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] Mountains, personal growth, and wisdom.
Music, Aloha and welcome to Your Heart magic, an 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. Welcome to Your Heart magic. This is Dr bethanne kapansky Wright, and today we have a talk, story time episode, and our topic is mountains and becoming so I chose this topic today because the mountains have such a special place in my heart.
As somebody who lived in Alaska for a really long time. I was a big part of the mountain running community up there, and I spent a lot of time in the mountains, hiking, training for races. I did some mountain racing, never anything super competitive. It was just fun to be out there and be a participant and get to be with a bunch of other people who love being outdoors and are pushing themselves to go and experience nature and be part of something bigger than just themselves. And there's so much of my past history that is tied up in memories around that.
So a lot of my writing reflects some of those times in my life, especially some of my earlier writings. And when summer hits. I think I will forever remember mountain season in Alaska. I climbed year round. They are climbable in the winter time. You just have to have the right equipment. But definitely the summer is just what I think you live for.
If you live in Alaska and you love being outdoors, and everybody has their different jam of what they like to do in the summertime. But for me, being able to access like all the trails and just be out and create all these memories, be out with friends, I'd hike solo, there's just so many different connections and memories that I have tied to that. And I always think of the mountains during the summertime.
So this month's talk story time was inspired by memories of some of those, we'll call them growing up years. And I say growing up years. I was a adult at the time, but they were years of becoming, and that's why I called this episode mountains and becoming. Because every piece that I'm going to share reflects some passage of time for me, some rite of passage in my life, where I was going through some sort of personal transformation or evolution, going through some kind of a big shift, understanding myself in a new way.
And I think the mountains and and a mountain, the symbolism of a mountain in particular is so symbolic of this massive piece of land that is unmoving and yet changes and shifts with the seasons based on what the weather and the elements are doing and reflect so many things back to us the wisdom of nature and the wisdom of a mountain. There are many, many voices and lessons and wisdoms in there when we listen with our hearts and we're really tuning into nature.
So some of these pieces of writing reflect some of those wisdoms at various periods of my life, and I have three passages I'm going to share today. The first one is simply called the mountain, and it's a poem that is on a old blog of mine called sunshine in winter. I'm not sure if I ever published this in a book. Maybe it's somewhere out there that I submitted to a poetry contest or something like that.
[4:00] Nature, spirituality, and personal growth through endurance sports.
But when I went to find it and to see if I'd put it in one of my compilations, I hadn't, as far as I know. So this was pulled off of a blog. It's called the mountain, and I wrote it back in 2013-
I climbed a mountain today, whispering to her with my every step of secrets waiting in wild places, the freedom beating and untamed terrain, the beguiling mysteries hidden behind the clouds, coaxing come find me.
Of the radiance revealed when bright sun smiles, the tangled wisdom of deep earth, the landscaped labyrinth, serving to remind you will never have her entirely figured out.
Of the beauty found and rocky scars, vigilant trees, loyal roots and punctuated wild flowers, exclaiming Life will always grow of her absolute wholeness that remains standing despite any element her ability to entertain.
Many suitors yet exist, unbound to none, but she her permission to be nothing more or less than who she is.
I climbed a mountain today, as I thought about it yesterday, when I climbed this mountain, untrained to her whispers, my heart could not hear, uninitiated to her secrets, my restless feet were forever climbing, unaware of her true nature.
My heart did not realize. I thought I knew who I was, but was about to discover I knew very little for the mountain I stepped on to find myself was containing the secrets of me I was not yet ready to carry.
I climbed a mountain today, as I remembered yesterday's younger, unknowing steps, I thanked her for bearing at the time the load I could not today, I carry the full of me my initiated steps and dance with the mountain as her secret reigns, baptized me and her sacred land embraced me as daughter. I heard her whisper, welcome home.
Years ago, when I was about to go through my spiritual awakening, divorce, giant upheaval in my life. It's something I've talked about quite a bit on the your heart magic podcast. I think that my relationship with endurance sports, with running and climbing and being outdoors, not only was a tool that was just healthy for me mentally, it's such a good way to cope with changes and to cope with life stress. I talk about all the time how much I love nature on the podcast, and I think no matter where we're at in our life, nature meets us there.
