Your Heart Magic

Virgo Energy: Self-Sovereignty and Heart-Led Service

• Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright • Episode 136

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Soul sovereignty lies at the heart of Virgo energy—a concept far more nuanced than the perfectionism and organization typically associated with this earth sign. Dr. BethAnne Kapansky-Wright takes us beyond these surface-level traits to explore how Virgo invites us to own our choices, trust our intuition, and walk our unique path with both independence and wisdom.

Diving into the etymology of "Virgo," we discover that the original virgin archetype wasn't about sexual chastity but represented self-sufficient individuals who weren't subject to others—sovereign beings owning their power and making independent choices. This revelation illuminates Virgo's true essence: self-determination balanced with the wisdom to seek support when needed.

Through the metaphor of marathon running, Dr. BethAnne shares personal insights from her recent Kauai Marathon experience. Each step represents a decision to keep moving forward, adapting strategy as conditions change. While we gratefully accept aid along the course, ultimately, we must propel ourselves forward—no one else can run our race for us. Similarly, in life, we receive guidance and support from others, but the journey of self-discovery remains uniquely our own.

The episode culminates with Dr. Bethann's powerful "Manifesto of Belief," written during her own transformative period of uncertainty. This heartfelt letter reminds us to trust ourselves "in the debris, in the breaking, in your grief," embracing all aspects of our humanity as essential to our becoming. She encourages listeners to write their own manifesto this Virgo season—a grounding activity that helps anchor us to our current self-knowledge and determine our next soulful steps.

Ready to harness Virgo energy in your life? Listen now and discover how embracing self-sovereignty might transform your approach to challenges, goals, and your unique spiritual path.

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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 Educator, and Akashic Records Reader. She is the author of Small Pearls Big Wisdom, 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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Intro/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. Author, psychologist and spiritual educator.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

Aloha everyone. Welcome to your Heart Magic. This is Dr Bethann Kapansky-Wright, and today we are talking about the Virgo archetype and looking at some of the qualities and energies that this archetype exhibits and how might we apply those to our life. And if you have listened to your Heart Magic for a while, you know that whenever we're doing archetype work first we did the tarot a year and a half ago into last year, and then we've moved on to astrological archetypes I really like to look at what do they mean, but also find a way to put a slightly different spin or twist on it to make it a little bit unique, because I think that part of the fun of working with archetypes is they contain such a beautiful collective well of wisdom and there's so many things that they have to teach us and so many different attributes and qualities an archetype might have that reflect something back in us that we can work on, growing, enhancing, learning from. There's a multiplicity of ways to do archetype work. It's never just one thing, but I love to keep your heart magic interesting and try and find a way to put a little bit of a twist on something, because it keeps it creative and it keeps it fun for me to make and, I hope, fun for you to listen to.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

First of all, virgo, in a mundane level, often means practicality. It is an earth sign, so it's associated with organization, putting systems in place. Virgo will ask us to do something step by step, and figure out how are we going to build out a plan or a pathway to get from point A to point Z. Virgo likes having a plan and having a detailed plan. And whenever we are looking at the earth signs, which are Capricorn, taurus and Virgo, they're always about grounded energy that asks us to harness our power in the tangible material world and figure out how we're going to build something forward. And each sign has a slightly different emphasis to it and Virgo is our analytical one. If Capricorn is the builder and about building something out and putting a really strong foundation in place, and Taurus is about embodiment. Now that we've built that strong foundation, how do we think about security and embodying the space that we have created? How do we think about nature and beauty and the material realm that's around us and enjoying that and playing with the ideas around self-worth and value and those kinds of concepts, then Virgo is slightly headier. Virgo is an earth sign, but I also think of Virgo as having a really sharp, keen mind and being very thoughtful and analytical about the next right step.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

So I really like Virgo season if we are setting any kind of a long-term goal or something that we really want to work on and manifest. It's not just a good season to plant the seeds of it, but to think about what's my next right step, how would I like this to grow? And we don't have to have the full picture to have an idea of the essence of what we're wanting to create with something or how we might want it to manifest. So Virgo season for me is a season before where I have set goals around physical health, health in my body. One year when I was really working on identifying with the educator aspect of me, that I am a spiritual teacher, I am going to teach, and this is back in 2018 or 2019. It was a while ago, but I use Virgo Season to make a YouTube video every single day teaching some aspect of heart, wisdom, spirituality. Basically, I was doing then what I'm doing now. It was just a different platform and it was less about trying to gain a big audience or have a huge goal around what I wanted to do and more about. I am a teacher and I'm going to teach and creating a platform for myself, just deciding to own that identity and own that title and step into that role and see myself as that, and ultimately, I think that is what Virgo is really about. It is about self-determination and owning our choices. It's a sign that is associated with service and is sometimes associated with service to a greater cause, service to something that might help or support other people in some way. But oftentimes I think we're called into different kinds of service in our life and when we are invested in walking a spiritual path, then it all boils down to the service of love and serving light.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

