Candice Wu 0:02
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.

Candice Wu 0:37
Lately, I've been interested in this idea about exploitation. I look around and see how, as a collective, there's a lot of exploitation of the earth, of animals, of our resources, using animals, using the land in certain ways. And in a lot of ways, depleting it.

Candice Wu 1:03
There are absolutely many people nourishing it and recycling and replenishing earth. And yet, there's this part of exploitation. And that led me to the idea of where do I exploit myself? That is the root of it. That's the core of where our actions come from, is ourselves.

Candice Wu 1:33
Where do I push beyond my limits? And, use myself and pushing me on limits and not a good way in a way that's not growth full or expansive, but in a way that drains and overrides what my body needs and wants. Where do I ask too much of myself or put pressure upon myself in ways that my easeful and natural being don't want to move or do or be?

Candice Wu 2:06
And for me, it's often reflected in the beliefs of not feeling enough or not having enough which then resides in not feeling and being enough. So it might look like going above and beyond for worthiness for value, or feeling greedy, like I want more. Like, I don't have enough where I constantly need more, or to do something, do more.

Candice Wu 2:41
And then, it can also show up in FOMO. For some people like missing out on something, wanting to do it all. And what that can often speak to is that feeling of in this moment, I am not enough. In this moment, this is not enough. This moment is not enough as it is.

Candice Wu 3:10
And how would our life be different if it were, if this moment, this breath, were enough? If one could find pleasure and contentment in this breath somewhere or in this experience of now, that can open up possibilities, that can open up the quality of our experience that can bring us to a truer sense of what we need to do, want to do, feel is right for us.

Candice Wu 3:50
A space where we're receptive and can listen to ourselves and be in harmony, true harmony with ourselves, rather than exploiting ourselves for the different ways that we can create or we can do. Just because we can do something doesn't mean that we should. And when we just do everything, we can find ourselves burning at both ends, or all the ends and find ourselves not quite, feeling fulfilled, joyful, light, natural, pleasant, truly in joy, but we can find ourselves exhausted or pushing for something.

Candice Wu 4:49
So we're just going to jump into a little meditation here in the form of an energetic download and clearing of energy, clearing of beliefs, and some forgiveness for any ways that you may have exploited yourself.

Candice Wu 5:07
And before we jump in today, while we're all, most of us are still in quarantine mode, feel free to check out if you're interested in dream work. There are ways that we can support our bodies in deeper sleep, more sound sleep, and more embodiment, so that our dream life thrives and we can glean some wisdom from our dream world.

Candice Wu 5:35
About last year, I recorded some classes on preparing your body for deeper sleep and dream work, that inner life, and they're all on Skillshare. If you haven't tuned into them yet, you can get two months free on Skillshare with the link that I'll provide in the show notes or you can go to [CandiceWu.com/dreamclasses](https://CandiceWu.com/dreamclasses).

Candice Wu 5:58
So now let's tune into the experience.

Candice Wu 6:07
And before we tune in, let your body move in any way or find stillness, whatever feels good for your body now. Give your body that permission to feel into pleasure, feel into enjoyment, and look for it. Especially if we're not attuned to pleasure and align to it in our lives, we might miss the places that are already feeling it.

Candice Wu 6:40
And if you can't find something inside that feels pleasant, even if it's a baby toe, or your tongue or an ear, then look outside and around you. Look for something pleasant in your space and let your body experience the connection with something that's pleasant.

Candice Wu 7:12
Turn on your curiosity, turn on your playfulness. And as you land in a space of restfulness, let your breath just release, the body. Release your attention on anything in the outer worlds, any pressures any stresses.

Candice Wu 7:42
We just let this be a space and time just for you to come into connection with the pleasure in your body, listening to your body and self-forgiveness. Just inviting the energy of love to surround your whole body, above and below it, side to side, in every dimension and every cell of your body.

Candice Wu 8:23
And as you sink deeper into your body, into your energy, let your own energy open up. The deepest parts of you know exactly who you are. Exactly what you love. The deepest parts of you know exactly how to be in the truth of who you are.

Candice Wu 8:56
Feel and experience anything that's happening in your body. Anything that's happening in your energy.

Candice Wu 9:16
Begin to notice your heartbeat and if any part of your heart starts to come in sync rhythmically with your body, resonating with your own energy.

Candice Wu 9:38
And for this moment, look into your life, into all the parts of your life with a broad brushstroke and sense any places that you exploit yourself or use yourself, use your energy in places that you're heart or your spirit truly don't want to.

Candice Wu 10:08
And you don't need to pinpoint exactly where but just sensing if there's any part of you that does feel that sort of exhaustion or drain, pushing outside of yourself or beyond certain limits.

Candice Wu 10:30
And just notice all these parts as perhaps a survival mode or protection. Ways that your body has learned to be in this world to gain love or worthiness. Just for a couple more breaths, respect that this is a way that your body has adapted.

Candice Wu 11:02
Just speak or hear these words inside of your mind and let them ripple through your body and your energy.

Candice Wu 11:15
I forgive myself for judging myself for all the times and places that I exploited myself or my energy.

Candice Wu 11:33
And as you breathe that through your body, notice any little shift, any movement of the body, any sensation, and emotion.

Candice Wu 11:48
And if these words aren't true for you, feel free to just discard them peacefully and continue to feel into your own energy.

Candice Wu 12:04
I forgive myself for judging myself for any time and place that I pushed beyond my body, heart, or soul's limits. And where it didn't serve me. And any time or place that I overrode my body's needs and desires.

Candice Wu 12:39
A couple of breaths, just noticing them pass through and again, discarding the words if they're not for you.

Candice Wu 12:54
And I forgive myself for judging myself for all the times and places that I pressured myself to do what was not for me to do. Or, I pressured myself to do too much.

Candice Wu 13:25
And I forgive myself for judging myself for any times and places that I did not feel enough in myself.

Candice Wu 13:41
Imagine giving your body a whole big hug, or even wrap your arms around your body just to support anything that's moving through.

Candice Wu 13:57
Track your body and notice anything that's happening.

Candice Wu 13:59
And we'll close with a couple more words here. And again discard them if they don't fit for you.

Candice Wu 14:15
I forgive myself for judging myself for forgetting that I am deeply enough and I am deeply free, and I respect my body's needs and desires.

Candice Wu 14:48
And just letting the energy of forgiveness for any judgments around this.

Candice Wu 14:58
Letting the energy of your body digest itself. Digest anything that's happening. Letting your body metabolize any emotions.

Candice Wu 15:13
This is going beyond affirmation. This is forgiveness. This is forgiveness for judgment. And then the rest takes care of itself.

Candice Wu 15:30
And if certain emotions are stuck here or you're not feeling anything, then I invite you to just touch your body. Look outside of you, ground yourself and practice maybe some more tools for releasing overwhelm or coming back into safety in your body.

Candice Wu 16:01
And if you want to stay with whatever else you're feeling, feel free to do that for as long as you need.

Candice Wu 16:12
And at some point, be sure to thank yourself for being in your own energy, taking the time and attention to love yourself to go deeper into the roots of some of these belief sets and where they're held in your body and your energy.

Candice Wu 16:36
And whenever you're ready to stretch or move, if your eyes are closed, open them, do that at your pace. Let your body ease into the flow with whatever new energy you're carrying in your body and whatever's transmuting inside of you, letting that continue if necessary.

Candice Wu 16:59
And I'll leave you with the little bit of music here as we close today.

Candice Wu 17:02
Thank you so much for practicing. And I wish for all of you that you can feel the sweetness of life, that you can feel pleasure and let that guide you. Let pleasure be your compass. Let contentment lead the way. And trust that, that gives life to creativity, that gives fertile ground for what naturally and easily wants to come through where you don't have to push. There's ease in creation, there's ease in doing, because you're deeply in harmony and respect with your own body, with your own heart and your spirit.

Candice Wu 17:50
It's lovely to have you here today. If you want to stay connected with me through my newsletter, feel free to sign up at [CandiceWu.com/embody](https://CandiceWu.com/embody) and feel free to check out other podcasts and meditations, guided meditations and healing experientials at [CandiceWu.com/meditations](https://CandiceWu.com/meditations).

Candice Wu 18:13
Thanks so much for being here. See you next time on the Embody Podcast.

Candice Wu 0:00

In this episode, Mary Oliver and a poem by Mary Oliver, loving what it is that you love and being free to do so and using self-forgiveness to release some judgments and belief sets around being yourself versus pleasing others and other ways of being around niceness, and ways that we can embody being ourself fully. Also, a little bit about how immigration and my ancestry and past life experiences have conditioned me to please others.

Candice Wu 0:49

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.

Candice Wu 1:24

This episode is sponsored by something that I love which is the Embodied Healing group that happens once a month. And if you want a little bit more soul support, body support, energetic support, if you want or need a compassionate space to do some healing work within a group that allows relating to one another and connection as well as working with me and in the many different ways that I do work with people, check the group out, it’s at CandiceWu.com/support.