So we don't have to, like, be super tuned in, we just have to be willing to show up and receive whatever's needed for us at that point in time, I wasn't ready yet to access some of this wisdom that I was later writing about, because I hadn't lived those changes. I was on the other side of things, and I hadn't really gone through what felt like that metaphorical metamorphosis of cocoon to butterfly wings and all that good stuff. And I was at the beginning, at the cusp of about to really go through this giant life change for myself. And I had a very restless summer. I was out that year quite a bit.
And there's many, many stories that I could tell you about that time of my life, but I think the most important thing is just reflecting on the fact that at the time, that was a way that I went to work through what I was feeling.
And I think the mountain held and contained these parts of me that I hadn't quite found within myself, almost as if the mountain was this giant mirror and was reflecting back these shifts that I was about to go through inside of me, reflecting back strength, reflecting back a sense of mystery and sometimes our heart and what we feel and the shifts that happen inside of us feel like a mystery that we are slowly discovering and we stay open to.
And so often we start to feel something change in us on a soul level, before we have any kind of conscious knowledge about what that is. And so we'll feel uneasy. We'll feel something shifting. We'll feel something in our life that no longer quite fits.
There's all these ways that these different little intuitions and instincts and perceptions and felt senses start to pop up for us, and we can't fully put it together in a conscious way, where we see the bigger picture. And so when we can't see the bigger picture, we stay open, we stay curious. We collect pieces of ourself, and many times, those pieces that we collect are reflected back to us from the world around us.
[8:56] Mountains, the wild self, and awakenings.
And in my case, all this time in the mountains, all this time playing with the energies of being so rugged and so wild, right? Like when you think about climbing a mountain, it feels so untamed. It's not something that you do if you want to stay neat and tidy and keep everything in a little box.
It's something that you do to have an experience of yourself that's more open, that's more free, where you dance with the elements a little bit more, and you go out there as prepared as you can, and yet you never really know what's going to happen.
And I should be clear that my version of mountain climbing was sometimes being on terrain where there wasn't a trail, but often there was some sort of a trail, a trail that many have hiked, or sometimes goat trails, or sometimes it would be a scramble on the scree, but oftentimes these mountains were climbable, so everything that I did, like I didn't have, like orienteering stuff or a backpack or anything like that, maybe some water and. Um, supplies and good shoes that could handle the terrain.
So it was this mix of going into territory that there was some sense of safety around, and yet completely wild territory as well. And it was exactly what I needed at that time in my life to experience myself in a new way and to meet myself in a new way. And so when I wrote that particular essay, I had climbed this mountain. It's called Mount marathon, and there's a whole big hoopla about that in Seward, Alaska on the Fourth of July.
There's a really long history of this mountain being raced on July 4. And that's that would be a whole other podcast that is a very fun it is a vibe. Mount marathon is a vibe. If you're from Alaska and you're listening to this, you know what I'm talking about.
If you're not from Alaska, you can look at Mount marathon race. We're at Alaska. It is this wild, extreme race that's up and down this crazy mountain, and hundreds of people do it every year. You have to sign up and get in the lottery to do it or qualify to do it. And a lot of times there's no space left. Like people really want to be in this race. But then it's like a suffer fest for however long you're out there, usually anywhere from underneath an hour, if you're really, really fast, and it could be up to an hour 90 minutes.
If you're not as fast, it just depends. But it is like one big supper fest, and yet it is absolutely packed in Seward, Alaska on July 4. And you can watch the racers go up the mountain to a certain point. You can see them come down. And sometimes it just looks like they are going like straight down this shoot made of scree and rocks, and it is really a spectacle and really fun to be a part of.
It's fun to be a race spectator on and I have a whole story about how that race, in and of itself, and reading about it in the newspapers actually, what woke up something in me and turned this, this girl who was a dancer and a little bit athletic. I like to run, but I'd never done anything like that. It turned me into this other person where I was like, I don't know what is calling to me in that, but I I have to go do this thing.
