Candice Wu 0:00 Hello, this is Candice Wu on the Embody Podcast, and you are listening to a{Live} now, a mini-series of the Embody Podcast.
Candice Wu 0:07 I want to start today by thanking all of you that are out there listening because you truly receive me and give me the strength to continue on with the podcast. And, I especially loved the feedback and the sharing that I’ve received.
Candice Wu 0:25 If you haven’t shared with me, I’d love to hear from you. And if you have shared with me, please continue to, as you feel inspired, because it’s just a joy to receive all of your messages. I reply to every single one, just know that I’m on the other end, and it means so much to me. Thank you.
Candice Wu 0:44 Before we get to the topic today, I want to mention that this podcast episode is sponsored by the Soul Body Women’s Retreat. It is happening in October 2018. And women’s retreats are just one of my most delicious and fun parts of my labor of love.
Candice Wu 1:04 It has always been a dream of mine to bring a group of women together, with lots of healing prowess, love, and the space to be ourselves and to look at whatever is truly in our lives, in a way that cuts to the root and heals through the whole spirit, emotion, mental, and physical bodies.
Candice Wu 1:33 And this year is quite special because it’s in Zion National Park, where the richness of the mountains and caves, the depths of that bring us to the depths of our soul, and hearts, as well as the lightness of the sky that brings playfulness, fluidity, and possibility.
Candice Wu 1:52 So, if you are interested or know a woman that might be, I would be so grateful if you shared, you can share my website CandiceWu.com/retreats. And you’ll find all the information there. And if you’re listening beyond October 2018, you’ll also find future retreats listed on that website, CandiceWu.com/retreats.
Candice Wu 2:16 So today, I want to talk about a song that has been inspiring me, it is called The Consequence of Sounds by Regina Spektor. And I’ve loved this song for a long time. And it’s just stuck with me. So, here’s the song. I wanted to rap it to you but my partner says that that would create some problems legally. So, too bad for all of you that you’re not going to hear me rap. Here we go. I’ll just speak the first chunk of the song that I want to speak to today.
Candice Wu 2:50 “My rhyme ain’t good just yet, my brain and tongue just met. And they ain’t friends, so far, my words don’t travel far. They tangle in my hair, they tend to go nowhere. They grow right back inside, right past my brain and eyes into my stomach juice, where they don’t serve much use. No healthy calories, nutrition values. And I absorb back in the words right through my skin. They sit there festering inside my bowels, the consonants, and vowels, the consequence of sounds.”
Candice Wu 3:27 So, I just love this song. And I resonate with it, the parts where it says, “My rhyme ain’t good just yet my brain and tongue just met,” and how, for so long, I’ve struggled to speak my voice, even speak and express myself to those around me. And now I’m here, which is interesting, because it’s much easier, but it’s sometimes still a challenge.
Candice Wu 3:54 The part where she says, “My words don’t travel far, they tangle in my hair and tend to go nowhere.” That’s definitely been my experience. In the process of getting to speak my voice, there was a lot of fumbling. And, even still now, there’s a lot of fumbling, but just stumbling and not saying it right, challenge, fear, anxiety about it. And so I can totally resonate with this.
Candice Wu 4:24 Then she goes into the fact that the words that she wants to speak outward, go back inside, and they basically digest back into her digestion track into her stomach, the words, “Fester inside and start to rot.” That’s such a good visual for what literally happens. All of the energy that is underneath, what we want to express in words and actions, in movements, or in our expression of who we are and what we do, if it doesn’t go outward, it just goes back in and absorbs and starts to decay inside of us.
Candice Wu 5:13 This counts for the past and the present. And this also counts for past life. If you believe in past lives, it counts for your lineage before you, your ancestry. All the things in the past that they have not completed, that they wanted to. Or, if something happened in someone’s life in your family ancestry that was challenging or overwhelming, that didn’t get the right completion or support around or feeling through those emotions, then, that experience goes inside the body and it waits for the safe time or the safe person to express it. And, it can just sit there and fester in with the lineage, it gets passed down. We inherit those things from people before us.
Candice Wu 6:10 It’s not all doom and gloom. But, what I’m saying is that anything in the past that wanted to have some movement outward, and into the world, to be seen and acknowledged, to be expressed, all of that gets built up inside of our bodies and starts to build up muck inside. We get disease, we start to become depressed because the energy of our creative force, which is this upward liver energy that runs through the inner thighs, up through the chest, through the eyes, that inspiration of energy, lifting us into aliveness, if it doesn’t come up and out and also through our arms from our heart, then we become stuck and we become depressed, that energy goes backwards, and it goes in essence, the wrong way or an imbalanced way. And whatever in your life is wanting to be currently expressed, and if it doesn’t get to, it goes back in. And it adds and accumulates with everything that was there before it.