Candice Wu 2:00

So I’m going to start off today with a poem by Mary Oliver and this poem is called Wild Geese. Many of you probably know this poem and I want to send a shout out to Kristen Donigan, who is a physician at the Raby Institute for sending me this link. It’s a SoundCloud link of David White, who’s another poet, reading Mary Oliver’s poetry and talking about it so passionately. And in her words, it’s devastatingly beautiful. So thank you, Kristen, for reminding me of Mary Oliver’s poetry and for bringing me such an important message right now that just really touches me and has also touched several of my clients, since I’ve received it and listen to it, which is only like, yesterday, well, yesterday at the time of this recording.

Candice Wu 2:56

So I’m sending my gratitude to you Kristen, thank you so much for listening to the podcast, for connecting with me and also sharing this awesome reading by David White and commentary by him of Mary Oliver’s poetry, which I’ll link in the show notes.

Candice Wu 3:13

So here is Mary’s poem, Wild Geese: “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

Candice Wu 4:27

This is coming to me at a time where I’m noticing the next level of the subtle way in which I try to please people and I may make things sound prettier or try to make what I want to say, come out in a pretty way or in a way that is accessible to everybody, like I want everybody to like me, and it’s really not possible and by admitting that, it’s also admitting that there there are people that I don’t like or want to be around, not that I don’t respect them or maybe I don’t respect them, but it’s a reality that there are people we are attracted to and people we are not wanting to be near.

Candice Wu 5:14

And sometimes those are lessons to us that if we stay, we will learn something more or will discover something different. And other times it’s important to trust, what our body wisdom and what our intuition tells us about where we need to be and who we need to be around. And it gives us the freedom to not like everybody when we accept that not everyone likes us, and that’s okay.

Candice Wu 5:43

Well, of course, I logically know all that and there’s still parts of me that just have been conditioned over years and years and years, maybe even lifetimes and I see it in some people in my family system, in my ancestry, that act in certain ways so that others can like them.

Candice Wu 6:03

Particularly, I noticed that in my father that he can feel anxious and begin to make himself seem happy and charming to the world and make things sound nice and good. And yet, there’s a whole other part of him that he may be blocking off or denying or not acknowledging and feeling. And it seems hard for him at times to just settle into his body and be present without making everything feel good, and maybe a false good. And I want to just respect that right now because I think that’s part of what has made our family survive, and perhaps shows in ways how he survived his own experience and maybe people in my ancestry on his side of the family have survived life in general for different reasons.

Candice Wu 7:04

And what I mean is that, particularly with my father and mother, they both immigrated from Hong Kong to the United States when they were 17 and they met when they were 21. My mom’s English was not that great and my father’s was better. My father, in large part, became the interface between our family and America. So between his parents, and siblings, and the United States, because my grandparents didn’t speak English, and for my primary family, where he was the person that was out in the world, making more money and being an engineer, he did really well in terms of using his social skills, his language skills and making people feel good in a way like a salesperson, but someone that gives others confidence about his work and about what their projects are. He has succeeded so much at that.

Candice Wu 8:16

And like him and many other immigrant families, the generation that comes over to a new place, at least in those times where racism and being prejudiced and possibly hurt or imprisoned could be a reality and it still is possible now. It’s still happening in many places, including here, painfully so. But, when it was even more of a risk, that those people that made their journey into a new land had to learn to be like other people and to smile and to be what others wanted them to be to fit in and belong so that the family could survive.

Candice Wu 9:10

We may know that as a simulation and that experience can be passed down in the ancestry and I feel I’ve inherited some of that experience, where some part of me believes that I need to be a certain way and pleasing to others in order to fit in and belong and be accepted, be successful, be liked and of course, if you’ve been listening to the podcast, there are many ways that I’ve talked about my young life, my childhood experiences that also contribute to that. And tack on some past life experiences where I’ve been a witch and whipped and burned and my leg cut off, because of my gifts and the fears of other people about my gifts and having to do things to survive.

Candice Wu 10:07

So just looking at the ways in which I can still try to please people and how deeply that’s ingrained, and stepping into a next level of moving into a different paradigm, another paradigm where I’m just me, and there’s a deeper, fuller acceptance from within myself that asks less of other people around me to accept me in order to feel okay and I can hear it in my voice. You might hear it too, over time on the podcast that slowly happened. In the beginning, I was a little nervous and not sure how this was going to be received by myself and by other people. And over time, I’ve built more confidence and loving in myself that I accept myself more deeply.

Candice Wu 10:59

Luckily, I have a friend that went to grad school with me and she and I, we just meditate together, we tune in and sense what deeper beliefs are living in our experiences where we parallel each other, the themes that are coming up and what might be needed. And she said to me that there’s a way in which I share my work or do my work, especially like, in the way I present myself in the podcast or other things that are public that feel a bit heavy because I’m still trying to please everyone and be accessible to every single person, and the truth is that I’m just not.

Candice Wu 11:48

I am who I am, and what I share is not going to reach every person and that is okay, because if it touches who it needs to touch, then great and if I’m enjoying it that is truly what I want to drive my experience. If I’m deeply connected with what I’m doing, what I want, and as Mary Oliver says, just letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Candice Wu 12:24

What would your life be like if you did not have to be good or, you did not have to do something more, do something different, or hide something of yourself in order to be good enough, worthy, deserving, belonging?

Candice Wu 12:48

There’s a way that we can truly be at harmony in ourselves if we’re congruent from the inside out. And that lends itself to true harmony with each other, when there’s acceptance inside of who we are and what we are and all the things that are trying to come through us, then there’s a deeper acceptance of other people being in that freedom as well or there can be.

Candice Wu 13:24

How much of us are still in the way of being nice and polite or making peace and where the reality of that is actually deception, disingenuousness and not peace but keeping things underneath the surface, so that they just don’t show up, so that we protect ourselves?

Candice Wu 14:03

So yeah, I’m calling myself to the table on one hand, but calling myself to the table with more loving.

Candice Wu 14:13

How am I pleasing others still? Where am I doing that? What does it feel like in my body when I do that? What does it feel like when I’m just true to myself and say things just as they are, just as they want to come through? And what am I so afraid of if I actually just do that?

Candice Wu 14:39

Sometimes I afraid that my words will be too sharp, that I’ll come on too strong or I’ll be too much.

Candice Wu 14:49

There’s a dream worker I was working with and she offered the words: “You’re so much.” Instead of being too much or not enough you are so much, and I really liked that. And I think that’s true, and it’s a way to reframe it so that I can find this space that I can be more genuine and authentic to myself and to the world.

Candice Wu 15:20

So if I’m sharp, what’s going to happen? Someone’s not going to like me or like what I said, or someone will misunderstand me, these touch into all of my younger viewers, and it’s calling myself to the table to honor those and respect that way of being as a way that I’ve survived and as a way that has helped me in life and in past lives, and that is the way that has helped my ancestry and the people especially that came here to start a new life. And it’s safe now. It’s safe now to be myself and not do the pleasing as I did once before. It’s safe now that not everyone likes me, no one’s going to kill me, at least I hope. I mean that is still possible in the world, but not as likely.

Candice Wu 16:27

And if you look at yourself, are there ways that you are giving your energy away? Are there ways that you find that your power is outside of you in terms of needing someone else to validate you or give you something that you think is outside of you, some belonging and some worthiness or some love or achievement, rather than feeling deeper and cultivating your own power even more. And how do we do that? How do we embody that? It’s not just words, as this whole podcast is about. It’s about cultivating any sense of yourself that has felt like yourself.

Candice Wu 17:17

There are two experientials that I focus on that and one’s in the alignment podcast at Candicewu.com/ alignment. It’s resourcing a feeling and a way of being that you desire to be.

Candice Wu 17:34

And in the podcast at CandiceWu.com/overwhelm, where we tune into times that you felt like yourself, the more we can touch into those times and let our body feel aligned with them, resonate with them, and in that safety, the more that builds up, the more that our nervous system and body says, “Oh, I know how to do that and it’s safe to do that, and I can be in that space.”

Candice Wu 18:10

And also looking at the fears and releasing the fears. Releasing the beliefs that aren’t true.

Candice Wu 18:24

So here’s my self-forgiveness for today, and I’m just tuning into this now and seeing what words want to come through, it’s not prewritten this at all. So let’s tune in here together and you can also, if you want, tune into any beliefs or ways of being that you want self-forgiveness around and to release judgments around and let’s do that together.

Candice Wu 18:59

I forgive myself, for judging myself, for believing that I’m not good enough. I forgive myself, for judging myself, for believing that I need to be a certain way in order to be liked, loved, and accepted.

Candice Wu 19:24

I forgive myself, for judging myself, for believing that I need to say things in a nice way or else I’m selfish, rude or a bitch.

Candice Wu 19:47

I forgive myself, for judging myself, for believing that what I share needs to reach everybody and be accessible to everybody.

Candice Wu 20:11

So I’m just letting those move through my body. They’re not very intense right now and sometimes it means for me that I’m not hitting the right spot and sometimes it’s just, I’ve worked on it and it’s cleared through my body energetically and emotionally.

Candice Wu 20:28

So I just did that with you so that you could feel into my process a little bit. Sometimes the words are not, “I forgive myself for judging myself for believing”, but there, I forgive myself, for judging myself for forgetting and have a few there. I forgive myself for judging myself for forgetting that it’s safe to be me and that it’s safe to say things just as they are. That it’s safe to love just as I love.

