting goes and goodbyes and leave takings that are going to take place in the next year. And let alone the details of selling a house and moving our stuff and closing a long term practice and all the unknowns. What will we do when we get there?
Where will we live? How will we live? It can be daunting, all the things that feel like roadblocks if we let them. But they're really not. They are difficulties, variables, challenges, not impossibilities. At one point in time. Kawaii felt like an impossibility. But I am finding that if I just allow myself to look at it differently, see things from the angle of can instead of can't.
That isn't an impossibility after all, just a process of figuring out how to navigate an obstacle course. And so I find myself in a new place of possibility ready to leave the familiarity of life and Alaska. Life after Brent has pushed me to go strip me of who and what isn't real in my life challenged me to consider what I am doing with my time. If I am living the life I want to live yanked me from the ease of shadows on the wall of the cave, representing certainty security and comfort and forced me out into the release of the sun. Who tells me I need to find new ways to let the sun shine brighter and my life.
There is a strange acceptance found when we began to let go, an odd piece that cast a soft glow and sense of nostalgia over everything. Though it's still a year out I find myself saying goodbye to people and places and old spaces in preparation for the change I find myself loosening the angles and grooves of the old shapes I once fit. I no longer have to squeeze myself into those molds. find myself letting the threads of how life was supposed to look unravel. Find the beauty and the becoming found. And life's on doings when I wrote that it was maybe just a few days after we'd made this big decision.
And the way the story goes, it took about 5657 weeks to really get out of there. It wasn't quite 52 life did have its own timetable. But I'd say things were close enough to the spirit of the intention that I really lived what it was to have a dream and choose to follow it. And something that I learned in that process is what really felt impossible. Like it just felt like I can't our life here is to set and all these things of what will I do about my brick and mortar practice? What about our home? We have all these things? How will we move to an island? What about the animals? Everything that I cast in my path?
[9:08] Allowing oneself to follow dreams and heart, despite obstacles.
There's a reason not to that felt like an insurmountable thing. The minute I had that mindset shift, and started to consider like, well, what if this isn't an impossibility? What if it's just something to figure out a way over or around? Maybe it's not even the obstacle that I'm thinking it is the minute that that happened? And we put this intention out there into the universe, things started loosening, and it wasn't immediate. It actually took a lot of work to manifest the move.
And it was a lot of emotional and physical labor and preparation and all of those good things that you might expect to go into such a big change. But what I found was that none of it was as bad as what I thought it was and the minute that I allowed for the possibility and really started thinking what if instead of I can Can't how much that in and of itself shifted things.
And that is the biggest thing I think that we can take when it comes to following the dreams and our heart is knowing that when we start to allow for the possibility, and instead of talking ourselves out of them, or giving ourselves every reason not to do them, that if we just softened towards it and put breath around it, we can begin to see a way through, and a beautiful image to conceptualize this as if you had a big metal chain of really heavy links. And you're trying to use your force to rip it apart. And you are pulling at it.
And the more you pull, the more impossible it seems. And it's like don't pull it all of it at once. What if you started with just one link? And what if you started with slowly bending that or grabbing a tool to do something that helped open that up? How might that shift how you experience what felt like an unbreakable chain, and would things begin to loosen, and that's exactly what happened. And as I gave myself permission to do it, I began to loosen, I began to breathe, I began to let go, because the big decision had been made.
And I began to start to have a small taste of what was to come. And these intuitive and creative parts of myself, that I think wanted to really come out, I just had such a desire to know myself in a different way. And the minute I gave myself permission to do it, it shifted everything.
So when we're following our dreams, it starts with allowance, it starts with allowing for the fact that it could happen. And maybe there are times where it feels like an impossibility, or we feel like given our circumstances, we can't go do the big thing in that moment. But we can allow for it, we can allow for it to take on a new form, we can allow for the possibility that things could be different.
There's always a starting place, no matter how locked into something we feel, we can always allow for the possibility, we can always set an intention and say to the universe, I have no idea how I'm going to manifest this, or what I'm going to do about this. But I know that I need your help. I know that I want to, I know that I want to follow what's inside me and be true to that.
And I know that I'm allowing for the possibility that it could be. And if I open up to that potential, and dare to get that far, what might happen and how my life meet us there. So obviously, in my case, life Mattis there, we landed on the island. This next essay that I'm going to read was written two years later. And what is fun about this is I ended up writing multiple pieces around this idea of 52 weeks, when I first wrote that original essay I never intended to revisit that particular day, I don't know that I thought it would hold as much meaning as it's come to hold for me.
But I do find myself every Memorial Day weekend having a reflection point around that big change in this pivotal moment in my life. So this next one was written, as I said two years later, it's now 2019. And I am really in the thick of this reinvention process and learning what it is to understand myself in new ways. And another way of putting that is be careful what you wish for I say that with laughter and compassion.
