Your Heart Magic

Fluid Balance Through Self-Care and Adaptation

• Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright • Episode 89

Share episode

What if finding balance in your life wasn’t about achieving a final destination, but rather embracing an ever-changing journey? Join me, Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright, as we explore the evolving nature of balance, especially during the introspective times of the equinox and Libra season. 

Drawing from insights in my upcoming book, "Small Pearls, Big Wisdom," we discuss how balance involves harmonizing action and rest, understanding our emotional states, and adapting to life's unpredictable shifts. Together, we’ll uncover practical strategies for integrating self-care, productivity, and rest into our routines, all while staying flexible and responsive to life’s changes.

In this episode of Your Heart Magic, we delve into the art of reflection as a tool for maintaining balance. Learn how to take inventory of different areas of your life—whether it’s responsibility, joy, receptivity, or relationships—using journaling, pie charts, or wellness wheels. 

By identifying imbalances and making small, intentional adjustments, we can achieve a fluid balance that evolves over time. Embark on this journey with me to nurture your personal ecosystem and thrive amidst life’s ebbs and flows.

Don't miss next week's episode, where we'll be chatting about what the Akashic Records have to say about the energy of October. New episodes come out every Thursday at 6 pm HST. 

--

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 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.

If you’d like to explore what your Akashic Records have to share with you to guide you on your path at this time, you can find more about Akashic Magic Sessions HERE. Alternatively, sign up for the monthly newsletter Akashic Magic. Each month offers a unique perspective on the current energies along with intuitive writing prompts! Members enjoy a free gift— a complimentary copy of  Dr. BethAnne's book, Cranberry Dusk— upon signing up. 

FIND DR. BETHANNE ONLINE:

BOOKS- www.bethannekw.com/books

FACEBOOK - www.facebook.com/drbethannekw

INSTAGRAM - www.instagram.com/dr.bethannekw

WEBSITE - www.bethannekw.com

CONTACT FORM - www.bethannekw.com/contact

Intro and Outro Music:

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, the clinical psychologist with a mystic mind. Aloha everybody.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

This is Dr Bethann Kapansky-Wright, and welcome to your Heart Magic. Today we have a mental health toolbox episode. Our topic is balance and we are talking about what does it mean to be balanced? How does that apply to us in an individual way? And just some perspectives and tools on finding ways to be more mindful of balance in our life and ways to think about the concept of balance.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

And I was inspired to focus on balance this month for a couple reasons. One we just passed the autumn equinox for the northern hemisphere spring and the southern hemisphere, and both of those equinoxes are about the balance between light and dark. They are about harmonizing disparate parts and finding ways to balance opposing energies and bring them into harmony with one another. It is also Libra season and balance and harmony and fairness and justice and Libras represented by scales and things balancing out. So it just felt like a concept that was very timely right now and I think it's always a good one to visit. I feel like the idea of having balance in our life as a general rule of thumb sounds pretty good and it's something that most people would say, oh, yeah, like balance is a positive thing. And then, if we actually really think about, but what does that mean? And try and break it down. It's an interesting construct to deconstruct, and a fun, creative prompt would be to just take the idea of what does balance mean to me and to write about that in your journal or do something creative around that. How would you represent balance through colors for you and think about your individual construct of what balance is? And I actually have a piece today that I want to share about balance. It is from my upcoming book Small Pearls, big Wisdom, and this seemed like a great way to share with everybody some of my thoughts on what balance means. This is called balance an ongoing renegotiation.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

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 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.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

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 negotiating our relationship with the energies and 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 do 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. That leads me to the first perspective I want to share today, and that is the idea that balance is an ongoing process.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

It's certainly not a one-time deal where, if we were to carve out our schedule for the next few months and in that schedule put lots of time for rest and time for work and productivity, time where we are investing in self-care, time where maybe we're moving our bodies and we put everything together, maybe we attend to our nutrition and our spiritual health and anything else we can think of that feels like a component of our lives. And if we were to schedule all of that out and say that looks like a well-balanced schedule, I'm doing such a good job taking care of all aspects of me. Even if we did that, life could still throw us a curveball. Who's to say that we stay on our schedule? Who's to say that something doesn't happen where the schedule goes out the window and, for some reason, it is not workable? Or who's to say we decide to do our schedule and we realize that the time that we put in for exercise every day because we thought this is something that would be good for me, every day, because we thought this is something that would be good for me to do, I'm going to get up and go to the gym and maybe it's not working for us.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

