Candice Wu 0:00
Hello everyone, welcome back to the Embody Podcast. It's great to have you here. Today, you might hear some extra sounds of Mexico City, even though I'm underneath my blanket fort lodged between a dresser and a bed, with the blankets overhead and all the windows closed and curtains shut. The sounds are still totally infused here and at any moment you might hear someone yelling tacos, enchiladas, tamales or a siren might go off, or a truck door might slam, dogs barking, what else, music or just random conversations. So, if you do hear that, just know that that's the pulse of Mexico City arriving to you now, and of course, the birds chirping, which is a lovely background.

Mexico City has been my hub for the last three weeks. I'm going on my fourth week here in Mexico and I'm absolutely loving it. If you've been listening in, you know, I've been to Oaxaca, and I've also spent some time with horses at a Hacienda outside of Mexico City. And last week and weekend I spent time at the hot springs at Las Grutas De Tolantonga and De Gloria or La Gloria, it was gorgeous, and I got to soak in the mineral waters.

By the weekend, though, it was wild with families and lots of kids. And, what I wasn't told about the best place to stay in that area was that at 6 AM, I would be woken up by the alarm clock of screaming kids, but it was a beautiful time and the sun was great, everything was just gorgeous, these waterfalls and cascades and being in these caves of the Grutas. The only thing is that I kind of suffered because I get really cold and the weather was cold, while the water was hot, I wouldn't say hot, kind of warm for me getting out of the water, I was just shivering the whole time. But it was gorgeous.

If you want to see some pictures of that you can check out my Instagram, especially the story feed. Just click on Mexico and travel. You'll see some of those pictures there.

Hello and welcome. You're listening to the Embody Podcast, a show about remembering and embodying your true nature, inner wisdom, Embodied Healing, and self-love. My name is Candice Wu and I'm a holistic healing facilitator, intuitive coach, and artist sharing my personal journey of vulnerability, offering meditations and guided healing support, and having co-creative conversations with healers and wellness practitioners from all over the world.

So we have a couple of weeks left on the Skillshare class that I'm offering for free on dreamwork and how to prepare and support your body in being able to remember your dreams the best, how to record your dreams and recall them, and support your nervous system in the playful, imaginative space that dreaming and dreamwork requires. You can find that at CandiceWu.com/dreamclassone.

If you've ever wondered, how can you recall your dreams or improve upon your memory with your dreams, this class might be for you. And as you hop on to Skillshare you can sign up for a free membership if you don't already have one and that class is offered for free right now until March 10th 2020.

So today's episode is a{Live} now episode, which means that I'm just going to be talking about what's alive for me now and what's been going on for me, the themes of my life, challenges, and before we start, I'd encourage you to check in with yourself, sense how you're doing and check-in with what's alive now for you. So let's take a moment and do that together.

Knowing that every moment is a fresh moment, every moment's evolving. So as you just arrive here, in a quiet moment with yourself, notice what there is to notice and feel where your heart is, where your mind is and your body. Notice if there are any struggles or things weighing on you. Notice what you need, what you want, and something that's been highlighted for me is noticing where my body feels like doing something would be like moving a boulder or a certain thing or activity or task feels like it's just so hard. Sometimes that feeling is quiet. So check in with all the things of your life and notice if anything tugs on you in that way and where you sense that in your body and whatever is here, just honor that. Respect yourself and appreciate what came through.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a podcast about proprioceptive writing, which is a tool that I learned at a retreat recently. So some of this stuff that came up for you today might be really nice to do some writing with. You can check that episode out at CandiceWu.com/proprioceptivewriting.

And for today, let's jump into the episode.

So as many of you know, when I began my trip, before I began my trip to Mexico, I had to work through some fears about Mexico, fears of my own safety, and fears of what could happen. There are so many ways that the media tells us what could happen in Mexico and had to sort all that out for myself. What was the media? What was not true? What is my own vibration? And what does that attract? What am I really afraid of?

And as I arrived here, I have been met with so much care and love. Just in about three hours alone, I was offered to have dinner with two families next to the river at the Grutas. I was given free soup because this one man had a crush on me wanted me to be his girlfriend. And then, I was invited to travel back from Tonga to Mexico City, which is about a five-hour drive with a family that had a car. Otherwise, for me, it would have taken a shuttle and then figuring out where the bus was and taking that bus home. But the adventure with this family ended up with a really nice meal and dancing, salsa dancing at the restaurant, and ended with a night of dancing as well at a different place, salsa place that night in the city.