But you know how when we wish for something, and we actually got it, there's always a twist. If you ever watch a movie with a genie, there's always this caveat to it. And in my case, it was more of a twist of like, this is what you asked for. And at the same time, it was like oh my gosh, I didn't think it would be this hard to know myself and to allow for this bigger becoming.
So this is a selection from 52 weeks part two, this is from revelations of the sky. The first one was from lamentations of the sea. Those are both books and my trilogy on grief and my memoir over losing brands and my subsequent spiritual awakening and transformation. And this was written Memorial Day weekend 2019. It begins with a reflection on the weekend in 2018 where I'd been like oh my gosh, we did it and we've been on the island almost a year now. And I'm going to drop into the middle of the passage so you have the context for what came before that.
Here it is one year later and life is still rearranging and reforming. New pieces have come into the picture. We are further along than last year and I feel like I am finally just starting to sink into what this move to Kawaii is all about when I first start arrived, I knew I was called to a deeper purpose of soul, I'd followed my calling to the island and expected things would begin to manifest, which helped me make sense of my deeper purpose. I'd stumble on to new intuitive clients and start getting booked with readings. Maybe I'd intersect with a local shop owner who wanted to collaborate, perhaps one of my books would hit, or one of my courses would take off, or somebody would hear me speak and offer greater opportunity. None of those things happened.
And I've now realized that I was thinking about it all backward, I expected my work to shape and define me and help create the next step I was meant to take. I thought somehow what I was doing, would inform my being, and the path would flow from there.
What I have learned since is I wasn't called here to do something first, I was called here to learn bigger and deeper ways to be, be in relationship with myself, be in relationship with the island, be in relationship with the universe, trust, surrender, release the plan, release the how and the white focus on the why to be a bright light, and hold space for the light. And in so doing awaken the light and others.
I know my why. I wrote the above words, a couple of weeks back as I went into a deep space of regrouping and recalibration. May was a month of learning to come back home to myself. And face the fact how I thought things were going to look is not how things have been, it was a month of learning, my sole purpose isn't something I am going to do. It is who I am called to be. When I bring myself back to my heart and let whatever I create flow from my center. When I focus on my light, I'm golden.
[16:59] Patience, trust, and self-discovery in pursuing dreams and soul growth.
Something that I was learning at the time that I wrote that is the importance of receptivity and being. And that in order to follow this soul calling and follow my dreams that I was going to be continually asked to surrender the plan in the form of what those look like, and trust the process. And now that just because I expected it to look a certain way didn't mean that it was going to and it didn't mean I lost the path.
And I had these expectations, we often have these when we have a dream or something we're trying to achieve or accomplish something that we're following, we think it's going to take a certain form, we expect the next step to show up, we expect a map that makes it easier. And we can just follow the dots and get to X marks the spot and say I did it I took the big brave leap and I did the thing and I follow the instruction guide. And there is no instruction guide. There is no set path when it comes to our dreams and the things in our heart that we feel called to create and to bring out into the world. We create the path as we go.
And oftentimes what I found is that the qualities of patience, and consciously allowing and letting the path unfold before us and show itself to us. And knowing when to push and effort and take big leaps and when to sit back and step and just allow for what's going to be that all of those are part of successfully living a dream and allowing ourselves to creatively adapt and let things manifest in their own way in own time, we are in partnership with our heart and with spirit. When we are following something inside of us, we're not alone in the mix.
So oftentimes we have this will this sense of I am going to do it and I'm going to do it this way. And this is how it's going to look and for me, I kept expecting to have like that moment where somehow it made sense. Or I got clarity or like something kind of hit it landed and I was like, Oh, this is how I'm going to shape my work and my voice. And I was so frustrated where none of that happened. Like I was doing things and taking steps forward and working on more creative and intuitive offerings and understanding myself in that way. But I didn't I never had a moment where I felt like things really hit or landed or I was able to reach a bigger platform. I felt really frustrated and like I was grinding it out and really confused.
And in the middle of that all this beautiful spiritual insight and self discovery was going on. And that particular Memorial Day weekend. I was really realizing like that was why I came here. Whatever I do is going to be the byproduct of who I become. That I didn't move to kawaii to do something like move to kawaii to be Have something I moved for healing I moved to grow my relationship with spirit I moved to be more fluid and intuitive to know myself in the form I'd created previously and become a bigger Batman than I'd understood myself before.
And that's part of our soul growth over our lifespan, we are all called in our own way to find that growth inside of ourselves. It just takes different form based on who we are and our unique requirements of soul. So for me, I was having lessons on forced patience and being and I was really starting to get it, that what I'd come to this island to do was not so much about the doing, it was about the becoming, and stepping into a place of more surrender and more grace and more acceptance on the path. So this last piece that I want to share kind of completes our arc of Memorial Day reflections.