Serving love, serving that vision of creating a better way by staying in our hearts and following their wisdom, and that path of walking the way of the heart, serving the cause of love, is one that's often associated with divine, feminine type energies trusting the intuitive path, trusting the path, the way of the heart, even if it doesn't make sense. So it's interesting to me because, even though Virgo has this reputation as being analytical and being focused and having this step-by-step process, I actually think at its core it's very intuitive and it listens to what the heart is telling it first and then figures out what's my next right step and maybe from there, what might my next right step be after that. But ultimately, virgo is in service to more of an intuitive energy that listens to the heart. It receives the knowledge from the heart and then it chooses to act and take a step. And one of the little summaries that I found on AI about the symbolism of Virgo it said that it was the astrological symbol of the maiden and that it represents the purification of the self through service to others.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

The original virgin archetype was connected to divine feminine figures like the goddesses Artemis and Astraea, who were virgins not because they were sexually inexperienced, but because they were self-sufficient and not subject to men. I always love that original definition. It's interesting how virgin became this word that took on being sexually chaste somehow, when really originally it just meant a woman who was sovereign to herself and independent and self-sufficient. I like that definition much better. Obviously, no matter how we might identify gender-wise, if we are applying Virgo energy to our life, then to me what that boils down to is learning how to have a sense of sovereignty, of ownership over the self, of not being subject, enslaved to something else, where we willingly hand the keys of self to somebody else and say, hey, you take responsibility for me instead of owning our right to exercise authority and authenticity and our own heart and our own life and to own our choices and find our path.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

So when I think about soul sovereignty and the idea of self-determination and being self-sufficient, I don't think about somebody who doesn't ever depend on anybody else and can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and they can do all of it by themselves and they're fiercely independent. They might have some of those qualities of independence and trying to be clever and resourceful and do as much as they can within their own devices, but I think that there's wisdom in self-determination and wisdom in soul sovereignty where it's really about just taking ownership of the self. And if we realize we have a need or something that we need help with or we need to ask for support, it's taking responsibility for that and choosing to take a step in that direction. And so I really think this comes down to self-knowledge and to knowing ourselves, trusting ourselves, choosing to see that we can trust ourselves, to walk our path, to make mistakes, to learn from our mistakes, to figure out how to grow to change our minds. We can trust ourselves to reach out and ask for help. We can trust ourselves to try and come back to our center if we realize that we're feeling diffuse or we realize that we feel like we're leaking power or leaking responsibility and letting somebody else own our choices for us instead of thinking about well, what do I choose?

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

It's not about doing it perfectly. It's not about being some autonomous, totally independent MacGyver-type individual who can get themselves out of anything. It's more about ownership of the self, ownership of our heart, ownership of the soul. It's about that self-knowledge and knowing who we are and that each of us in our inner wisdom and follow that intuitive self, we will walk the path that is written in the stars for us, if you will. That's part of our astrological star blueprint, or divine blueprint, our soul alchemy. So it's really about ownership of self, not about being self-sufficient to the point of toxicity where we never accept help.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

Like anything we talk about on your Heart Magic, there's more of a spectrum and a way that something can be too extreme where it's too much of one or the other, and we're always wanting to move towards harmony with these archetypes and taking the best qualities of it and figuring out how can I bring this into my own life to create more balance. So if there's an area in one's life where we're having a hard time taking responsibility or we're hoping that life will kind of make it easy for us, maybe the call of Virgo is a call to think how could I take one step in this direction, that is, me owning this choice and moving in the direction of something that I want to change or something that I have been trying to create. What could I do? And then setting intentions and maybe doing some prayer, some meditation, work, opening ourselves up to ask the universe for help and trusting that if we're doing our part in taking the small step that we know to take, that the universe will meet us there, spirit will meet us there and bring through what we need to help us grow something and figure out the next right step.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

Yesterday I was running the Kauai Marathon. It's interesting to me that it happens every year. The Sunday right before Yesterday I was running the Kauai Marathon. It's interesting to me that it happens every year the Sunday right before Labor Day, so that means every year it happens in Virgo season and I think running a marathon is a very earthbound thing, like your feet are literally striking the earth for the 26.2 miles that it is, and you are very aware of being in your body, how the environment feels, how the elements feel. It's a literal interpretation of what's my next right step? And now, what's my next right step? And in a marathon it usually is just keep moving forward.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

I think that, having done distance running since about 2009, I think is the first time that I did a really long race, a long triathlon back then but having done endurance athletics for that long, I think that any event that you do often is a journey and so, even if you have one strategy going in mile by mile, you might find that you slightly alter it. So I had some points yesterday where I felt really good and it was great Keep going, keep up this pace, just stay in that rhythm. And then I had some miles that I got to where I was like this feels really terrible and I don't feel like I can lift my legs to go up this hill, and it was like, okay, let's remap the strategy. My next right step is to keep stepping. It's absolutely to keep moving forward. If nothing else, keep making progress and moving forward. But I did a little bit of mental remapping, of thinking about how am I going to get through this hill section, and choosing to do some power hiking, followed by some running, and conserve my energy in the hopes that I would have enough gas left in the tank to feel like I finished reasonably strong. It was a good strategy. It worked really well for me.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