So I need friends and also felt like people here really know how to bring you into their families. There's this openness that I don't experience as much in the United States just, you're part of our family now, come eat dinner with us.

So while I've been receiving that from the people, I've also been receiving the energies of the different places that I visited. The energies of the hot springs were beautiful, clear, and magical energies, very calming and it brought me the sense of flow of being in myself, being at home in myself, and sitting into my own energy while allowing the flow of things to come.

And what I do when I'm in a place is I meditate and I cycle the energies through my body and also give to the space what might be needed that I have and allow it to integrate with my energy so that essentially I become one with that and take it with me as much as possible.

Do you have a place that gives you just the right feeling that you really need right now? Especially if it's been a place you've been to, you can really integrate that in a way that seems more solid. However, if you've really developed your imagination and your imaginal skills, then it doesn't really matter. You can imagine that place and resource at any time, but it is with you and your body.

Many of you know I've also challenged myself to surrender to my intuition to follow the whims of it and to trust it no matter what and that led me to some interesting experiences, it led me to making friends. It led me to not knowing where I'm going into days, but trusting it and then allowing things to matriculate and come to fruition. And it felt really good.

What can sometimes happen to me, with my intuition is that I ignore it for some time. If it's something that seems to rub up against structures or things that I've created or ways that things are, and maybe I don't want to face that, then I can ignore it. Or, I can just kind of keep pushing through overriding or bypassing that sense in me.

So what I recently found with that is kind of some big news to me, and it might be for some of you who are regular listeners.

What I found is that I need to take a short hiatus from the podcast. Well, shorter, not I don't actually know. But the guidance that I'm getting is that I need to take a break and to let myself have total freedom from the timing that I have decided for myself, that I publish this every Monday.

I need to reset my relationship with the podcast. It has been such a wonderful experience, to do the podcast and then to receive feedback, to know that it has trickled into many places and supported me and making connections that some of you all have reached out to me and shared your thoughts or reached out for sessions. It's been fabulous.

And in fact, I forgot to mention it but earlier in February, I believe it was the fourth, was the podcast's two year birthday. So the podcast is now a toddler.

And as every parent knows, when you have a toddler, you also need a break. You need a vacation, you need someone to help you through it so that you can have some time off.

So that's what's happening for me now, and it was a bit hard to admit.

The sense was this weight, like, I was carrying a boulder. It's like, Okay, the next episode needs to be completed by this date and I'm not ready or the sound quality in this space that I'm at is not good enough. You know, even as I speak, I can hear trucks roaring by, but for me, that was just really a sign that I needed to let it go for now and allow my soul, allow what's inside of me to unfold, because maybe I just need a break and some new energy or maybe there's something else my attention and energy needs to be placed into.

Maybe I just need a rest. Maybe some other format of the podcast is meant to emerge. But I won't know until I do it. And it was tricky because I also had a podcast guest set up. And I really love this person. And I hope to have them on the podcast later. At least, that's all I can feel now. But it didn't feel right to do it today and this week, in anytime in the near future.

So do you have anything like that in your life where you feel like you really need to make a certain choice to either let go, end something or start something and the structure of what you've had in place seems to be the way you push through or the way that you just keep going with and there's this little nudge in you or a bit of pressure when you think about or picture doing the thing that you want to do or the thing that you're supposed to do?

If you haven't little tension or constriction or nudge, that's probably your body trying to say something. And it doesn't always mean to let it go. But maybe there's fear. Maybe there's a message that says, this isn't for you now, even though it was before.

So for me, the podcast has just been excellent and just this wonderful platform of connection and sharing, and for me to grow. I really honor it and thank the podcast itself for coming to life. And I thank all of you for listening and receiving me and for even giving me critical feedback at times, helping this to grow into what it needs to grow into. And it's not the end I don't feel it's the end. But I do want to let you know that I will be taking a short break on some weeks because there are still some episodes that are in the pipeline that are fresh.

I have an interview coming up with Dr. Terry Fernandez. And we talk all about polyamory and diving into knowing ourselves as polyamorous beings. So that's coming up.

And as possible that I just feel the inspiration to whip up something on the spot. But I am going to let it come with more spontaneity and freedom without the boundaries and structures that I had created for myself, that I had set for myself for two years.

