a{Live} now: Getting Schooled by Ancestry and Emotions — EP72

Candice Wu 0:00

This episode is about what’s alive with me right now. And what’s alive with me right now is feeling just schooled by my emotions. I’ve been feeling a lot of grief and pain. And this is the story of how that’s unfolding in me, what’s emerging around my ancestry, and how I’m dealing and healing with all of these experiences.

Candice Wu 0:29

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.

Candice Wu 0:42

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.

Candice Wu 1:03

Hello, and welcome back to the Embody Podcast. It is wonderful to have you here. Last week, I got to share an interview and conversation with one of my healers, Charmayne Kilcup, and it was fabulous. It was about self-forgiveness and tuning into worth, it was just so fun to have that with her. And it’s very timely, because I really needed her this week. Sometimes, I just scheduled her like once a month and this week, it was like, two times within the span of seven days, kind of, yeah, seven days. So, it’s been a little while since I’ve felt schooled by what’s going on inside of me. And what I mean is just feeling overwhelmed and feeling an intense density of something coming up in through me that wants to be seen and looked at, that shakes me to the core.

Candice Wu 2:09

The last time I remember feeling this intensely was during that experience about a year ago. I talked about it in Episode 13 Spiritual Crisis and Existential Crisis. It was about a year ago in Bali, that I felt that so many of my belief sets were being pushed to the surface to be examined again. And I felt like the core underneath me of who I was, was just breaking apart and I didn’t know who I was anymore, even though I did. But the feeling of, I don’t even know who I am anymore. What is this life anymore? What am I doing here? Who am I? Those feelings and questions were so big in me last year. And it all came to the surface with a urinary tract infection and a bunch of other body symptoms, a lot of heat, a lot of anger and a lot of emotions coming to the surface.

Candice Wu 3:17

It was such a scary and vulnerable time but I felt like I was able to move through it with presence and a lot of help. And Charmayne was somebody who was extremely helpful during that time and, yeah, it’s been that long since I felt that schooled by my emotional or inner world. And I’m coming off the tail-end of it now. But I want to share with you what I’ve been experiencing. But first, when I feel this way, feeling schooled, I think I just need to, like, bring some laughter to it because it’s been so intense. But the beauty is that I’ve been able to laugh at myself, and also see very well that this is something that my soul is wanting to heal. But in it, I couldn’t help but feel incompetent. And coming to do this podcast, even I felt like what do I even have to say? What can I even say? Or what authority do I even have to say anything?

Candice Wu 4:25

And it’s just that kind of dismantling of the ego and the inner world that brings a level of vulnerability and incompetencies, incompetency to it all, because, in a way, we have to get to the place of unknowing. And we have to get to the place where we say, okay, I surrender to this, what is it? I don’t know what this is, what is this feeling. And to explore it in an earnest way, feel through it in an earnest way. It sometimes requires us to break and to break into that place of feeling unskilled.

Candice Wu 5:06

And yet to feel that way to allow ourselves to feel the uncertainty, to feel incompetent, or to feel unskilled, requires a lot of skill, requires a lot of mastery and navigation. So, I just want to say that I would not be here to be talking about this, to be even feeling okay in myself if it weren’t for the support of other people. I’ve been able to share some of this with my mother, and with my partner, and with a few friends as well. I have such a good support system and that means the world to me. So, I just do not underestimate support, community, and people that I trust that really helped me along the way.

Candice Wu 5:54

So, the episode I was talking about that happened about a year ago was Episode 13. I think I called it The Terrifying Gifts of Freedom and Expansion, Spiritual Crisis and Existential Crisis. So long title, and it may be it even had #WTF is Going On?

Candice Wu 6:16

If you want to check out that episode, you can find it at CandiceWu.com/ep13 and just I think about things I’ve recorded a year ago or even like months ago or a week ago, and think, wow, I was such a different person in a way. And things I might have said, then maybe I wouldn’t say now or I see things differently now. So, please keep that in mind as you listen to that episode and understand that we’re all evolving, that all of our perceptions change over time and we allow ourselves that to grow and to change and to be different, and to assert something in each moment, knowing that the next moment it might be different.