Maybe we realize that we're really tired and we're worn out from the last season in life and that it's not procrastination that keeps us from going. It's actually this deeper need for rest and revisiting our need for movement and perhaps finding something that is a little bit more gentler or less demanding, or working it into our life in a different kind of way. And so, even when we plan to try and have things balanced. It is an ongoing renegotiation. There are times where we are going to feel called to take a step and we will know the right thing to do. There's times where we're going to be called to rest and take a step back and hang out on the sidelines for the bit and just receive and be.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

And so when I think about the construct of what does balance mean, I often think of it in a very holistic sense and the idea that each of us is a ecosystem of self. We have our own individual needs, our own individual things that help us operate at whether it's peak capacity or average capacity or subpar capacity. We have different need sets and things that fuel us and nurture us or take energy from us, and so in that process, we have to figure out our individual relationship with whatever composes our life, and then that ecosystem itself is happening within the context of our lives, and we are part of this greater ecosystem of whoever is in our family system, whether that's our animal companions, family members, roles that we might have, our work systems, our communities that we live in, and then all of that is happening within this greater ecosystem of the cycles that we are all under, and those might be the cycles happening in a very tangible way, like the seasonal cycles, the economic cycles, the cycles of bigger things that affect the collective and all of us is going through it. And they could also be things that are even more cosmic the astrological cycles, the energy. There are times where I might do an energy update for the collective for the month and it will show and reflect from the Akashic records that the bigger cycle is one of a collective slowdown and that doesn't mean that an individual might not still fall call to act. They might have really good energy. It might be an action-oriented month for them. Certainly, we can have something happening in our own pace and rhythm that doesn't always match something happening in a bigger, more cosmic sense, but sometimes we will be impacted by what is happening with those energies and so we will say I had all these goals to accomplish this month and I feel like I'm moving through molasses and for the life of me I can't figure out how to make myself go faster. And then maybe we tune into some spiritual wisdom or somebody's spiritual update or astro update somewhere and we see the fact that it's this collective slowdown and that something's happening right now and we say, oh, maybe that is impacting me and it's part of why I'm having such fuzzy thinking right now.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

So when we're talking about balance, it is an ongoing renegotiation because we're working with so many different factors and they're always in play. None of them are ever fixed, none of them are ever static. It's all fluid. So even when we try and account for something that we stabilize, things could still change around us. And that brings me to my next point that we stabilize, things could still change around us. And that brings me to my next point, and that is that balance requires self-knowledge.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

Balance really requires heart wisdom. It requires learning to tune into our inner self. It requires knowing ourself and being able to do regular inventory where we ask ourselves what do I need right now? Where am I at right now? How do I feel called to move forward? It requires being able to learn about ourselves with curiosity and learn that the general wisdom for somebody else may or may not work for us. Something that is representing balance and helping somebody else might not be what's right for us. That's why there are so many different tailored coaching plans or nutrition plans or exercise plans, all these different things that people decide. I want to grow in this area in my life, and so maybe they seek out expertise for how do I best do that? And there are all these different offerings out there that say, here's how you do that, and they wonder well, how do I pick one? And so we learn a lot about ourselves through trial and error, and some things might work for us, some things might not, but it's never a one size fits all, and so we have to know ourselves and we have to be willing to experiment and we have to be willing to engage.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

For example, I think it's a really nice general wisdom to say it's important to feel our feelings in order to process our feelings. What we avoid and choose not to feel often will start to come out in our lives and manifest distress or anxiety or anger. Our feelings will try and get our attention, especially the big ones and the important ones, and they will keep knocking on the door of our heart until we pay attention and until we listen. I think that is a great general rule of thumb and that most of us are well served by finding ways to feel our feelings and have a process around those. Now I could also argue that if somebody were to take that to heart and they were having like a really bluesy kind of Saturday and they would say but I shouldn't go out and do something, I shouldn't distract myself, I'm supposed to feel my feelings and I should really feel why I'm sad right now. And they're trying to feel their feelings and nothing's coming through. And now they're getting frustrated and they think, well, maybe I'm ignoring my feelings.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

If I go out and go do something fun, am I distracting from it? Am I trying not to attend to my inner self? Am I missing a moment here that I could be learning from my feelings? It would require some self-knowledge for that person to perhaps be able to say you know what? There's a lot of spaces in my life right now that I carve out where I do try and spend some time with my inner self. I feel like I have places that I do introspect. I'm open to listening to what my feelings have to say. I don't feel like I'm living in a chronic dance of avoidance with them and so maybe right now I don't need to like be in the feels. I need to get out of the feels and go do something and move my body and go do something that distracts me and that's fun and that puts me in a different energy, and then I'll come back and revisit this and see do these things still feel meaningful? Do my feelings still have something to say?