One of my friends reminded me that we only know what we know, we only know what's connected to what we've experienced and what we can sense now, our knowing is limited to some degree and if we are expanding then we do need to let go of, or not placed too much stronghold on the thinking, the ways that we believe things work right now, and what we believe right now, because it's going to open up the new thing, the expansion, is trying to make its way in. And if we bind ourselves with the thinking that is of the now, we might not receive that.

This is actually connecting with another theme that I've been experiencing.

Before I left and while I first arrived in Mexico, I was feeling a lot of spiritual dismantling, feelings in me breaking down, sloughing off, fear, and coming into more safety, but feelings that would only arrive as words such as, Who am I now, what am I doing in life? What am I doing at all? What is this experience of being human? And those questions were not to be answered. I had enough sense in me to know that, but to be felt through and expressed outward and to find myself through it and to the other side.

And I can't say that I'm on the other side, and all the way through it yet, but it's been helping me to read the book: No Death, No Fear by Thich Nat Han. One thing he said is that if you have a notion about Nirvana, that notion should be removed.

This is a direct quote, if you have a notion about Nirvana, that notion should be removed. Nirvana is empty of all notions, including the notion of Nirvana. If you get caught in the notion of Nirvana, you have not touched your Nirvana yet.

This deep insight and discovery of the Buddha took him beyond fear, beyond anxiety and suffering, and beyond birth and death.

And he also said when you have a match, you have the condition to make a fire. If the flame you make with that match lasts long enough, it will burn up the match. And that match gives rise to the fire but the fire itself burns up the match. And the teaching of impermanence is the same. It helps us to have an awakened understanding of impermanence. And the insight of impermanence is what will burn up our idea of impermanence.

I wanted to read those two excerpts because whatever ideas we do have about truth and who we are, what we're meant to do, or what we're supposed to do, especially, the best thing to do is start to acknowledge those things, and to look for them wherever they emerge, because those are the constructs, such as Nirvana, impermanence, that really bind us to some experience that is not the full expansion of that experience.

Whatever constructs I have, this book has really helped me break down some of them without really even knowing what those are. I was feeling a lot of grief and what I could place it to was this feeling that I missed my mom, I miss my family.

And as I was starting to explain, it will be a Dia De Los Muertos to my mom, and what it is, even though it's not until the fall, October 31st through November 2nd, as I understand it.

I told her that I wanted to come back to Mexico during that time and experience that because it was similar to what Chinese people do with their ancestors is go to the cemetery and bring all the foods they like, bring celebratory, like things to celebrate with, paper money, we bring the money to send to them. We have all the food and drinks they like. We have some that we like and we have this time of eating there and honoring our ancestors.

And I was sharing with my mom that for El Dia de Los Muertos, The Day of the Dead, that it's similar, and Mexicans believe that there's that time where the layer between the spirit world and human worlds or the concrete world is thin, and their ancestors can come and visit them, and they can be together. And they create an altar of all these foods and beautiful artwork, skulls, sugar skulls and other things that call them home.

And when I said that to my mom, that this altar calls them home, I began to cry and I felt like I needed to call my ancestors home. And it's different from feeling like, you know, with Family Constellations work that my ancestors are there. At least something in me clicked where I felt like calling them to me was a different experience than them being there and me going to them or somehow bringing them more into my experience of my body, my home was important here. And I can see my grandparents and their home with me. This is their home in me, in this body. In this experience that I live, they live through my eyes, through my senses, they're in me.

And then I read this lovely quote from Thich Nat Han in the same book, and that is, where is that? Here it is: She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet. Wonderful. Each time my feet touched the earth, I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine alone, but a living continuation of my mother and father, and my grandparents and great grandparents. Of all my ancestors, these feet that I saw as my feet, were actually our feet. Together, my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.

I love this. This is exactly what I began to feel and it came to me at the right timing.

Well, it actually came to me one night when I was offline, I didn't have good Wi-Fi. And I looked at my computer and said, What do I have on my computer that I can read or watch? And I had this PDF book of No death, No fear. And another excerpt I really liked from the book: If you look at a friend with the eyes of a meditator, you will see in him or her all generations of their ancestors, you will be very respectful to them and to your own body, because you will see their body and your body as the sacred home of all our ancestors. You will also see that our bodies are the source of all future generations.

I love when different wisdom sets overlap, and this is just so beautifully overlapping with the wisdom of Bert Hellinger, of the many who practice Family Constellations.