Candice Wu 7:02

So, also encourage you to feel that way about yourself or to see yourself in that light that each moment of growth, each moment of new awareness can bring you a new perspective that also gives compassion to the past self. Your past self, that has believed something different. And it’s not to reject or dismiss or to avoid your past self or to judge your past self. But to add on and to recognize that you are evolving. And that’s okay. And what you’ve said before, doesn’t mean that it sticks to you forever. Even though in this society, we tend to do that, we tend to, I don’t know, let things stick onto people’s reputations. And yes, there is a character over time that’s built. But can we afford ourselves the ability or the capacity to change moment to moment, and to see things differently as time goes on?

Candice Wu 8:08

Well, let’s talk about where this all began this time around feeling schooled, feeling really deep, deep, deep emotions that I didn’t know where they were coming from, exactly. And I didn’t know what was trying to show itself to me. And even though I felt like I had pinpointed some of the emotion and where it’s linked to, and have talked to the emotion that was coming through, there was more and more and more and more. I was feeling so much grief and pain, physical pain in my body and my heart area, my chest, in my stomach. And the grief that was coming with it was so huge.

Candice Wu 8:56

And luckily, I’m at this place in myself where I can be with the emotion without knowing what it is. That’s that place of unknowing. That’s that place of saying, “Okay, what is this?” with curiosity? Whereas in the past, I would feel intolerant of emotion that I didn’t understand, but with my mind, but sitting in it, I can feel through it, I have tools to temper it if I need to. And I can honor it without knowing exactly what it is. But there is something in me that feels like if I can find the context for this, or give this grief or pain what it needs. It usually reveals its context, it usually reveals the resolution, the completion of what it needs to feel safe and well again, inside of myself.

Candice Wu 9:53

I’m totally tangenting. So, I’ll back it up a bit, you might know that I’m in a pretty new relationship. And in any new relationship that feels like a soul connection to me, I feel like the energy of the other person is something that enlivened something in me or brings forward and brings alive something in me that is ready to be seen, claimed or expressed. And this one is no different. So, I feel like the energy of this person that I’m in a new relationship with, created an echo effect into my soul and an alchemic reaction that brought forward and unearthed a lot of different emotions that, in some way have to do with him, and in so many other ways, have everything to do with me, and my ancestry, and my soul, and what’s the next level of loving and healing was for me.

Candice Wu 11:02

So, with this alchemic reaction, this energetic exchange, I started fearing, losing my Chineseness, that the complexity of who I am that included my ethnicity, and my experience as Chinese-American, couldn’t be held within the context of the relationship or couldn’t be, couldn’t find safety within it. And that was just the fear. And as it all shook out, there was space for it, and that process I won’t talk about now, but mainly want to focus on my own experience and what’s unearthing for me. But as I turned to that fear towards myself, and wondered, could I hold my own complexity, a whole slew of emotions and ancestral experience came up to the surface.

Candice Wu 12:01

And it’s not like this is the first time I’ve explored my Chinese-American identity or the pains of my ancestry, you probably all know, all of you that have listened to more than one episode that I’m really working deeply with my ancestry, and through family constellations, and just tuning into the energies and belief sets of the family system, that that’s one tool that I use to heal at the soul level.

Candice Wu 12:30

I believe that our family systems bring us a very unique and powerful set of lessons that are imprinted in our DNA as we come into this life. And it’s an outward expression of the belief sets that we come in with, that give us a mirror and a way to a platform to work with healing our hearts and souls. There’s obviously the spiritual level that can separate itself from any family tangling or ancestral inheritance. But what I find is that at a very, very deep visceral and unconscious level, that those things are still living in us, the pains of our ancestry that are an integrated, the losses that want to be seen, the grief that never got to be had or the person that was silenced, or the experience of immigration or war or losing important people.