Candice Wu 7:19 In the tradition of Yoga, and specifically Ayurveda, food is anything you take in through your senses, everything that goes in your mouth, what you see through your eyes, what you hear through your ears, what you touch, what you experience, and all the emotions that are happening that want completion, that want movement, all of that is food, and it needs to metabolize, and for you to take what’s good and digest the rest and eliminate what’s not needed anymore.
Candice Wu 7:58 The way that we digest our emotions and our experience in life, past and present, directly relates to how we digest our physical food that we intake through our mouth. And so it just makes good sense that anything that wants to be expressed into, go outward, if it doesn’t get to, it just sits dormant in us and stagnant, absorbs back into ourselves, our bones, our tissues, our muscles, it becomes stuck energy, blocked energy in our body where the energy is supposed to be moving. And then, it rots inside of our gut.
Candice Wu 8:41 So what do we do then?
Candice Wu 8:43 I can tell you what I’ve done and what’s worked for me as well as what’s worked for my clients. And that is clearing out what has been sitting there, all the gunk, all of what has not been completed, what’s dying, clearing all of that out in a compassionate and loving way, so that what’s happened before actually can be reclaimed, that energy that was latent and lurking and incomplete. All that can be acknowledged. And we can see what’s behind it so that power can be restored now.
Candice Wu 9:21 What does that take? It takes healing up the parts of me that in the past have wanted to act, speak, protect or do something, especially in situations that were overwhelming, scary, traumatic. And I’ve had a slew of traumatic experiences, as well as a childhood that I experienced is very traumatic.
Candice Wu 9:46 Traumatic, trauma with a small “T” as lots of therapists would call it, where it’s continuous. Continuous experiences that are every day hurting, over and over and over. And so for me, there was a lot of experiences that were incomplete, times where I might have wanted to yell back at somebody but didn’t because that would have been dangerous back then. I have to do that completion now. And allow my inner child to have the safety to do that now. And to give myself all the love that I missed out on or perceived I missed out on when I was younger.
Candice Wu 9:46 I’ve also worked deeply with Family Constellations, which is this healing modality where we illuminate what is the true context for the issues or the patterns that we are holding now.
Candice Wu 10:43 So, things that seem especially out of the ordinary, or that don’t seem to have some resolve in the present life, belief sets or patterns, cycles of things happening, that can be resolved by illuminating what happened before you came. What happened in your lineage that may have been so hard to bear that it got passed down, that the energy of perhaps the grief or anger or something wasn’t safe to be had at that time, and it wants to be seen.
Candice Wu 11:19 I have found journaling to be incredibly helpful to just put out onto paper, to witness myself and to see what’s all inside of my heart, my soul, my mind. And to give it some importance, give it a space.
Candice Wu 11:39 I’ve also found myself increasingly interested in using my voice to express, using text message, email, social media, more and more, I found that something was missing. And lately, I’ve been using even the voice message button on Facebook Messenger or using WhatsApp, we’re just recording a little audio and emailing it to somebody. And of course, you know, I’ve been doing these podcasts. So, I found that this has helped to move a lot. Even if I record something and don’t send it, it’s still moving something.
Candice Wu 12:15 So I’ve talked a little bit about resolving or recovering what might have wanted expression in the past. But I also want to talk about the present.
Candice Wu 12:26 What wants to have an expression in the present moment?
Candice Wu 12:31 I find myself asking that all the time to myself. And it’s a question you can ask yourself.
Candice Wu 12:38 It’s certainly true that if you clear up the stuff that has been waiting in your gut to be recognized and digested, that you’ll have more space for what’s present. So, I highly recommend working with all of what may be waiting for you there. And to do it with playfulness and love so that you can ease through it. But feeling into what’s alive presently is also incredibly healing and pleasurable.
Candice Wu 13:09 And so ask yourself, “What do I need to say to myself? What is it that I need to say to my loved ones, to people I don’t even know, to strangers that have touched my life?” Or, to the person who sends you a weekly newsletter that you’ve been touched by.
Candice Wu 13:30 See if you’re inspired to share your feelings and thoughts. So that energy has movement, and it doesn’t just get stuck into your body.
Candice Wu 13:39 You might ask yourself, “What wants expression in my life in terms of my body? How does my body want to move or be? What do I want to be doing each day?”
Candice Wu 13:51 Whether that’s work-wise on a large scale, or small in terms of your daily actions, rituals, activities, etc.
Candice Wu 14:02 It makes a difference because what wants to come through you is essential to the evolution of this entire planet. It’s essential to your own evolution. You are the only person that can express what’s truly inside of you. And in a way, it’s our responsibility to protect our own energy. It’s our responsibility to protect our bodies, this vessel for which this energy wants to come through. And the way we protect it is by allowing what’s there to move and maintaining this healthy vessel, this healthy home for the energy of consciousness to move through us.