Candice Wu 21:03

Thank you, Mary Oliver, and also thank you to Charmayne Kilcup who initially taught me the phrases around forgiveness of the judgments and she was taught by her teacher, Robert Waterman.

Candice Wu 21:22

You can also phrase things in terms of, I forgive myself, for judging myself, for all the times and places that I and fill in the blank, that I was not myself or that I pretended to be somebody else or that I sugar-coated and glossed what I wanted to say or changed what I had to say for someone else.

Candice Wu 21:48

Whatever those ways of being or that you would like to shine some light on, so it’s not that we’re changing our habits, even though that’s part of what I am doing, it’s not the pressure to change, it’s the forgiveness, that you have judgment around the way you’ve been, around the belief sets that you have, and have had. That’s what gives the safety for something different to arise, that’s what brings that belief set into the light and out of the unconscious place in us, that just lives it out, unknowingly. Or, lives that out because it hasn’t been looked at fully and embraced and taken into our hearts. Candice Wu 22:37

So when I do this forgiveness work, I stay with the feelings and allow them to move all the way through or work with the feelings and parts of me that show up. That’s for another podcast, but you can also tune into the Parts Work podcast if you want a little bit of support with working with parts. That’s @ CandiceWu.com/partswork.

Candice Wu 23:03

And let those emotions and energies move all the way through the system and that’s what creates a lasting change. That’s one way that I work with the body and the beliefs.

Candice Wu 23:19

So as I come back to Mary Oliver, you do not have to be good and you do not have to walk on your knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. This is my favorite line: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Candice Wu 23:39

It’s so easy. It’s so simple. Love what you love, and that’s in terms of people, that’s in terms of your experience.

Candice Wu 23:53

So much of the time I can be clouded by what I feel I should do, what I feel or think I should do, what think I should do that usually comes from what I should do or what I have been doing, or what something in my ancestry tells me that I need to do or some way of protecting. But if we let these words sink into our bodies, in our hearts, you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. It’s like giving the deepest permission to be yourself and that’s exactly what I believe is needed in the world.

Candice Wu 24:33

There are all sorts of ways that things can be helpful. But when they’re really resonant with the energy of loving what one loves, we feel it, like, I can feel that in Mary Oliver’s poetry. There’s a deep resonance that vibrates through my resonance, which is like the universal energy that’s in all of us. It’s in you and me. It’s that remembering, coming back to the wholeness, and that wholeness can save lives, that wholeness can show someone else that there’s a way to just love what you love and be you, and that is incredible harmony. We won’t need war if we can just be ourselves.

Candice Wu 25:42

Sometimes they think about this in terms of horses and I think what would a horse do?

Candice Wu 25:49

If a horse doesn’t like being around this other horse, are they going to try to are they just going to find a distance that feels right for them? Are they going to find another horse to be around?

Candice Wu 26:02

Sure, there are ways that horses have trauma and could be resourced, could be led by other horses or people or other experiences to learn and heal and renegotiate that trauma. But by and large, what they do is they will be congruent with what they feel. What they feel they need, they will instinctually do without a thought. They don’t think about, oh, should I walk away or should I stay? They are just doing it.

Candice Wu 26:38

And while that’s not applicable in every situation, that’s something that we can feel into and use in our own energy.

Candice Wu 26:50

How can we make our lives simple and just love what we love?

Candice Wu 26:54

Do what we love to do and cut through the fears whatever ways that we think we should be and just shatter them to the ground.

Candice Wu 27:11

So I want to leave today’s podcast with the idea that we are not limited. We are just one possibility of the infinite amount of possibilities that we could be, the ways that we could be. And yet, there is a way that is so deeply aligned with who we are and so specifically eccentric to ourselves.

Candice Wu 27:40

In the podcast with Nick Werber recently, at CandiceWu.com/nickpart2, a friend of mine and fellow healer and integrative coach and constellations facilitator. He and I talked about being black sheep or not, and wherein our being is the black sheep. And those are the places where we feel like we don’t belong. And those are the parts that we can bring forward and that are really essential to who we are usually, and essential to us feeling whole.

Candice Wu 28:20

So while we are infinite possibility, I do believe that there’s a unique signature of who we are that wants to reveal itself and that can be a great relief because all we need to do is witness ourselves and as Mary Oliver says, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Candice Wu 28:52

Thanks for joining me today and may you love what you love.

Candice Wu 0:01

This episode is with my guest, Susan Lipshutz and she is the everyday medicine woman. Susan reminds us of what’s beyond the minds programming, our innate wisdom, and reawakening the divine feminine. In this conversation, she talks about what informs the universe and what is the Akashic realm. So, learn all about the Akashic realm and Akashic records here in this episode as well as being a rainbow sheep.

Candice Wu 0:32

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 0:46

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 1:06

The Ally with Death Experiential is on sale until January 6, 2020. It’s so fitting that in this episode, we talked about cutting the umbilical cords of what’s not sustaining us anymore, that for a time the umbilical cord is needed, and then there’s a time to cut it off. So, what needs to be cut off in your life? What needs to die? What needs to end? When we identify these and work with the energies, emotions, and sensations that are held in our bodies, then we can truly clear and cleanse out what needs to go to make space for a new life, for vitality, rebirthing yourself, and what’s life-giving and present.

Candice Wu 1:51

So, if you want to get clarity for yourself or come back to your intuitive sensing, playful self, check out the Ally with Death Experiential, which is an audio experience that’s guided for you with moody and provocative music by Larry Saint Germain and produced by Chris Spiegl. You can find it at CandiceWu.com/death, you might consider giving it as a gift to yourself or to a loved one. And again the sale is from now until January 6, 2020.

Candice Wu 2:21

We first became interested in the Akashic records when I learned Ayurveda, I was studying Ayurveda and sensed into that as something that was very familiar to me, and over time, I began to develop different gifts and skills in the intuitive or psychic realms, in awareness, and I thought, maybe, it’s time for me to learn that more formally. And so, I worked with Vanessa Rodriguez, who was also a guest on this podcast previously, and she learned from Susan Lipshutz. So, today is such a special day because Susan is here talking to us about the Akashic realm, her 25-year old relationship with the realm and the records, how they can be supportive to us and how the records hold everything, that the collective has ever been through and we are going.

Candice Wu 3:22

I love the way that she brings life and her vibrancy to this conversation, and I have just admired Susan from many different angles, in how she brings people together in the language that she uses that so juicy and provocative, and invoking, and in her way of relating with people. Susan is a licensed clinical social worker and has been a pioneer in the field of integrative psychotherapy, women’s empowerment and soul level mentoring for over 35 years. Her consultations are tailored to the need of the individual, offering a blend of innovative deep therapeutic approaches with an expanded understanding of the greater self via an astrological and spiritual perspective.

Candice Wu 4:15

Susan invites a reclaiming of each woman’s ancestral wisdom, inner guidance and innate understanding of true beauty via a weaving of practices and teachings, inspired by her many years of dedicated work with global wisdom keepers and evolutionary teachings. She’s the founder of Everyday Medicine Woman and offers workshops, meditation courses and retreats as well. So, without further ado, here’s Susan.

Candice Wu 4:53

Okay. Hello, Susan.

Susan Lipshutz 4:56

Hi. Hi. How are you?

Candice Wu 4:58

Wonderful. How are you?

Susan Lipshutz 5:00

I’m Well, thank you. I’m very happy upon our recording right now, mercury has just gone direct, and so, that feels like a wonderful boost.

Candice Wu 5:10

Doesn’t it? It just feels, for me, it feels like some clarity, like things are settling and also like, moving. How is it for you?

Susan Lipshutz 5:20

Well, I think, you know, the experience of this, these, the retrogrades, this year of 2019, have all been in water. So, I think there’s been very much an experience of, because mercury, when it goes retrograde is a process of unwinding, and ultimately, renewal and a lot of what we hope will be clarity or information that can come forward, but because it’s in water, I think it really takes us into more of the unconscious and more of the symbolic and deep in the underground elements of ourself, and then end up having to transcribe those and so, I think with the crescendo having just been in Scorpio, which is very much the elements that we hide from ourselves. It’s quite a deep, rich, mystical and healing journey.

Candice Wu 6:12

Thanks for describing it that way, it really did feel for me like I was in some underbelly of myself…

Susan Lipshutz 6:18

Yes.

Candice Wu 6:19

…then seeing things like oh man, like wow. So, here we are, we’ve emerged out of that and it’s just beautiful to talk to you. I know we’re going to jump into some akashic records today, but before that, I’m just chuckling at technology bumps in the road that we’ve had, and you just mentioned that sometimes when we talk about, when you talk about akashic records that that happens, and I experienced that, too, when there’s a big not just akashic records, but like a big load of energy.

Susan Lipshutz 6:53

That the, that it’s more difficult or interesting to record? Yes.

Candice Wu 6:58

Yes, you Yes, and technology just kind of crashes. Right?

Susan Lipshutz 7:03

Absolutely. Patience is required.