[12:14] Grief, resilience, and self-discovery through mountain climbing.
And so there's a whole other journey around that. And so I had this special relationship with that particular mountain, and when I wrote that piece, I had come back to hike it several years later, after I had gone through these big rites of passage in my life, and I really could see where the mountain helped me integrate and was holding pieces of myself that I was not yet in touch with and so when I climbed it that particular day, I felt very full.
I felt very whole. I felt very in my power at that time in my life. And this essay was a beautiful reflection on that. So speaking of Mount marathon, this next one is called better days. And ironically, it are not ironically, I climbed a lot of mountains, but that one, as I said, I had a special relationship to. That one is also in this particular essay and better days, was written after the loss of my brother Brent. It is in Lamentations of the sea and one of the chapters on Greek.
And it is a another reflection on how a mountain held me and helped symbolize a profound rite of passage in my life. Better days, I spent part of my morning looking through a photo album from six summers ago. Life was in an entirely different place than on the cusp of extreme change, though I hadn't yet realized it.
Most of the pictures are myself in motion, climbing something, biking somewhere, racing this, and running that, tapping into previously unexpressed energy inside that taught me how strong, clever and brave I could be.
I don't think you can run up and down a mountain for speed and time and not tap into those attributes within yourself I didn't know at the time those were the same attributes I would need six months later, when I found the courage to speak the words that would leave me starting over on my own, even though I didn't know how to be alone, how to support myself, and how to do life solo.
But I was strong and brave and clever, the girl who climbed more mountains than I could count multiple times a week, the girl who cruised up and down monstrous hills on her road bike, the girl who had never done a triathlon in her life then found herself with an Iron Man medal around her neck precisely one year after starting training.
The girl who was strong and brave and clever, the girl who trained for an ultra marathon in the heart of an Alaskan winter by doing solo runs, it sub zero temperatures for several hours on end, water bottle freezing up, eyelashes, icing with frost.
Running through chilly winds and chunks of ice and trails that crunched with arctic cold by the time race day wound around, I found out that 40 miles on an April Oregonian deep forest trail were a snap compared to the conditions I had trained strong and brave and clever the girl, the girl who grabbed my life by the reins and had an unshakable faith in my ability to be my own change, even when my own faith and self altered, she believed in me so profoundly.
How could I possibly let that part of myself down so I made the changes she insisted upon. I started over my brother is alive in those days, he scattered throughout the photo albums. It's bittersweet. I'm reminded, as I look through the pages that during that time period he had severe blood clotting and ended up in the ICU over Christmas. The doctors told him it was a miracle he was alive.
After that, he took medication daily, monitored his blood levels, tried to live better, at least for a while. As time went on, everything seemed under control. With the clots, fine tuned and managed. He didn't think much more of it. I guess last January proved that wrong.
I have wondered what he would have changed over the last six years, if he knew they would be the last six of his life, how he might change his story, if he knew there wasn't going to be many opportunities for better days ahead, that the days he was living each day were the better days that each of us is spinning out our stories each and Every day, and that these days, these days right now, are the days we have to look to for better.
Have to find the beauty in have to see the light of souls becoming even in the face of dark, that each day that offers breath is one more day of better we just don't always have the eyes to see, which has a lot less to do with looking with the mind and more to do with listening with the heart.
[17:05] Embracing life's moments and finding inner truth through running and writing.
I see the beauty in the pictures as I look back time, wisdom and perspective all help me see the better of those days where smiling eyes and frantic fun often hid the breaking heart and growing spirit emerging within. I see the girl who is about to dive into the deep end and find out what it truly means to live an authentic life where her life will align with her inner truth.
I spent yesterday in the mountains mount marathon, one of the ones I used to race up and down for speed back in those days where I was that girl yesterday was just for fun, though, as I found the longer I've embodied being strong, brave and clever by living an authentic life, the less I've needed my old platforms of courage.