[20:59] Following dreams, growth, and transformation.
And this was written in 2020. And it is a reflection on how life has changed even more during the last year and my tradition of taking some time over that weekend to write and reflect on where I'm at, and how I've changed since that original 52 weeks piece of writing and declaration was made. So we're dropping into this essay about halfway through the year I made my 52 weeks vow I wrote about my decision to change my life.
And that piece of writing later ended up in Lamentations of the sea. So it is only appropriate that I honor the anniversary of the decision and write a follow up piece reflecting on all that has transpired in a year's time. Thus, a tradition was born. Memorial Day weekend became an anniversary and reflection point where I write a piece about where life is now. Both 2018 and 2019 offerings have made it into my upcoming book revelations of the sky and build a bridge to answer the question of what came next.
Because I discovered that the story I'm writing with my life is so different than the story I thought I was writing. I thought the focus of the story was on the decision to move here. And the courage it took to leap I thought the focus would be on the triumphant choice point I reached where I finally gave myself permission to say yes to my dreams. And that is a very good story and one that was worth telling.
But I keep living the truth that any ending is just the beginning. And I now know that this was never meant to be a she moved to kawaii and lived happily ever after story. The bigger story is about what happened when I arrived here.
How struggle and hardship transformed me how I learned that saying yes to becoming the highest expression of myself meant I was going to have to dissolve prior selves in order to create a new elixir have deeper authenticity and healing. How I came to understand the heart of the universe in bigger, more meaningful ways. Because I was pushed so far out of my old bounds of self. I had no choice but to rely on my intuition and Spirit to guide. My story is not a story of immediate success or manifestation. But it is a story of radical transformation.
After all, the dreams in our heart are a living thing. Because our dreams are our deepest truth. And truth is always alive in love. Which means our dreams want to come to life. They are seeking us as much as we are seeking them. They want to come out breathe and grow into material form. And the more we focus on letting go of how we think things should look, the more the universe can assist us in creating them.
We just have to keep listening to our hearts, taking steps as we feel called to step and knowing that following our dreams is how we dream the world our heart yearns for, into being. There's a lot of growth and those words and I have yet to sit down and write a reflection point for where I'm at right now. But I will and hopefully that will make it into one of my next books. But what I can share with you today is that this idea that our dreams are from our hearts, and whatever is from our heart is our truth and that our truth is alive in love. And since love is transformative.
Our truth can be transformative and how our dreams come out and actualize is also transformative. They change shape. They asked us to change shape. It might feel helpful to think of them as something that you are working in Relationship with where the two of you are doing a Tango or singing a duet together. And there's a lot of improv involved. And the universe is the bigger symphony or the dance floor that is upholding all of it and supporting it and coming out into being.
And so if you find yourself in a place where you are trying to follow your dreams, or you don't know what your dreams are, but you really want to listen to them. Well start with the desires in your heart. Start with the things that speak to you and light you up that you wish you had more of in your life. As we identify those things and give ourselves permission to allow for the possibility that they could exist. We learn these really gorgeous lessons, and they are hard lessons. They are hard lessons.
[25:20] Stay with your hearts and stay with your dreams.
But they are also gorgeous lessons about letting go and surrendering the plan and becoming more malleable and learning not always to feel like we have to shape our life but to allow ourselves to be the shape be to be the one who shaped and allowing our dreams to help show us the way and knowing that even if we think we made a misstep, or went in the wrong direction.
As I look back on all these assays, there's absolutely things I would do differently. But that kind of begs the question of maybe I wasn't supposed to do them differently. Maybe I was supposed to do it exactly the way that I did all along because I was exactly where I needed to be at the time. And the lessons and growth that came from that were the ingredients that I would need to keep moving forward on the path of my dreams. And so we learn along the way we grow in wisdom. We learn to surrender, we learn humility, and to have a humble heart.
And to know that the path of following our dreams even though it takes bold inspired action and big leaps of faith, it's also a very humble path, because it will ask us to let go and surrender so much and to release all of these ideas itself and expectations and old ideals were allowing ourselves to be chiseled even as we are trying to chisel the path. It is a symbiotic process and it happens in what can be a beautiful and messy and very tangled alchemy of becoming.
So I leave you with those thoughts today. Stay with yourself. Stay with your hearts. Please stay with your dreams. I will be back next week with a Energy Update for the month of June we will be looking at what the Akashic records have to say about the upcoming month and any other energetic or astrological shifts going on that feel noteworthy to leave into the podcast. And the meantime have an amazing week. Be well. The love the you and be magic.
You've been listening to your heart magic with Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright. Tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your life