Candice Wu 7:06

So much, right? But Susan, it’s a blessing to have you here. You, I’ve seen you as just anchoring the energy of our ancient wisdom and the divine feminine or mystical essence, bringing in that energy, but grounding it in a way that people can understand and take up in their modern and daily life, and you are the founder of Everyday Medicine Woman. And you also speak about bringing together the wisdom, the ancient wisdom of your grandmother’s, of our grandmothers into our lives. And I wondered, how can we see threads of your own lineage and your grandmother’s in your work, today?

Susan Lipshutz 7:54

Thank you, thank you for focusing a little bit on ancestry and I think For me, it’s been a process, and it’s so interesting that I think sometimes, for all of us, we are so close, and so informed by the dynamics of our family, I know you do so much incredibly beautiful work around helping everyone heal from the impact of some of the experiences that we’ve gone through in our families that have resulted in obstructions and adaptations and some trauma, that it really creates challenge in knowing who we are. And so, I think that’s true with our lineage that for many of us or spirituality that we are so close to the experience and the experience is often informed by the limitation or the struggles or the challenges that our families have gone through, particularly for those of us who are women, who have matriarchal lines that have all been informed by the journey of leaving homeland to come to where we live, which is the United States, although we listen to podcasts all over the world, and then informed by cultures who that have denigrated and suppress the feminine and marginalized.

Susan Lipshutz 9:12

So, I think about the challenge of really opening up to my ancestry had to do with me reanimating and being able to see everyone in there, through that lens of understanding and the way that I found myself back in to really appreciating them as guideposts and potential wisdom keepers was being able to work with women, elders and grandmothers from traditions and cultures other than mine, but who had unbroken relationships to themselves as being connected to ancient lineage, ancient meaning, something really beautiful and assets that kept us connected richly to ourselves as stewards of earth and connected to being able to dream in a timeless way, and being able to understand that we all carry a certain kind of innate kind of wisdom that if we harvest it, just like harvesting a garden or an orchard, it could become a remedy or feeding or serving of others, you know, are calling.

Susan Lipshutz 10:20

So, by me searching outside of my traditions, it allowed me to then come back in and start to see the beauty as well as that which was out of balance for them and being able to invite some sorts of making peace with and doing ceremony on behalf of the wounds and the difficulties that they went through so that I didn’t have the benefit of really seeing and feeling their power and their wisdom in an unobstructed way. It was more than I really felt the absence of it and searching for. I would say the more particularly, though my grandmother, who I spent a tremendous amount of time who was immigrated from Russia, and fleed and was an orphan, and went through a tremendous amount of challenge, but I experienced her. She taught me how to cook and she taught me how to laugh, and she taught me just this the sweetness of an experience of the preciousness of life every day. She really didn’t share that element of her story, but she really lived, what she created and what she forged. She was an Aries. So, what she forged in order to create an incredible family here in the United States, and I was lucky because I was the last of the grandchildren. And so she, I just have had her to myself, and we spent a lot of time together. It’s really, really very sweet.

Susan Lipshutz 11:51

So, I think also, really, as I say, doing my own healing work, and appreciating it through the lens of the challenge that and the marginalization at the feminine is moved through, has helped me to understand and have tremendous compassion for the elements of what presented itself to me as an interception from a really strong sort of support of my own mother, and being able to appreciate the gifts that she gave me, and the gifts of her pain, because that also helped me understand my journey as well.

Candice Wu 12:26

It’s beautiful. If you’re so sweet to hear about your grandmother and that preciousness of life that she brings, and the laughter.

Susan Lipshutz 12:32

Yes, I can smell the chocolate. Those incredible cupcakes. We still do those traditions that they did, you know, with my daughters when they were little, too.

Candice Wu 12:44

Oh, that’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. Wow, you have so many different layers, Susan, of your work, and I can just hear it even in that description, and the major piece I hear is bringing people to their essence and that connection that brings us into that wild, unknown, unknown self and harvesting everything we can for that. And I’m curious, what’s alive for you and your life right now or in your work right now, your exploration and relationship with everything you’re working with?

Susan Lipshutz 13:20

You know, it’s interesting, because I feel like I always, you know, life is a spiral, you know, in terms of a journey that we have. And so, whatever we’re meeting in a contemporary way, I think it can’t help but open us up to elements of ourselves that we couldn’t get to before we didn’t have this, couldn’t be on this part of the road. So, we have, hopefully, whether it’s more maturity or we bring more perspective or we have more tools or readiness, you know, so, I think that it’s just this experience of meeting whatever is new for us in our lives, and yet kind of then how it sequences or how it activates elements within ourselves that can ultimately kind of you, being a therapist, also understand how people will come in and go, I thought I already dealt with this. And I’ll kind of I don’t see that anymore for myself because it’s like, well, yeah, yeah, we meet ourselves.

Candice Wu 14:20

Yeah. Right. I remember times I used to say that, too, and then it stopped because it was like, Oh, yeah.

Susan Lipshutz 14:29

Right, right, right, of course.

Candice Wu 14:30

Right.

Susan Lipshutz 14:31

And so, it’s just fascinating for me in that way, but also as well as my, whatever my personal themes might be, that I see this with my work as well because, you know, there’s just so many, like you said, layers to my work, and I think when I keep moving on my path, I keep reencountering.

Candice Wu 14:50

Oh, yeah.

Susan Lipshutz 14:51

That technique or “Oh my gosh, that tool” or this way that I can work because I do so much as this is this sematic work that we’re all facing, and then how can we move into a ceremonial or a ritual place to help step into a collaborative so we don’t feel like we’re passive in the process or reactive in the process, but we can say, How can I be interactive in what’s happening in my life? What’s happening in the world? And how can I collaborate with it, no matter how challenging it may be? And so, there’s that process. So, I think what I find fascinating for me, is that I’ll feel like I just keep evolving, and I don’t mean that any other way except the work just keeps opening up, and things that I’m excited or interested in. So, it’s, and then I find that “Oh, yeah, this is really important to remember how meaningful it was to do this particular kind.”

Susan Lipshutz 15:46

Like last night, I have a monthly women’s medicine circle, and so, last night, we did some cord-cutting ceremony which really had to do with unwinding from what is not life-sustaining anymore, and I sort of like it to You know, when you’re in utero, your umbilical cord connects you to the placenta which is life-sustaining, but when you come out of it it’s no longer life-sustaining, it’s not supporting you and so you cut the cord, and you connect the cord to something perhaps else, but I think we have to do that over and over again and saying, “I need to now unwind from something, that is not life-sustaining anymore, that the myth is that it’s been keeping us alive and I need it, but in fact, it’s harming me.” So, in there’s that interception of how do we differentiate that and so coming out of the mercury retrograde and so forth.

Susan Lipshutz 16:33

So, my point being is that for me, personally, I just find it so interesting, you know, to keep finding these, “Oh, there’s this little tool in my toolbox” like that man, you know, it’s like, oh, there’s this cool little gizmo and right in my pack that I can use again that I forgot I had and that’s so fabulous. And let’s work with this, and let’s construct of we’re working with astrology and we’re working with their everyday lives, and we’re working with what’s happening, but there’s something that will help us move through it, you know, so, I’m ever grateful for the time that I spent in that deep sort of practice of learning, and I’m always learning and I’m always growing. And I always feel like, “Oh, I’m a beginner again, because we’re beginning every day with the rising sun.” And yet, at the same time, there’s some developed understanding that we can work with as well.

Susan Lipshutz 17:33

So, I think what I find is really fascinating and beautiful, and I feel very called to is working on an individual level with clients, working collaboratively with more innovative, entrepreneurial kinds of spaces, working with larger groups of intentional community and retreats and so forth. However we gather is this interface around where our life is right now and how to honor it, and then how do we tap in, and how do we expand out for information, for understanding, for a reset, and a perspective, that in a very timeless, a very timely, and a very deep reference point of historical in a sense.

Susan Lipshutz 18:24

So, we go to a timeless place to discover past present future from a very different perspective, so we can move back in, like I said, as co-creators and so what I find two maps that can really help us do that is through astrology and through the Akashic realm or the Akashic experience, and so, I’ve been finding particularly and working individually with people, if they’re open to it, is working with opening up their Akashic records while also having their chart available through collaboratively, so, I don’t work with people as a one-shot consultation, because I find too many people just passively want to walk in the space and say, “Well, what are you going to tell me?” And then it’s almost like prove to me that you can move into these spaces more like a psychic reading, and then I can step out of the space of I don’t like what I hear. That’s really not, I think really deeply about collaboration that I don’t know anything more than, you know, my whole hope is to help you remember what you’ve forgotten or what you don’t have access to.

Susan Lipshutz 19:32

And so, me having access to the material can help you remember and have access to yourself. So, it’s really one of us working together and having this incredible experience of the following the breadcrumbs we’re putting together this, you know, weaving the dots of your story in a much bigger way so that we take it back into our everyday lives. And I think this is true in different ways with women, in particular, in our lost ancestry as a collective, and then understanding the power that we have now that we’ve never had before, and how to use it wisely as leaders, and stewards and a different way of collaborating with that maternal energy. And, you know, systems, too, because the astrology shows us in big trends, how the systems are all collapsing. And so, we have to create new structures, and how do we do that? I really find that really, really powerful and enjoy it very much to feel compelled that it just has so much information of value to it.

Candice Wu 20:33

Oh, yeah.