I've learned to see living life as my true self by fearlessly plunging into my soul as the greatest act of courage I can offer in this world, my platform has become my heart. There is much space to fly free. I climb with an old friend, cool air, shifting fog, occasional glimpses of sun.
The trails are familiar, the conversation laced with laughter, the sky performing a filmy dance of clouds that keeps the views of the peaks across the bay ever changing. I feel the old days coursing through me as I run down shale flying dust in my face, legs pounding. I feel the spirit of my brother.
I don't feel him as often these days, but he is here this day, running down, remembering feeling the presence of the day, the better with me. There's no audience, no clock, no timer, nothing but open skies and almost empty mountain. True friendship and my becoming it is the best run on the mountain I've ever had.
Three or four years pass between the timeline of those two pieces that I wrote, and that one just kind of says it all. I had moved into such a different phase in life by the time I wrote that, and by the time I lost Brent, and I still love to run, I still love to climb. I live in Kauai now, not Alaska, so not in the way that I used to, but I kind of lost that part of me that felt more competitive or that needed to prove something, or whatever that was about.
For me, it served a purpose during its time, and I think that I had really integrated so much of the lessons that I'd been learning as I was younger and had just arrived in this different place, and this place of appreciation and gratitude and and that particular essay I was having like such a profound shift in my life after losing Brent.
And I think when we go through that kind of loss, we access things inside of ourselves that we can't always. Access any other way grief is this doorway to some of the deepest truths of soul. And my deepest truth of soul was really seeing how like this is it like this day and the next day and this present moment, and really seeing if Brent had known like this is all that you have. You beat time, this one time, right then, that was that part of what I told in the story, that he had these blood clots.
And that's what happened in the end, a blood clot that broke off. And, you know, he died instantaneously, and, of course, very unexpectedly. And he we almost lost him about six Christmases earlier, and that time he was short of breath and able to get to the hospital, and they figured out what was going on, and he was in the ICU, and so it was this miracle that he was still alive, and we really thought that he was on the right medication, that it was all under control. And I often wondered, like, what if he'd known? What would he have done differently?
And that finite sense, that limited sense of time and truly having like, this is it, this is what he had reflected back to me, this immense gratitude that what if this is all you have. And that wasn't in a scary way, where I felt like, Oh no, what if this is it. But it was more of this invitation to truly embody the moments that I have, and I have probably lost and refound that lesson so many times since I wrote those words. I think it's hard to Carpe Diem every single day.
We all can get caught up in life, stress and some of the stuff that wears us down. And there's lessons in that, there is growth in that. So we're not always meant to live in this like mountain running high. There is so much becoming that happens in the valley, that happens halfway up the mountain as well.
[21:53] Poetry on becoming, risk-taking, and self-empowerment.
But when I find myself straying too long from those lessons of presence and gratitude, I always come back to some of these times in my life, and some of the wisdom integrated from those times that reminds me like, these are your moments. Bethanne, these are the better days.
So this last poem that I'm going to share today is just called mountains. It is from cranberry dusk. That is a poetry book I wrote years ago that is called cranberry desk, a journey of becoming, and this feels like a fitting poem to end this talk Story Time episode with today on the mountains and becoming:
The mountains will exact payment from all those who climb, making you stop and pay attention to something beyond yourself, forcing you to learn that any journey worth taking begins with a single step, extracting something from your heart that frees you up to be better, daring you to risk the guts to make the changes you've been talking about instead of sitting around talking.
And if you listen close enough, they will gently soothe your fears and say, My dear one, of course, it will be hard and steep and bloody that is called Becoming but my gorgeous scope wasn't made through the ease of a day, and so it is true for you.
Thank you so much for joining me in today's your heart magic podcast, and for this talk Story Time episode, we will be back next week with a new podcast. It is a archetypes of the Tarot episode, and we are moving on to the card the star, and talking about all things the star, all things inspiring and hopeful and bright and beautiful, the star is a really optimistic card, so I am looking forward to being able to share that episode with everyone. In the meantime, have an amazing week.
And as always, be well, be love, be you and be magic.