Candice Wu 13:37

If that isn’t honored in some way, somewhere in the ancestry, it gets inherited, passed down and there’s some way in which our body resonates and mirrors, literally and symbolically, physically, the experience of the pain, whether that’s through literal heartache or heart attack, or feeling out of it, or having a great deal of depression in this life that seems unexplained. So, I really embrace using the family system and the ancestry as one way to reveal the inner workings of my soul, because we’re just intricately connected that way. So, as I turned that question on myself, can I hold my own complexity?

Candice Wu 14:29

And I asked the grief inside of me, where are you coming from? Or what do you have to say? What’s your story? And listen from a heart space. And the grief first told me, can I be taken care of, will you take care of me?

Candice Wu 14:48

And I knew that that really touched something because we started crying more. But still, I couldn’t quite understand what that was. And my mind went to immigration and coming to the United States, with this dream of a better life that my family probably came with. They wanted to have better education and have better jobs, and probably very earnestly came here, but with some fear. And I felt the experience of farther back ancestors, people that are related to the culture that got hurt while coming here, that maybe worked on the railroad, and weren’t given citizenship or weren’t treated well. And small experiences where they wonder if the complexity of their culture and who they are, could be taken in by people here in America.

Candice Wu 15:48

And I’m sharing this not to blame anyone or to bring victimization or anything, or a villainization but to explain what I feel was the experience of my ancestry through immigration. Can the US take care of me? Will we be used for our bodies and seen only for our bodies, what we can give or do and not seeing for our hearts and humanity, not seeing for where our hearts thrive, or what we’re bringing with us and the richness of our culture and love? So, with that, some of the grief was continuing to move and yet, it still felt way, way, way, way, way deeper than that.

Candice Wu 16:36

And again, it’s not to blame the US or the people that came to receive my family or those that immigrated before my family. But to just show the pain of I think many immigrant families that are not quite fully taken in or understood. And also, I realized there’s the American experience, on the other side of that, that I’m not speaking to, but today just want to speak to mine. So, even though I was feeling this grief, and this pain, in these belief sets of fearing that I would be seen just as a body and not for my humanity. Well, that relieves some of the grief and pain. As I said, there was way more. And the next feeling and thought that came up about the grief was the feeling of being left to die.

Candice Wu 17:35

And that also felt ancestral. It also felt cultural. And so I just had this imagining that I was honoring all the people that had been left to die that maybe had been used for their work, your physical strength. But that had not been taken care of and had been left there without being nourished back or mutually given back to. But then it took me all the way into my ancestry to my grandpa, my maternal grandfather, when he was about 14, or 15. The story goes from my mom that he had to crawl to get help after his parents died of starvation, that this was during the war times in China and there was no food. And he was so weak, he couldn’t even walk he had to crawl. I don’t even know where he went to get help or what he did next. But the feeling of being left to die — felt related to the untold story of my great grandparents.

Candice Wu 18:47

But they lived and I’m living proof that they lived and the ancestry survived. And I survived because of them. This whole experience of processing this grief feels like a call and response to my ancestors and the people of my culture. That there’s this call to honor this grief and that grief. And there’s just more where that came from but my response to my great grandparents is, I’m right here, I’m alive, and I’m doing so well. And thank you. And even though you were left to die, or you die, I’m very well alive, unless carried on.

Candice Wu 19:38

So, as I told my mom about the experience of feeling left to die, and asking about my grandfather and his parents, she told me the story, and then she told me a story about her maternal side of the family, that my great grandpa on her mother’s side was a woodworker and that he had built a door so strong during the wartime, same time period, that the store was so strong that when the Japanese came to invade, and I guess they were very vicious and just were trying to kill everybody, that my great grandparents saved so many people from the village that they lived in, because they all crammed themselves into this room behind this door that was like six to ten inches thick. And that the Japanese could not knock over this door or break it open.

Candice Wu 20:41

And I just can’t help but feel so much love in that moment of imagining everyone supporting each other behind that door, so much pride, that my great grandfather, his craftwork helped save so many people and the togetherness, but also the fear and the pain, and the hurt of the other coming in and invading. And I say it that way like the other is in the unknown people, the people that we say are not us, but the other. And it feels like many of these experiences that I’m touching on this cycle of grief and pain have to do with that, other than I’m experiencing that other than I’m talking about that cross-cultural experience that has brought pain wounding and hurt.