Susan Lipshutz 20:34

People are feeling that, too.

Candice Wu 20:36

I think so. And, you know, people that I previously have known to maybe just not even look in the direction of astrology have been coming up within themselves just like, “Well, what if I look? Oh, wow, that matches what happened yesterday.” And it’s this fun, delightful place that people are awakening this, to this as a tool. Some people, not everyone, and that’s okay, but I’m fascinated with this crossover, this collaboration, partnership of Akashic records and astrology, and I want to hear more about that. And before we go there, would you describe your relationship or your understanding of Akashic records? Especially for people out there that are just learning about it or want to know more, and want to know from your view.

Susan Lipshutz 21:29

Oh, sure. Yeah, that’s really all I have just like you.

Candice Wu 21:33

Thank you.

Susan Lipshutz 21:34

So, I’d love to and when I say I’d love to, I mean, I struggle with the words because it is something that is outside of our mind, and I think one of the beautiful parts of Akashic work, which I will do my best to give a glimpse of some way of our creating a bridge for that is that I think it lives in the space of wanting us to update our mind so that our mind can start to have a capacity to understand what our experiences that transcend the mind. So, really, what I’m saying is that I think many of us and I think we find this a lot, especially when we start to do this workaround heart-centered work or our soul level work or this experience of what meditation and mindfulness and you know, kind of, in that level of what we experience that is beyond what the mind can.

Susan Lipshutz 22:34

Mind has a program for that we need to find a way to have a divine mind, to have that cosmic consciousness that lives in our individual ability at the mental level so that we can hold what it is, we’re coming to understand in a non-ordinary way, that we can then help us move through our lives without having to struggle and keep repeating all these challenges, and all these things that create suffering for us, because we can’t translate them into uploading them as it relates to belief systems. I don’t know if that makes sense, but a lot of times, we’ll go through this incredible healing or we’ll get a different understanding at a, like, we get it, it’s the best way I can put it, but then our mind gets in there, our beliefs get in there that gets here, right, fear, death, unworthiness, and then if we don’t update those, so we can do them with beautiful techniques of, you know, working with shifting those through mantras and through, you know, kind of rewiring and all of that, but I think that if we can upload the basis and the premise of at the mental field, at the meta, how we’re holding our understanding, so it even goes beyond our beliefs and attitudes are informed by a deeper understanding, a deeper knowing.

Susan Lipshutz 23:57

Kind of like once we see something that isn’t just in the brain, but it’s really, we really take it in and digest it, we change it. We’re not connected to it in the same way. Like even if you took a hike, and you didn’t know how to get somewhere, but you finally get somewhere, and then you see where you’ve gone, the map inside goes, “Oh, I get it now,” and it might take me a little while to remember it, but now I understand where the route is, and I understand what it looks like when I’m on the other side of that, and I can hold that image of that bigger field, like when I’m up there, so that when I go back down, I remember where the journey really led and how beautiful the vision is, you know, the visuals. The field is the panorama of it.

Susan Lipshutz 24:42

And also, there’s another element to it, too, where it’s not only the information of what we receive, that we hold more than that it’s the vibrational frequency which gets into more, you know, esoteric concepts, but it’s like when we’ve, when we have created a shift inside of ourselves, we just feel things differently. So, when our heart opens.

Candice Wu 25:05

Yeah.

Susan Lipshutz 25:06

Right? So, if we feel things differently, and through that then, it helps us comprehend what we’re going through. Just like when we’re children and our cognition up, you know, we go through a big growth spurt in being able to go from concrete, meaning right and wrong into more abstract thinking and holding concepts, and it’s the same thing. I think that the records or the realm of the Akashic, its design is such that we mature our minds so that we can hold concepts that we’ve been trying to when we’re meditating, or we’re trying to move past some old thinking. Does that make sense?

Candice Wu 25:44

Absolutely. It’s like, it feels what you’re saying is that it’s designed to support us in more than just what we fed most of our experience through the mind and into all the ways that we can perceive, know and experience, and see.

Susan Lipshutz 26:06

Exactly, exactly. And so, the way that I got drawn into it because I was doing, I was going through my own spiritual awakening and I was sort of running around experiencing everything, you know, and not digesting it, of course, at all, but I was on a sort of a feeding frenzy, and it’s like, Ah.

Candice Wu 26:28

Let’s have the buffet of life.

Susan Lipshutz 26:30

Exactly.

Candice Wu 26:31

I get it.

Susan Lipshutz 26:32

So I, I was I received a few Akashic readings and it wasn’t so much, I can’t quite tell you what I heard. I can tell you what I felt, and what I felt was the most expansive love other than having my children, of the most expansive love, I would say it’s a similar field of, of just pure source love, of through this experience and then holding it was really on attunement that all allowed me to have a different level of calm through my experience, and a different sense of understanding that drew from whatever doors opened, that I walked through. And so, then I was just sort of like, “Oh, I really want to keep doing this. And I’d like to learn this for myself.” And then I thought: if there was the way I could learn this to be of service to other people, that that would really be something I would love to be able to do. So, that’s what I did.

Susan Lipshutz 27:27

So I’ve been working with the records for over 25 years. And I find that the work is just tremendously, there’s always some golden seeds that open up through the readings for other people, and I can’t really kind of, I have no idea what’s going to happen when we open the records and in the sense that I will see where that information wants to go, but that it in some way inform some sort of assistance for someone on the journey that they’re on or it kind of creates a fast forward in the sense to get to the heart of something that they have felt nodded by.

Susan Lipshutz 28:05

And there’s someone that I work with who’s a teacher in astrology, and he speaks about because he’s a therapist and a beautiful, deep evolutionary astrology instructor in a really rich way. And he articulated the same thing I experienced in the Akashic, which is we open up the field, it’s a field of love, and when we open up a field of love, in the space of healing, then there is a safety and there is access to an overcoming of some obstruction or not, whether it’s a karmic knot from a past life, whether it’s an episode or an encapsulated kind of traumatic or obstruction in this life, but it allows for a permeability into understanding that then we can open it up more, and we can have, and the person can feel more capacity to understand. And through the deeper understanding, not just knowing, you know, like, “Oh yeah, I know my story,” but in the felt experience beyond that, from a place of compassion can offer a sense of self-healing to it, which I remark in that as well. I feel that as well.

Candice Wu 29:21

It’s beautiful.

Susan Lipshutz 29:22

Yeah, it is very, very beautiful.

Candice Wu 29:25

Well, and when you’re saying that the umbilical cord, just like referencing back to that…

Susan Lipshutz 29:30

Yeah.

Candice Wu 29:30

….I feel almost like the way you’re describing it. It’s like taking your essential chord and plugging it back into source. The source of that you are, the love and it just reminds in it.

Susan Lipshutz 29:46

Yeah, yeah. And so yes, and so, I want to also say, just as you’re talking about that, for those individuals who have been to Peru, what is really beautiful about Peru and there are many places in the world where there’s been an unbroken relationship to ourselves as humans that are natural part of our nature and our cosmic. So, when you’re in Peru for example, the word Pachamama, which is mother, but it’s a cosmic mother because Pacha is time, and mama is Mother Earth.

Susan Lipshutz 30:22

So, there are some of the teachings in your umbilical cord and at some point in your life shifts, from your human mother to your spirit mother. So, you always want to start a ceremony by thinking: Pachamama. And all the time, and you’re doing all these dispatches, which are these beautiful offerings, which I had this benefit of learning how to do, and they’re just so exquisite and simple, but the idea meaning is that let’s re-articulate and re-reference ourselves like our GPS, that our umbilical cord goes down to be fed through Pachamama. A Pachamama Earth is also living in space in the universe, and the universe is informed by cosmic consciousness. So, cosmic consciousness has an intention, and that’s what we’re sourcing the records from, is this divine intelligence that has an intention for us.

Susan Lipshutz 31:16

The intention is that we remember that we’re loving, that we have an intention to evolve, and that we’re part of this evolution to grow. So, it’s not just universe. So, what a lot of people say, “Oh, the universe is guiding me or I’m letting the universe move through me” and it’s like, okay, but what informs the universe, right? And so, what the universe is, is a divine intelligence, cosmic consciousness, that’s almost saying: “We love you earthly being. We want you to evolve because we’re in this beautiful construct, where if you don’t evolve, we don’t evolve. So, we’re kind of moving backward. I know this serves you well, but we’re moving backward to…”

Candice Wu 31:58

I love it. No, it’s perfect.

Susan Lipshutz 31:59

So… get it together, this is what was going on around the Mayan calendar, where 2012 we’re all like, Oh, so we’re just going to fall apart, you know, all these things going to happen, and it’s like it really had to do with the Mayans are our timekeepers. And so, when you learn about the calendar, the calendar is all about time, and it’s an incredibly complex system of time that keeps repeating itself and then in this compound way, moving forward, very much like our compound where we call the compound trauma memory of the compound memory of our soul. So, around 2012 that was the whole notion was that when some people prophecies we’re talking about is that, “Hey, we’ve been here before and we blew it.” So, we’re in the, right, we’re in in the eye of the needle, where we’ve got to go through the eye of the needle.