Our bodies are the living memory of our ancestors, it's the home of our ancestors as Thich Nat Han says. And when I do see another person and I sense and see their ancestry, I see a fullness. I see love. I see that challenges coming through, and where they might originate, the darker pockets of what's unintegrated or where the fears held. I see that I'm not their parents and not responsible for making them happy, but that I can be loved by seeing them.

And this, coming at this time where I was feeling, I missed my mom. I missed my grandparents. I miss my family being with me, brought me a new level of integration.

The loneliness I felt was just these keyholes to allowing me to feel a new sense of belonging and integration with who I am already. The ancestors that are in my being already and that love me.

Early on, I did an episode of basics of Family Constellation, I think it's Episode Five. You can find it at CandiceWu.com/ep5. And it comes with an experiential that invites you to picture your ancestry behind you. And that's that same offering here from Thich Nat Han.

And the last bit that I have been feeling into from his book is about No death, No fear, the sense that if you don't believe there's death or birth, if you look in his description, that there really is no birth and no death, that nothing does die and nothing does ever get born because it all is a continuation. Obviously, this requires a much longer description, but just the sense that when we see something as birthing and coming into form and aliveness, it's just that all the conditions are right for it to show up in this way. But it came from many things and it is a continuation of many other things.

So if you see a flower come into shape and form, and you could imagine or say that it's being birthed, it is because of many factors that allowed it to have what it needed, sufficient conditions to become a flower, had the water, had the soil, had sun, it had a seed, and none of that was created out of nothing. It was already there in many other forms, and then when it dies, it passes into the earth. But that's not really dying, that's a continuation, and with people, that's the same.

And I don't know how I can really totally understand it on one level I do and on another level, there is this sense of birth and death. I can feel like, a concrete or human reality. But something about it was so soothing, his invitation that if you've suffered a loss, the feeling of grief, that someone is gone or not with you anymore, that maybe there is something for you here, in No death, No birth, no death, no fear.

And for me, it just let me grieve more. Let me bring in a new idea and break apart, loosen up old ideas, some of my old ideas to where I can feel even more freedom now.

And the last thing that I got from the book that has been really helping me is this question of, where will I be in 300 years, will this matter?

And so whatever it is that is in front of you, if you just ask yourself, you know, will this matter and even five years? See what the answer is.

It can really bring your values forward, it can bring what matters to light. Maybe that's similar to the Ally with Death experiential. The shaman death, it brings forward in a heightened way, what's important.

And so as I make the choice to take a little break from the podcast, even though I feel it's so important to continue, in some ways, will it matter in five years or 300. Now, what really will matter is the surrender that I am choosing, because this is part of it, this is one big piece of it, that I surrender to the sense of me that says, No, don't do it right now. And I can pick it up anytime I want and that there's something else for me to do, even if that's nothing.

So in this next couple of weeks, I will rerun a couple of episodes that I really like and that might offer you something now. And this is a really good reminder that all the podcast episodes while in the beginning, I do share some more moment to moment what's happening in life, experiences that I'm having.

In general, each episode is a theme that could be everlasting in a way or evergreen, where if you need that energy or some transmission from that specific topic, that it's there for you and it can be timeless.

So I trust that you're guided to any podcast that calls to you. And let's see which ones will be rerun, what I'm guided to.

And also, lookout for that new episode with Terry, with my guest, Terry. And I look forward to sharing with you what happens in the meantime, through this time.

If you want to stay connected with me, I still will be doing my newsletter, here and there, maybe once a month or every couple of weeks. And so that's one way to stay connected or on Instagram with me.

And let's see what emerges here. Let's see how things evolve or take a new shape. Or, maybe just, I'll come with a breath of fresh air.

Thanks so much for listening. All of you out there that are my friends, that are colleagues, that are people that I've never met, but maybe you've sent a message to me, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart and I look forward to connecting with you next time that my spirit calls me to record something. S

So as we close today, I'm wishing you all a sense of loving yourself, well-being, peace, being at home in your body, and the courage to look into the notions, belief sets, structures and truths, “truths” that you have decided upon or have been bound to, not that those are bad, and there are some times it really needed. But that if it is time for you to move beyond them, to let the match burn up in the fire, to have that courage to do so and also the loving and the light in order to be able to bring your ancestry home and into your body, sometimes that can bring difficult feelings.

And we can also resource the best of our ancestry, to be at home in our bodies. Let our bodies be the continuation of the many that came before us, the many that obviously did it right for you to exist.

Thanks so much for listening. See you next time on the Embody Podcast.