Candice Wu 21:46

As I imagine to this experience of saving themselves behind this door and the grief that came from that. I felt the words, we lost everything, we lost everything. And my words to my ancestry here or to honor that, yes, you’ve lost so much. And you’ve gained so much. You’ve gained a whole line of a family after this. And all those people that were there with you all the people you saved. All of you that survived, you survived. And that means the world to me, because that gave me life.

Candice Wu 22:40

So, while they lost so much, they also gained so much and they gained me. And for me, that’s extremely redeeming and helps me honor that this was their experience and not take it on as mine. And like a live in it and soak in it, we can give it back to them because I feel their desire for me to live my life free of this loss. This isn’t my loss, this is theirs.

Candice Wu 23:14

And to recognize how much I have right now, the abundance in my life, the abundance in my heart, the abundance in the people around me, the experiences that I’m experiencing and get to have, that is to honor their lives and to honor their losses to live in the game now. So, while they lost so much, they had everything to gain as well, because they survived. And they took that up, they created more. And that feels really redeeming for them as well and for me to feel that recovery of the loss.

Candice Wu 23:56

So, I did not know that all this pain and grief would open up into just so many different aspects of my Chinese history and my ancestry. I don’t believe that I had anyone that I knew or my family knew that was working on the railroad in America, in the US. But that just feels like something that’s so familiar to me, just like in the past, I had processed the pain of Tiananmen Square, and the experience of being silenced and fearing death, if I were to speak up for something I believed in, and also processing the experience of Chinese foot binding, feeling like that’s something that I’ve experienced before.

Candice Wu 24:54

So, I’m not sure if those are part of my past life experience or not. But something about that is very close to me. And I came in with so many beliefs of that I should stay silent, that I should not exist, that it was dangerous to speak, and it’s dangerous to stand for what you believe in, it’s dangerous to stand. So, that just relates to the foot binding and to Tiananmen Square. So, whoa.

Candice Wu 25:26

Even though I had worked with some of these pieces before these other pieces that I knew about, but didn’t feel the fullness of, I didn’t realize that there was something to be felt about them now. But of course, there was. I don’t think my ancestry has stopped to grieve those losses. They’ve been working so hard. Chinese people are very well known to work hard, at least my ancestry. And working hard is such a value.

Candice Wu 25:57

So, I know that that working hard and that pushing through, and not grieving is actually part of how I am, where I am today and how I get to receive so much abundance today. And so my gift back is to honor them and recognize what they went through. And to receive all those gifts of their hard work by living my life from where it is now, from the gifts they’ve given me.

Candice Wu 26:32

Just taking a deep breath with this. I don’t have it all sorted out, there’s still some, a little bit of emotion left about this. But it has moved a great deal since I could feel a genuine honoring of my ancestors for the pain that they experienced, of both sets of grandparents on my mother’s side, the layers of things that are happening here. And to give that pain that belongs to them, the rightful place of it, staying with them and not with me, that really helps to release my pain and my grief.

Candice Wu 27:17

And so, now as I sit back to reflect on this, with all of you listening, I just feel appreciative of myself that I was able to expand into the discomfort and appreciative of my mother who is willing to share some of these bits and pieces that she knew. She didn’t feel much for them and that’s okay. It’s not hers to feel either, necessarily. But I am so glad that I know my ancestry better now, I know the story even better. And that’s where the soul of our family challenges us to honor it, is when something in the storyline in the heart of the family soul is waiting to be held and seen and loved.

Candice Wu 28:11

So, I do feel a greater love for my family system. I feel even more resilience and strength coming through the abundance, coming through and a lot of what I’ve said in this podcast, to all of you, I didn’t have all that figured out before I started saying it all about the abundance and about what I would say back to my family. I appreciate that a lot of it emerged through the conversation here.