Susan Lipshutz 32:50

So, where are we now? We’re in going into the next decade, where everybody’s going, “Hey, we’ve got like 9, 10 years or we are going to have environmental apocalypse” and it’s not to scare people. It’s just saying, “We’ve moved away from our consciousness of understanding of our responsibility to our land and our earth. We are technology grew faster than our awareness, shamans, and we’ll talk about, we just didn’t dream into our dream, the understanding that we were earth keepers too. So, now we have to include that into the dream.

Susan Lipshutz 33:22

So, you see how it all weaves together. So, its collective as well as it is individual, and that’s where we’re at that, like fast forward into this place of saying, and that’s where young ones, which is why Greta Thunberg and all of these earth guardians are coming forward at 13, 15, 18, why we’re seeing people coming in with children that are anxious and depressed. And so, everyone’s going why are they anxious and depressed? It’s like, what they’re waking up every morning to their future, which is they don’t have one. They’re seeing the earth blowing up and on fire. They’re seeing that there’s no clean water. So, they’re saying, “Hey, I’m gonna step forward and it’s my earth and so I have to, you know, I have to take care of this because you’ve all forgotten.

Susan Lipshutz 34:08

So, it’s really sad. It’s admirable but really sad that our leaders are these 15-year-olds saying, “Okay, we’re going to take leadership.” That plugs into we’re Chiron is, which is an Aries in the world right now. Chiron is in astrology is the wound. The planet Chiron speaks to the wound and the remedy of the wound, and it’s just gone into Aries and Aries is forging action, leading. It’s an initiatory energy. It launches the spring. So, these are warriors coming in things, you know, “The heck with you Let’s go. We’re not waiting for, we’re not going to read this anymore. We’re going to take action.” So, I see it all leads together in and why we are, where we are, and why.

Candice Wu 34:55

In Hong Kong, too.

Susan Lipshutz 34:56

Correct.

Candice Wu 34:57

And all the young people that are just…

Susan Lipshutz 34:59

Taking to the streets.

Candice Wu 35:00

….relentless. Yeah. And beautifully collaborating with each other. It’s, yeah, this is, I love this description of it.

Susan Lipshutz 35:08

Yeah, and the intergenerational piece of this, where we have elders that have lost their voice. That’s why when I started working with the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, they were saying, we’re only doing this to awaken you to the wisdom of, the lost wisdom of eldership. You have marginalized eldership and put them into places, warehouses, and forget them, and elders have all this. They’re like time capsules have this incredible knowledge, and that we have just discarded because they don’t have anything that we feel is a value to our culture. So, when we start to reanimate that, we start to reanimate, you know, everything. So, we need that intergenerational wisdom instead of using our world, right?

Susan Lipshutz 35:54

So, getting back to the Akashic records, we can see the value of how by piercing the veil of time, and how by resourcing a memory field of understanding of ourselves, our past lives, our multidimensional self, who we are to one another, who we are to the world, our mission, all those things that we reawaken. So, how we sort of find it in a way or where is it been? It’s really fascinating, because so, I liken it when people used to ask me about, like, how do you describe the records? I would be fumbling along, because when I started working with it, the, you know, the internet, the World Wide Web was just starting. And now, of course, that’s our whole life. So, I say it’s very similar to the cloud.

Candice Wu 36:42

Yeah.

Susan Lipshutz 36:43

So, when people go, well, what’s the cloud? And how do I get on really what is in my cloud? And everything’s stored in my cloud, and I go, well, ah, the records. So, we have these weird, we have a cloud and the cloud is up there, but how do we connect with it? So, by opening up in attuning and learning how to connect to this vibrational frequency of the Akasha, we can access our cloud and then we download it and we upload, so there you go. So, and then we keep getting upgrades. So, our life-lesson in some ways are the upgrades like you know, we don’t we simply cannot carry all of that information, and it’s connected to collective information. So, we’re really doing that.

Susan Lipshutz 37:29

So, when we, say when you Google the records, there’s a lot of material like everything else, but there are people who have independently discovered so to speak this beautiful experience and it’s not exclusive to the Akasha, I mean really beautiful wisdom. Teachers that we love that throughout all the ancient traditions or all the spiritual traditions or have spontaneous experiences and are they able to work for lack of better word we say channel are tapping in if they’re very, if they have very clean energy, and I think part of it is you, yeah, you have to find a way to grid the space.

Candice Wu 38:07

That’s right.

Susan Lipshutz 38:08

You know, so that, because a lot of times we’re bringing in, like when we start to tune in, we can bring in a lot. It’s like I kind of look at it as, in the old days, when we had radios, where we had to turn the dial, you know, where the old ham-radio, where we had a radio wave into the real frequency, we get a lot of static when we’re starting to open up to psychic realms for lack of better word or intuition, we get a lot of static and that creates actually a lot of difficulty for us, because that’s when we start to actually pick up other people’s stuff or material that really isn’t ours or material of pain that’s on such a deep amount of pain and anxiety in the world today. And so, we have to lift beyond it like an airplane we have to keep going up.

Susan Lipshutz 38:52

So, if we live to a frequency where it is at a causal level where it’s beyond karma, where it is free choice free will, that’s the Akashic, it’s really pure love, pure source, but we have to learn how to do it, and then we have to stay there, and then we open up to a free then that that space really protects us from bringing in a lot of extraneous material, including our own, you know. So, I think that’s the process of refinement.

Candice Wu 39:18

Yeah, absolutely. I was, that does bring me to that, the question. How is this similar different to, for lack of a better word, other psychic gifts and intuitions and clair abilities? And I think that that does answer that to some degree. It’s about the refinement and which space you’re tapping into. Would you say more?

Susan Lipshutz 39:39

Exactly, exactly. And that’s, yes, yes. And so, again, I think in terms of looking at source, I mean, their urge is so many kinds of ways in which we see when we start to look for this material or this understanding all the way back to the Christ consciousness and that sense of when Christ or the, I’m not well versed, but the last years that people speak up around that the journey of this ascension, that was perhaps kind of merging with the Akashic field or light so that then this individual could hold a sense of that deep kind of love and understanding that then came back to teach.

Susan Lipshutz 40:22

But there were around the turn of the century was really when a lot of like Rudolf Steiner and the Theosophical society and that movement and Europe in particular in you know, United Kingdom, coming to the United States, that where is more looking at spirituality and esoteric teachings, and then bringing it in, that we see a lot more writing because there’s a lot of world tradition that then transcends, you know, starts to anchor into the wisdom traditions and Edgar Cayce did a ton of work, you know, around the Akashic field and the Akashic records and reading, and his teachings and his books that he wrote, but the person that I think is just an incredible archivist and individual who’s brought through so much around the Akashic realm, and the Akashic teachings is Ervin Laszlo and he’s in his 90s, and he’s written something like 70 books, and if you, I had the pleasure of being in his presence a couple years ago, as many of his books, he’s extraordinary, and he, if you read about him later, but he was like a child prodigy and music and, and then led him to this interest in thought field, and then systems theory and quantum thinking at a time where no one was really speaking about this, and starting to encounter the Akashic realm and then started to look throughout the world and ultivate people’s experiences and, and really decipher this.

Susan Lipshutz 41:57

A lot of people who are very, very driven in terms of science, so, mathematicians can really understand this once they move into a quantum level, and scientists, so, it’s a science, spirit sort of, you know, esoteric spiritual Arts and Science Arts in that way, but he would talk about a unified field that then played a fundamental role and then bringing it down. So, one thing that he spoke about, and I’m just going to give a little quote, it’s from one of my favorite books called The Akashic Experience, Science and the Cosmic Memory Field by Ervin Laszlo and this is actually what he did is he did a foreword and then he has added chapters from all of these extraordinary teachers around their spontaneous experience with the Akashic, you know, in their lives. And so it’s really, really a lovely, rich sort of book, but that he talks about that when we think about the Akashic as, again, this cosmic memory field.

Susan Lipshutz 42:56

So, he says around the cosmic role and encompassing reality, the unified field is a rediscovery of the ancient concept of Akasha. In ancient India, the Sanskrit word Akasha meant hasmik sky, similar to our concept of space, but Akasha refers not only to space in a modern sense, but also and above all, to the higher sphere of life and existence. The Hindu series believed that all things arise from and re-descend into the cosmic source they call Akasha. It was seen as the first and most fundamental of the five elements. So, air, earth, water, fire, the Akasha, embraced and held the properties of all five elements, and was believed then to conserve the traces of everything that ever happened in space and in time.

Susan Lipshutz 43:51

The Akasha is the enduring memory of the cosmos, the Akashic record. So, when you jump off from that, you see that It holds everything that we’ve ever been through, and then everything that the collective is ever been through, and where we are going. And then the notion, the predication of the Akasha is that when you come into a space, so, if we think about moving through like a biosphere into a new sphere, which is the thought field thought realm, then into this Akashic, it is above all the struggles we’ve been through, and it takes us to a causal level where we’re creators of free choice, free will, like Eckhart Tolle talks about the power of now, you can be in the pain body or the dream body.

Susan Lipshutz 44:40

So, if you step into possibility in that field, and you start to look at everything, you start to see, “Do I really have to keep suffering or can I move into knowledge and through knowledge, can I free what I’ve been through so that when I moved back in with this understanding, I can then start to navigate myself from this place as co-creator?” It doesn’t mean all our challenges are difficult. It’s just a new classroom to move through with them and to start to see all the material we’re looking for.