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

So this is a great example because in order to work with when do we feel something, when do we think about something and when do we just decide to move through it and to go mindfully distract or do something constructive and do something cathartic mindfully distract or do something constructive and do something cathartic? How do we know what's right for us? We have to figure that out for ourselves as individuals. Grief comes to mind as a beautiful example of this. I think grief is such an individual process and finding our way through grief and finding grief itself is a really imbalanced state. So I don't know that we can find balance in grief, but I think the idea of this ongoing renegotiation of when do I take a step and move forward in grief, when do I rest and let myself grieve and let myself be in my heart, and how do I find a balance, of making sure I'm honoring both of those energies and doing what's right and being constructive in this and not destructive that's something that requires a lot of self-knowledge and the ability to collect information and see what other people say that's helpful, but ultimately figure out what is going to be most helpful for me. But ultimately figure out what is going to be most helpful for me and so for balance. That's really the perspective of well-being that I think serves us best is knowing that seeking balance is bringing different energies in our life into harmony.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

If we've been too long in one, it might be time to try another. If we're always going and going and we never stop, we probably need rest. If we've been through a period of hibernation and receptivity and a lot of introspection and we're tired of thinking and feeling and being with our thoughts, we probably need to get out in life and to experience it and to create opportunities to harvest something new so that we have some new material to work with. If we have been in a season of pain for a really long time, we might think about what is something small that I could do to try and bring more light or joy or focus on rebuilding my relationship with happiness in my life. And if all we're ever seeking is happiness and we feel like we're not allowed to let anything in, that feels sad because it's negative and we realize that we're becoming pain avoidant. That might be an invitation to sit with the wound and to really examine what it has to say. And so balance is really looking at these different aspects of self and figuring out where do I fall on this scale and do things fill out of balance in this area in my life.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

And that brings me to the last thing that I want to share, and it is a really practical idea of how we might work with this concept, and so I've got a couple suggestions for that. One of them is just to do inventory. Take out your journal and write out different areas in your life. You can decide what feels most relevant to you right now. So you might write responsibility and duty versus joy and pleasure and play, receptivity and being and being still versus activity and movement and action. You might write down things like divine, feminine and more feminine energies versus masculine energies, feelings versus thinking.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

Or you could take a different tact and just write down some of the components that compose life. How are you doing with self care? How are you doing with your spiritual connection? Are you nourishing your spirit and your meditation time, your heart, wisdom, your creative practices? How about your relationships? How about your relationship with friends, maybe relationship with significant others, or family relationship with yourself? How about health? How about things like movement and activity? So you could break it up into different components as well.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

Whatever you want to do, that feels like a really fun, intuitive exercise. And so you just take inventory. How am I doing on each of these things? If you want to make it more concrete, give each of them a rating on a scale of like one to 10. And 10 is I feel like I'm really rocking it. I give myself a gold star, 10. And one is I am so deficient in this right now I know I'm neglecting something or I haven't attended to it. Five might be somewhere in the middle doing okay, could do better. So that's a great way to kind of do some inventory.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

Something else you could do is maybe make a pie chart, or like your version of a wellness wheel, and divide it into these different slices, and those things could be like exercise, movement, physical activity, health. It could be relationships, friendships, marriage, family, other relationships. It could be self-care, spiritual connection, time with self, investing in self. Maybe there's one there for work, work, life, anything that you're doing, volunteering, feeling called to do. Maybe there's a slice for creativity. You can make it specific to you and then just jot down in your chart. How are you doing Any thoughts that come through on what's going well? What do you need more of? Just something to create a visual image where you can self-assess where you're at.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

And I've always loved the idea that balance is unobtainable. So I don't really seek to be perfectly balanced, but I do like to think about the idea of a very fluid balance that is ever evolving. And when I notice one piece is a little bit deficient or something in my life isn't getting enough attention, I bring it on my radar and I just acknowledge okay, this is an imbalance right now, but here's some steps that I can start taking to try and bring it back into balance. And, as always, giving ourselves permission to listen to ourselves and then taking small, measured steps in that direction to bring our ecosystem back into greater harmony and back into greater flow is always a wonderful place to start.

Dr. Bethanne Kapansky Wright:

All right, that wraps up things for today. I will be back next week with a new your Heart Magic episode. It will be the beginning of the month, so it will be an energy update for the month of October and we will be looking at. What do the Akashic records have to say about the month of October and some of the astrological transits going on and what that means for the energy and how we can apply that to our lives? In the meantime, have a beautiful week and, as always, be well, be love, be you and be magic you've been listening to your heart magic with dr bethann kapansky.

Intro and Outro Music:

Right tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your light.