Candice Wu 28:41

And I want to just end with thanking you for listening to this episode, that so deeply. I don’t know, just deep, about my family system and my process of being in touch with my ancestry with my pain, and also allowing me the grace of sharing this story, while not having it all figured out. And I’m wishing that for you to that you allow yourself that space of not having it all sorted out, expanding a little at a time into the discomfort that you might have. And getting curious about what is it in my heart, my ancestry, in the collective or the archetypal energy, or my past life that wants to be seen here. And if that’s not something you can access, just to even feel what you can access and honor that without pushing it away completely. But can you look a little bit and then a little bit more, and take a break when you need to.

Candice Wu 29:54

A lot of times we see that place of “I don’t know” or incompetency, like when you feel broken enough that you feel like you can’t even do your job or that you can’t even speak with any authority, which is what I was referring to in the beginning of this podcast. We think that this is a setback for us. We think that when we’ve reached a pain in us, or discomfort, or emotion of anxiety, grief, anger or something, we tend to have the thoughts that this is a setback we haven’t we come a little farther than this, or why did I get back here.

Candice Wu 30:41

And I encourage you to let go of those thoughts or rather just acknowledge them and not give too much to them because the big feeling that we’re having tends to be the preface to a major expansion. And if we can expand into the feeling, that feeling wants to help us to bring us more loving and resolve for the next thing. And to bring us even more of ourselves more of our own story, so that we know who we are, but then we know we are not that. We know the deeper love that we are and that we can feel even more resilient and embracing of whatever emotions come up at any moment.

Candice Wu 31:30

Sometimes we also think that we’re losing it, like oh my gosh, I’m going crazy, or now I’ve really lost it or I’m so overwhelmed, I can’t handle myself, I can’t handle this, I guess it means I can’t handle anything.

Candice Wu 31:46

Whatever words come up, these actually might also be related to your ancestry. When I had the words come up that I’ve lost it all, or the feeling that I’ve lost everything, or the feeling of being left to die, those words had a context and because I, not that I dwelled on those words, but I felt them and I witnessed them, and I was aware of them, because I didn’t just push them away. It allowed me to find the true context for those words, and those words wanted to be honored and fully seen and felt with my great grandparents.

Candice Wu 32:34

And when those words, and those feelings that come underneath those words, get felt and acknowledged, then they just dissolve. But when they’re waiting to be acknowledged, they will wait, time doesn’t matter, it will pass down generation after generation, after generation.

Candice Wu 32:56

And for some of you like me, you are feeling even farther back into your generational lines. I’ve been working with my great grandparents and their experience. I’m no longer working with my parents, and my grandparents in the same way of what their wounds, were there are losses. I’ve just worked on those and worked on those and was able to go further back. Not that that’s the goal. That’s just the process that I went through. And it feels like deeper layers that can have a stronger effect like homeopathy down the line of my ancestry is stronger medicine. And it gets to an even farther back, stuckness or disconnection around the flow of love, and opens up that flow again, like a faucet. So, that flow of love is even more sourced from behind them, behind my great grandparents and flowing towards me. So, I encourage you to hear the words that come with how you describe your situation.

Candice Wu 34:04

Here are the words that come from how you describe your physical pain, or your emotional pain, or the experience that you’re having with a relationship, your work, anything. And try to take those out of your context and let them float in this sort of imaginable dream space. Dream space, meaning one that connects with the soul, imagery, feelings, and emotions that connect with the soul and the heart, rather than the logic of our daily lives, rather than the mental and brain logic but living in this space where things can mean different things, words can connect with different experiences. And let that open up for you that it’s a possibility that you’ve inherited some words, even if the words are, I’m never enough or this is how my life always is, that I always get the short end of the stick.

Candice Wu 35:09

Listen to those words. And just see what might happen if you open this door to the ancestral inheritance or your past life inheritance.