But I think that that literal interpretation of taking that next right step and being so closely bound to the earth ties into this archetype so beautifully and I've often found as a runner, when I am doing the training, doing these events, that this idea of being self-sufficient and self-determination and soul sovereignty is a wealth of lessons there. Some people might follow a training plan or have a coach, so they are asking for help. There's definitely race support out on the course, so they are asking for help. There's definitely race support out on the course. It was so grateful for those who were there at the aid stations with water and sometimes there'd be snacks. Whoever brought folk to mile 18 and the pretzels was like heaven bless you, because that really helped turn my race around.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

But ultimately, like I am the vehicle that's moving myself and nobody else can get into my body and move me for me. They can't do the miles for me, they can't take my path and somehow make it easier for me. So I think that metaphor of welcoming help when it came and being grateful for it and knowing that that was so necessary and it made the day a little bit easier, a little bit lighter, but also knowing that ultimately, like this is my race and whatever I've got in the tank that day is how I'm going to run it there's just some really nice parallels with this idea of owning our choices and owning our space of self and knowing that ultimately, no matter how much wisdom and help and ideas that we get from others, we have to move our own vehicle forward and trust ourselves to do that. And know that if we make a mistake along the way or have these rough patches where it doesn't seem like we're really getting anywhere, that we can trust that it's all part of this greater alchemy of self. And if we can stay in our hearts and keep faith and our ability to just figure out the next right step, we will keep moving forward and we will stay connected to our path.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

I want to share a passage today that encapsulates the energies of what we're talking about and it is a letter that I wrote to my younger self. It's called Manifesto of Belief a letter to my younger self, and it's in Small Pearls, big Wisdom. There is a longer version of it in my other book, revelations of the Sky, and I wrote this back in 2019-ish and I think it might have been the same summer that I had declared to the universe, like I am a teacher, you know I am a speaker. I wanted to see myself as such and I was really trying to own that choice and own my choices, and I'd been going through a lot of grappling of soul. I think I'd been on the island a couple years by then and it was long enough to have put down a few teeny, tiny roots over here. But I was also very much in transplant stage and very much between identities and reinventing and re-understanding myself and not really knowing who I was anymore. I'd left my old life behind in Alaska and I hadn't fully put down a foundation over here. I was still doing a lot of receiving, a lot of growing.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

When I think back to that time in my life, I kind of think about it as being in higher education, higher being like spiritual graduate school and really learning what it meant to trust my heart, to come back to my heart, to stay in my heart, to believe and where I was being led, even if it didn't make sense, to stay with myself, even when it felt like things had gotten dark and I didn't know what my next right step was. So I was having a lot of things that I write about and teach about put to the test and going through a lot of transformative times and sometimes it felt like trial by fire a little bit. And I wrote this passage as a reflection to myself when I think I'd been through kind of this mini dark night of the soul where I'd been going through another breakdown of self and maybe I was just breaking down. I don't remember. I know that I had come out of a dark place when I wrote it and I was really coming back into my power and really realizing nope, everything I believe holds true. It just looks differently than I thought it would when I live it and when I experience it, versus just thinking about it in idea form. So this is called Manifesto of Belief, a letter to my younger self.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

I know it's been tangled and hard, but, my dear girl, let me tell you what you're going to do. You're going to trust yourself against the odds, against what lies unseen. You're going to trust the questions that sit unanswered in your heart. You're going to trust yourself in the debris, in the breaking, in your grief, in the deconstruction of self and the unknown pieces of your psyche's submergence. You will trust yourself and hold your hand through your fall from who you once were. You're going to forget about the instant successors and mind over matter, manifestors and positive vibes, only tribes which disconnect you from the most integral pieces of yourself, the darkness within which exists to guide you through the tunnels in life where the soul goes quiet as it prepares for rebirth. You're going to trust yourself when it looks like everybody else is winning and you're losing. You're going to trust that some days your wins will be getting out of bed and moving forward.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

Maybe your purpose here is to be the most human you can possibly be, to embody every inch of your humanity and to shine with your faith that our inherent love, beauty and goodness still exist within this human space. You're going to trust that human space. Trust the trail of being a true human. Trust the trail of real in all its gritty splendor and glossy mess. You're going to trust your brokenness, your chipped parts and all the times you strive and fail. You're going to trust that failure is success in its own form and that life is moving your experiences together and revealing the bigger picture of you in its own time. You're going to trust your imperfections and tribulations and you're going to become an expert on emotional reincarnation, for you will resurrect, rebirth and reinvent yourself many times over. So you're going to trust your feelings and see they are all part of the same tangled ball of red yarn, leading you deeper into yourself, deeper into your heart, deeper into the truth that is you.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright :

Happy Virgo season everyone. If you want to take the ideas on this podcast today and do something more with them, then write a manifesto of self, whatever fits for where you're at in life right now, some kind of letter to yourself, or just what you believe in, something that helps anchor you to your self-knowledge and soul knowledge at this time. It's a really grounding, beautiful activity and often helps us figure out what is my next right step on my soul path right now. With that, have an amazing week. I will be back next week with an all-new your Heart Magic and, as always be well, be love, be you and be magic.

Intro/Outro Music:

You've been listening to your Heart Magic with dr bethan kapansky right tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your light.