Susan Lipshutz 45:11

So, I don’t know if that helps explain things, but I love that notion of cosmic sky, and that we carry that in, and then it sort of makes sense that the missing piece for us is that our minds are really caught in a meta journey of what we’ve learned in our three-dimensional world, right? And what the constructs and what we’ve learned about how we’re supposed to move through life and who we are and what our limitations are, what our families mean, and then we start to move up to a whole different level and we take that understanding down, and we can start to work with it in a collaborative way where it doesn’t have such a hold on us, to limit us to limit our thinking then, which is why I think we collapse when we go into these beautiful space of healing, and we go, “Oh my god, I feel so free.” And then like something comes in and says, “Ah, remember, you don’t know how to do this. Remember, you’re not as empowered as you think. Remember, you come from a family that, you know, believes that we’re all strugglers or you know, that we’re suffering, right?”

Candice Wu 46:21

Yeah. This outer world that’s been constructed around it.

Susan Lipshutz 46:25

Exactly, the limited thinking that then draws us back yet. So, I don’t know if that helps.

Candice Wu 46:31

Absolutely. And I was really curious about the bridge. Well, not the bridge, but you know, I’m so glad you brought up the Sanskrit word Akash. And the essential meaning of that, and you know, I’ve studied Ayurveda some and yoga, Tantra and I haven’t really studied the Akash very much, even though that’s been a part of things, but I love this piece of what you’re bringing in this definition of it makes so much sense. And I, I’m curious, to me, it feels like there might, all maybe this is just fed through the mind-stuff, you know, that there’s some sort of gap between where the knowledge began or at least we think it did through ancient India, you know, through people seeing this, seeing and sensing and being in this realm, making contact with it as their way of being and the way it’s come delivered to maybe the Western more Western world that it seems newer, too. Do you feel like there’s a gap there or what is in between that space of time?

Susan Lipshutz 47:46

I think what’s be well, I think it was a loss of appreciating the sacred in order to build what we also needed, you know, you know, every, I don’t think this is exclusive to. I think that there are many teachings where we see I was just mentioning, for example, earth-honoring teachings, whether it’s the in North American traditions, whether it’s in South American, so the Americas, whether it’s an African, whether it’s a Middle Eastern, whether you know all the points of the world because America is such another than the indigenous, the native to America, you know, America is a young country in industrialized country in that way, but I think we don’t want to romanticize ancient teachings because there was also a great deal of challenge in those ways as well, but I think in terms of the understanding, I think that there was when we were living more by the land and we were living more by, this is where I guess moon cycles and astrology comes in.

Susan Lipshutz 48:55

When you look at every single culture, every mystical, but also just culture, when you go to sacred sites around the world, there’s always a place where you see that there was a respect for and a charting and a marking where the moon was, where Venus was, where the sundials, you know, like observatories, because they lived by charting and tracking the moon cycles, the planting, you know, all the solstices, the equinoxes, everything was in relationship to the cosmic, to the sky in order to live. So, there was a respect for the fact that we living, even we didn’t understand what all the different nuances about the earth but we knew we lived at, in order to live on the earth, we had to appreciate and respect the sky, right? The cycles, the cycles of life, and to be connected to that, and we lived in a way that was more symbolic in that sense as well.

Susan Lipshutz 49:56

So, every single tradition when you look at all the signs, right? So, the Northern Isles of the ruins are you look and you go and you see all of these symbols, and what I love what I teach in the records, they tell everybody that you, that everything is held in the records. Everything’s held in the realm. So, the more you open up to your symbolic mind, so, you open up to where do you see symbols everywhere. Everywhere you look like when you’re in parts of the world, and you look at the weavings or you look at their art, everything in there is embedded their story through symbol.

Susan Lipshutz 50:29

So, we start to open up and see that the signs that we really want to remember to, that like you talk about the bridges that are lost, because as we got more logical, right, as we got more as their maps had to do with logic and reason and schooling and education, even though there was something really interesting right to learn and to create a common language that’s and to grow to say, yeah, the earth is not flat. I mean, there are beautiful ways we start to meet each other and there are ways in which we can have technology and we don’t have to, you know, use our as much as we can carry the water in a little place, we can start to pipe the water in and move the water right. So, there really are beautiful advancements that resulted in us becoming interested in learning and growing and building. It’s just that we lost, we have disconnected value that started then to become archaic and old fashioned, and superstitious, and then scary.

Susan Lipshutz 51:25

So, the other piece of why do we lost this is that people have mystical power, at first, you would see that these were the seers, right? These were the ones that were on the court that would always say, “Okay, bring in the prophecies or bring in those who could bring in the remedies, bringing the wit,” you know, and then they became scary. They’ve started to, and that was religion, that was modern religion started to say, “No, no, you’ve got to cut these people off because they’re bringing in, they’re bringing in dark forces,” because then people wanted to control people. So, it is really a journey of power, and diminishing the sacred and diminishing the esoteric, and diminishing the women. And it was the women in the indigenous that all got thrown under the bus that they became ousted, right?

Susan Lipshutz 52:13

So, we all if we all in past lives have this mastery, we also have the past life memory of when we were sent out of the garden, so to speak. So, so this is the retrieval, right? So it’s, that’s why we don’t believe in it. So, we have to open up all of our fear around it, and we have to realize that in the mystery, in the esoteric, in the signs. When we let our mind open up to the symbols, we start to open up and we start to bring it into the logical mind that can transcribe it, and then we have the opening of the bridging, if that makes any sense, and it all its political, its religious, right? It’s spiritual.

Candice Wu 52:55

Yeah, it’s everything.

Susan Lipshutz 52:56

It’s everything. It’s everything. It’s the Akashic it holds it. That’s what I love it because, you know, I’ve done so much training myself in all these different traditions, and then I walk in the Akasha, can I go? Yeah, it’s above gender, it’s above lineage. It’s above, like, it’s everything. And so then, you as an individual can find your own, you know, ancestry, your own belief system, everything that you want is inside of there, but it’s held in a much bigger way. So, we just really can take off in some ways all the rules and move into a space where the only rule is intention, is that you’re really seeking highest and that you’re coming from a very, very clear understanding of love and truth. So it’s that, that sort of guides us. So, I do a two-pronged process where I do a preamble so to speak, that has to do with where we’re operating from, and in bringing that attunement of the Akashic field into our bodies because the bodies hold our record when we’re human in our ourselves, and then opening up the records of this like library.

Susan Lipshutz 54:06

A lot of us will go places in the world where we can feel that spontaneous experience, kind of like we’re having this download of everything, and that’s because those are those places that have not had so much dense sort of, you know, rebuilding or a diminishment, you know, so places it can be just our own backyard, but it can also be places that are sacred sites. So, like, if we go to Machu Picchu or we go to the Himalayas or we go to Chichén Itzá, where we go, you know, to the waters, certain places, wherever it might be, that we can feel where there’s this intersection between the sacred and the intersection between the nature and the holding of that, that bridge.

Candice Wu 54:51

That’s so wonderful. Thank you, Susan.

Susan Lipshutz 54:54

I know you felt it. I mean, you travel so much.

Candice Wu 54:57

Yeah, I do and it’s um, it’s lovely. To hear you speak in this way about the Akashic. For me, it wasn’t until recently that I experienced the Akash like I had a relationship with it in a more formal way, I guess is through the, like explicit understanding of it, but I have come to find it in myself in other ways, in my own gifts, and so it’s nice to have that matchup and also refined in ways by learning from you and other people. And yeah, I’ve definitely had my experiences of going to places and feeling the energy of that space that can bridge something for me or show me another piece of something.

Susan Lipshutz 55:45

Yeah, yeah. We have this awakened experience and then the challenges, somehow integrating it because it’s a much higher frequency. And so then bringing it to a much denser frequency which is our bodies and then, you know, our emotional realm and our psychological or thought field. So, to be patient and letting that kind of start to move through and blower systems out, but to just let it come down, the mountain top and then like, you know, of course, it’s like the Charlton Heston version of the commandments, but, you know, he would come down with like white hair and his, you know, sandals are blown up or something like, yeah, you’re putting your finger in a live wire, it’s like…

Candice Wu 56:31

I do experience that sometimes, though. Like it’s download, and I’m like, “Whoa,” it feels like my hair is shooting out from my head, you know. How can I explain to my family, I’m like, I just got a download of something and like to feel this. I just feel like all this energy moving through my body and they’re just looking at me like, no.

Susan Lipshutz 56:53

Our crazy family member. Yeah.

Candice Wu 56:57

That’s me.

Susan Lipshutz 56:58

That’s you, and I reframe it: as people say, I was always the black sheep. Like, I know you’re the rainbow sheep.

Candice Wu 57:04

Oh, the rainbow.

Susan Lipshutz 57:09

Yeah, it’s and I will tell people when you’re for sure when you’re starting to work with this, you need to definitely be taking like magnesium and electrolytes and, you know, definitely so and move through because you can burn out your nervous system and then because, you know, again, this is where the esoteric speak that can sound you know, like, “Oh my God this person,” but you know, getting back into I think a more generalized way when you’re saying about bridges, I think more people certainly when they’re doing yoga, we have more conversation than we’ve ever had about chakras. So, I would pair for everybody.