Candice Wu 14:43 Let’s not just eat our words, and swallow them so that our bodies just get loaded up with unspoken things, and unsaid and undone.
Candice Wu 14:59 Let’s take one little thing at a time and let it move outward. And just see what happens.
Candice Wu 15:06 I want to talk a little bit more about the rest of the song, The Consequence of Sounds.
Candice Wu 15:12 Regina Spektor goes into all of the ways that on a micro-level, where we just absorbed back in what we want to express, need to express, because then, what we’ve swallowed is stagnant energy, then, we just watch a lot of shit happen out in the world. We just watch things happen because we don’t speak out. We don’t support or take action, the things that would be helpful.
Candice Wu 15:43 She called it and I quote: “Getting stuck in the machine.” But we just spend our time maintaining what it is that we need to maintain, to live the life we just found ourselves in. And then, we just watched the weather predicting that things are intensely happening out in the world.
Candice Wu 16:04 And these words really tug on my heart where it says, “The National Geographic was being too graphic, when all she had wanted to know was the traffic. The world’s got a nosebleed it said and we’re flooding, but we keep on cutting the trees and the forests.”
Candice Wu 16:21 And the last words of the ending chorus is: “The world that has made us can no longer contain us and profits are silently rotting away. Because the consonants and vowels, the consequence of sounds.”
Candice Wu 16:36 What this means to me is that when we, on a micro-level, keep our voices in, swallow what we have to say, we really affect the world outside of us, because we’re just creating outside of us what’s happening on the inside, we’re just letting it die, we’re letting things rot and go to hell.
Candice Wu 16:59 And for the Yoga geek in me, I want to share just another little piece here that this song just fits right up with the language of Sanskrit.
Candice Wu 17:09 Sanskrit is the language of nature, it is vibration and sound. And that’s the subtle energy of what creates the physical, the physicality of everything that we see around us.
Candice Wu 17:24 And so when we hear the sound “Ohm” in a Yoga class say, ohm is the sound of all possibility that’s out there and all probability. And it’s the root sound of every other sound, and manifestation that’s out there.
Candice Wu 17:43 And so it just gives even more backing to this song for me, that the consonants and vowels, the sounds that we want to speak, that the energy underneath what we need to say, or do, if we let it go nowhere as she says, then we just don’t serve ourselves or the world. And of course, it decays inside of our bowels.
Candice Wu 18:12 So with all that said, I first encourage you to listen to her song, and I will link it in the show notes.
Candice Wu 18:19 And secondly, I encourage you to notice in yourself. Where there’s anything rotting inside of you? What has been wanting to have a voice that hasn’t? What needs completion in your life, or the life of your lineage, the soul of your lineage?
Candice Wu 18:42 And maybe you don’t know those things and Family Constellations as a really good way to illuminate those things without mental knowledge because it teaches you to see what is already there in the body.
Candice Wu 18:56 I encourage you to journal or to give voice, speak to your friends and family or loved ones, therapists and coaches, whoever it is that you trust, to start to give voice to things that have been wanting to be heard, yearning and aching to be heard.
Candice Wu 19:16 And support yourself, give yourself encouragement that whatever is aching to be heard is worthy. Whatever you are yearning to do in your life, that has worthiness. It’s a time to give yourself that chance to clear up what’s been stuck there. And to give yourself the freedom, the space, and the love to give expression and life to what wants to be living.
Candice Wu 19:48 Speaking of giving life to what wants to live and letting things die that need to die, you can experience the Shaman’s Death or something that I’ve created is the Ally with Death Experience. And it’s a guided exploration online where you can simulate your own death, the symbolic death, where all of what needs to die, needs to end, release, or where you’re putting your energy that is draining you, where your thoughts are that have just been rotting your system and giving you disease in your body, you can clear all of that up and give space for what you truly yearn for, what’s your purposes now and to find that.
Candice Wu 20:39 Give yourself the chance to have clarity on who you are today. And all of that space allows you to give birth to what would truly make you live a life that you want to live.
Candice Wu 20:53 If you’re interested in experiencing this, you can find it on my website at CandiceWu.com/ally.
Candice Wu 21:02 In a couple of weeks, I will be releasing the audio version of the Ally with Death Experience. And, so if you purchase it from now until it gets released, you will get it for free. And that entails me guiding you through the experience with my voice and some awesome, moody music to get you set into that experience in the deepest way.
Candice Wu 21:26 Speaking of endings, I’m coming to the end of what I want to share with you today. And so, I will leave you with Regina Spektor song, “The Consequence of Sounds” in the show notes and with the question for you, “What’s alive now?”
Candice Wu 21:43 Thank you so much for listening to the Embody Podcast and I will see you next time.