Candice Wu 35:22

One more thing that just came into my awareness is that May 5th started the day of running in Remembrance and Awareness of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. It was a #MMIW and #nativewomenrunning. So, just aware that there is something in the archetypal energy that other people are experiencing as well around, people being left behind or left to die. This MMIW is about remembering those who have been taken or stolen or secretly murdered, and not spoken for and silenced.

Candice Wu 36:02

So, there’s a lot going on in the air and a lot of times when I’m feeling something, I don’t realize that this is going on in other parts of the world or in the soul of the world. So, it’s really nice to look out sometimes and notice what might be going on. So, that’s all I have for today. I appreciate the space to share pieces from my ancestry and the words that I’ve offered back to my ancestry as a way to show them that life moved on and that their love really traveled downward, if they hadn’t really let that click.

Candice Wu 36:44

A lot of times when we are in hurt, shock, trauma loss, and a part of us is stuck there, that same part of us doesn’t realize that life moved on, and isn’t able to fully take in the life that moved on or the growth that was had or the love or abundance that stemmed from a loss or a time of loss. It’s like that part of us is stuck in time, and really needing to grieve or acknowledge something back there before it can say, “Oh, wow!” and look at all the beauty that came from it. And by highlighting the beauty that came from it in going that way first, it can also help the grief to move, it can help bring the safety to say that, “You survived, thank goodness for that!” Because sometimes our nervous system doesn’t realize we have survived, even if it moves forward, even if it created abundance.

Candice Wu 37:49

So, thanks so much for letting me share these pieces of my ancestry, my responses, to share this in a way that’s actually very free-flowing and not so orderly. And I want to leave you with two quotes that a friend shared with me these quotes are by the poet, Nayyirah Waheed. And I’ll connect them in the show notes. The first one which really pertains to this episode.

Candice Wu 38:20

“There are feelings you haven’t felt yet, give them time, they are almost here, fresh.”

Candice Wu 38:32

And the second poem is, “We returned to each other in waves. This is how water loves.”

Candice Wu 38:41

So, I’m just really feeling both of these right now. But there are feelings you haven’t felt yet, give them time, they are almost here, just allowing things to unfold and allowing the feelings to come as they will.

Candice Wu 38:59

And having that respect for the way things move and want to show themselves to you. And the second one, “We returned to each other in waves. This is how water loves.” It feels similar water and emotions. This is how water moves. Let’s let our emotions, like water move in us the same way. Contraction expansion, coming in waves, a way, closer, respecting that all of our inner world moves in this way. Like the moon connects with the water, like the ocean tide coming in and out.

Candice Wu 39:45

So, thanks again for joining me today. If you enjoyed this and would like to contribute to my patreon page, which supports the podcast, the production of it and the publishing of it. You can find that contribution page at CandiceWu.com/patreon. And even a dollar a month really helps out to build up the energy behind the podcast and I just feel very touched when I receive that support.

Candice Wu 40:17

If you’re interested in learning more about family constellations, or in listening to the conversations with other constellations facilitators, feel free to find these episodes at CandiceWu.com/ep5, which is about Family Constellation, CandiceWu.com/nick, which is a conversation with Nick Werber, CandiceWu.com/suzi, SUZI, which is a conversation with Suzi Tucker. We also have the conversation with Dan and Emily at CandiceWu.com/danandemily, as well as an upcoming conversation with Francesca Mason Boring, which is at CandiceWu.com/francesca. That is, at this moment not published yet, but will be in June. You can also find a little bit about family constellations at my website at CandiceWu.com.

Candice Wu 41:17

Also, if you’re interested in receiving more updates from me about my personal healing experiences or life experiences. You can check out my newsletters and sign up for them at CandiceWu.com/embody, and there you’ll receive up-to-date information about what’s happening for me, where I am in the world, as well as self-love notes, podcast updates, workshops, and retreats.

Candice Wu 41:46

Thanks so much for joining me today. And I’ll leave you with a little music so you can transition into your day or reflect on your own ancestry, what’s coming up in you, what emotions are moving in and out, what parts of you are wanting to emerge and bring you more expansion, and sending you all the love. Take care and see you next time on the Embody Podcast.