Susan Lipshutz 57:43

When you’re at the fifth chakra, because you think about the first three chakras are personal chakras. The fourth chakra is a bridge between personal chakras, interactive chakras, that’s the epicenter, right? But then from the heart chakra when you go up to the fifth chakra which is felt to be. So, if the first chakra is earth and the second shock was water and the third is fire, and the fourth is, you know air, the fifth is ethers and ether is the Akashic, because the fifth chakra holds that gateway not only to our voice but also up to the ascended, so, the sixth and the seventh, which means it’s the time where we start to have our relationship to our divine self, to our master guides to knowledge itself.

Susan Lipshutz 58:25

So, the Akashic is a more rarefied air, just like ethers. It’s like when we’re up in the mountain tops, and we have that rarefied air where we have like, you know, we can have altitude sickness, but it’s the higher altitude where there is just, you know, it’s almost like you know when you’re at those places where your literally touching clouds. So, when you can think of it and the chakra system, and you think about when you’re working with your fifth chakra, even though we talk about the repression of the voice and opening up our authenticity and our integrity, all of that is true and it’s opening us up to the cosmic currency. So, that’s the real gateway to the Akashic. And so, you can see it really simply when you’re familiar with it, with the chakras, it’s a way to place it on your body map.

Candice Wu 59:13

Mm-hmm. That’s lovely. Thank you, Susan. Yeah. And I want to hear about your upcoming retreat.

Susan Lipshutz 59:20

Oh, absolutely. So, now we’re going into another…

Candice Wu 59:23

Yeah.

Susan Lipshutz 59:23

Another…

Candice Wu 59:24

Shift gears that kind of quickly.

Susan Lipshutz 59:26

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Candice Wu 59:28

Yes, another layer.

Susan Lipshutz 59:30

Another layer. So, yeah, I have an annual, for lack of better word intentional communities. And you know, my passion and my commitment and my dedication is really to the healing, empowerment, and evolution of the feminine as a sacred activator, so to speak. And so, one of the ways that I really love to do that is doing a deep dive where we can have a space to step out of time, like the Akashic and do some work together, as a community, as a collective, and really hold space for each other and have this magical, you know, experience that is one that where we can shift something inside of ourselves.

Susan Lipshutz 1:00:08

And so, this is our 20th annual gathering and it had experiences of different locations, and we’re repeating we went last year to Santa Fe, and we’re returning to Santa Fe and actually have a, something that I wrote about that I’m going to have on my blast this, that’ll be coming up at this point, it will have already been out, but it has to do with why I have such a, you know, my individual experience that’s so special with Santa Fe, at from an Akashic point of view, we all have places that are very, that we have agreements or soul connection with. And so, for me, one of those places is in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Susan Lipshutz 1:00:42

And so, this will be a retreat, and it’s a repeat retreat coming up from April 30th to May 3rd and women that are interested in this can just hop on my website or through Instagram. On Link Tree, there’s a link right there. Facebook also has a Facebook and then those are platforms you can find me and so, it’s just gonna be a beautiful three-day, like Thursday night to Sunday afternoon. This particular theme is the, has to do with liberating our soul voice, which is very timely from what we were just talking about. And so it’s a, it’s just going to be a really beautiful time to be together and to do some meaningful work, thematically, that then allows us some ceremonial processing and process and individual collective work.

Susan Lipshutz 1:01:23

And also, I love to take us to places where because a lot of women don’t have a lot of money. And so this is sort of a vacation, too. So, we do a lot of work but we do it we’re also taken care of. So, the land is really incredible, and the food is really great and the beds are really wonderful and you know, so we just feel nurtured and nourished so you don’t only leave spiritually fulfilled, and feel really animated and activated to bring forth what you’ve learned about yourself and your what you want to bring forth in your world and your family in your life, but also you feel a real deep sense of restoration for your physical self and self-care, which is women, we’re just, you know, we can leak so we can do a lot of massages and stuff, but we have to really go into the source of ourselves to start to feel like we can hold the nourishment, and I feel like we really do that. So, anybody who’s interested in that, I’d love to have you come so, you know, if we still have spaces, please just jump in and grab one and come be with us.

Candice Wu 1:02:22

That sounds beautiful, Susan, and it’s your 20th year of doing this 20th retreat year 2020 2020.

Susan Lipshutz 1:02:29

2020!

Candice Wu 1:02:30

I just can’t help but you know, with the mental idea of 2020 in vision, seeing…

Susan Lipshutz 1:02:37

New decade.

Candice Wu 1:02:38

A new decade.

Susan Lipshutz 1:02:39

…to move into. Yeah.

Candice Wu 1:02:41

Beautiful. This has been amazing to have you talk about, everything you talked about today. It’s very inspiring and opening. Is there anything else you’d like to share today?

Susan Lipshutz 1:02:55

I’ve just really appreciated taking the time to speak with you and I really want to honor you for the amount of your dedication and the amount of material that you so generously curate, and bring forth to the collective so that they can receive this and take that in, in a way that’s meaningful for them to digest it in the, you know, in their homes, and you know, and podcasts are also in their bathtubs and cars.

Candice Wu 1:03:27

On the toilet.

Susan Lipshutz 1:03:30

Okay, we can go there. Replace the sacred.

Candice Wu 1:03:34

Yeah.

Susan Lipshutz 1:03:36

But really that intimacy and you know, the privilege of that, and you just do such an exquisite job and you’re so dedicated, and you have so much, so much gentleness that you bring to such intense work. And so, you know, I really want to honor you and the retreats that you offer and your individual work and so just the bounce and all that good stuff back to you, too. Thank you for that. You really do a service for everyone.

Candice Wu 1:04:03

Thank you so much, Susan. That’s, that really means a lot coming from you, and I just, I want to go to your retreat. That’s what I want to say right now. I may, I do have a soul contract with Santa Fe, I believe I have some. There’s a lot of energy there for me and around Albuquerque.

Susan Lipshutz 1:04:22

So you got it?

Candice Wu 1:04:23

Yeah, yeah. Well, I also had a reading from an Astro cartographer not too long ago, and he had confirmed that so that was really cool that my intuition was right on about it, based on what he had shared with me, too, but thank you so much for all that you do, all that you bring, and how you bring people together in such a beautiful, loving, mystical and mysterious way, like in the best way of mystery, and touching into for every person and the collective who we really are and what we’re doing here, it’s really magical to see you work and know you and I’m so grateful.

Susan Lipshutz 1:05:09

Thank you so much.

Candice Wu 1:05:10

And I know so many women out there are, thank you, and the world.

Susan Lipshutz 1:05:14

Oh, it’s my pleasure and I do work with men, too, but just you know, the collective ways is really more dedicated for women, but I would say to whoever’s listening, you know, if you want to write me at Susan@everydaymedicinewoman.com and you feel called to do some sessions, I work in this way, and an integrative psychotherapy and consultation and fold all this into the degree that people are open and receptive, and I do that with people throughout the world or in-person in Chicago. So, you know, just to let users know that that’s possible as well.

Candice Wu 1:05:47

That’s wonderful

Susan Lipshutz 1:05:48

So, thank you so much for inviting me. I appreciate this time.

Candice Wu 1:05:52

I appreciate you being here, Susan, and I know everyone can find you at your website, Everydaymedicinewoman.com. You’re also on Instagram and Facebook, is that right?

Susan Lipshutz 1:06:02

That’s right.

Candice Wu 1:06:03

Wonderful. Thank you, Susan. It’s been such a pleasure.

Susan Lipshutz 1:06:07

Thank you, mine as well.

Candice Wu 1:06:11

Susan, thank you so much for joining us on the show you are an absolute rainbow sheep and you just bring a rainbow of colorful gifts and abilities that spark the rainbow in me. Thank you so much for joining us and thank you all out there for listening, and I hope that you found something interesting and inspiring for you, something that sparks the next thing for you or an interest for you or whatever you take from it, enjoy that. Be sure to check out Susan’s retreat that is still open and available for you. If you are a woman and interested in it, check out the link on the show notes at CandiceWu.com/susan.

Candice Wu 1:06:57

And just a reminder that The Ally With Death Experiential is on sale until January 6, 2020. So, it’ll help you cleanse out and end this decade, like crazy this decade and step into 2020 with a clear vision, with 2020 vision, that’s at CandiceWu.com/death. And I’m wishing you all just a lovely day. Enjoy today. Take good care of yourself and see what you need for yourself today.

Candice Wu 1:07:30

Just a drop in note about my website that there are all of the experientials and meditations for you to search on the database at CandiceWu.com/meditations. So, if you’re looking for something on self-love or something to support, healing, trauma, intuition, whatever it is that you’re wanting for yourself or needing, you can search there and see what shows up. Also, the podcast has its own database and CandiceWu.com/podcast, and you can also search for topics that you’re interested in. I always recommend just tuning in and plugging into what you really feel is right for you, what you’re called to, what shows up for you.

Candice Wu 1:08:17

Thanks so much for joining us and looking forward to seeing you next time here on the Embody Podcast.