From Emotional Numbness to Wholeness – EP24

Candice Wu 0:00

This episode of the Embody Podcast is about my personal story of moving from emotional numbness, to wholeness, navigating and developing a range of emotions, and my perspective of how emotional experience changes over time.

Candice Wu 0:13

I talk about an integrative blend of practices that have helped me on my journey and can help you in developing your emotional capacity and feeling good in your body. And over the course of this week, I’ll offer three different audio healing meditations that you can use to develop your own emotional capacity.

Candice Wu 0:34

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 0:48

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 1:11

If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you may have noticed something different this time and it’s that there is some music that opens this podcast. I want to send a huge thank you and shout out to Nick Werber, who is a fellow family constellations facilitator and musician, and he created this music and offered it to be used for the podcast. And for that, I’m deeply thankful. You can find out more about Nick in the show notes.

Candice Wu 1:42

This episode is sponsored by all my listeners and supporters on Patreon. If this podcast is touched you in any way or resonated with you, I would greatly appreciate your support. There are also gifts that you can receive if you donate certain amounts that I will send you personalized meditations and healing experiences based on my intuitive sense of what you need and your input. You can access my Patreon page at CandiceWu.com/patreon. Thank you so much for your consideration.

Candice Wu 2:17

And just to give you an update about where I am in the world, and what I’m doing, how I’m doing, I’m in Lombok, Indonesia, which is the island next to Bali. And I’ve been here about a week now with my partner, it’s always an interesting process to figure out where to live, figure out nutritious food and transportation. So, that’s been an adjustment but I’ve really enjoyed the beaches here. It’s much cleaner than in Bali, because this island is far less developed.

Candice Wu 2:48

So, after my grandmother’s passing that I spoke about two weeks ago, being in Hong Kong and honoring her with my family, I spent a little time in Malaysia and headed over here. I’m finding that my body still wants to move very slowly and consciously, as well as a lot of unconscious inner stuff is still working out in our emotions that I’m not completely understanding or able to name all the time, but are just trying to move through me, sometimes in uncomfortable ways, like a stomach ache, or just random anger that wants to come through in screaming or pushing or moving.

Candice Wu 3:31

So, in working with all that I, if I step back, I have a lot of compassion for myself, because there’s so much going on, on the inside than on the outside, I need to rest and be quiet and slow down and integrate. But to an outside person, it might just look like I’m lazy or not doing anything. But in fact, so much is happening at the unconscious level that it requires rest, it requires slowing down and integrating.

Candice Wu 4:02

So, going all the way back to the episodes about spiritual crisis and existential crisis, I’m not all the way past it, things are still cleansing out of me, and finding its way to be known, different beliefs and values are coming up to be examined and to be sorted. I constantly have dreams about cleaning out the kitchen, cleaning out different spaces that I’ve worked in, or spaces at home sorting objects, getting rid of things, getting new clothes, keeping a few of the old ones. And so, I interpret that as sorting my inner world.

Candice Wu 4:41

With all this going on, I’m also learning about the culture and having new experiences here in Lombok. Lombok is very different from Bali, because it’s primarily Muslim, whereas Bali is mostly Hindus. So, I can often hear the Muslim prayers broadcasted over the loudspeakers right from my guest house, even in the middle of the night like three in the morning, sometimes, near the beach villages, there are plenty of surfers and new restaurants popping up left and right. It’s a much simpler and slower life, and it’s very breathable. So, there’s my update for you and let’s get to the show today.

Candice Wu 5:22

I’m often asked by others about my emotional capacity, and how is it that I can feel so much and feel strong in that or feel so much and get support? How can I have such a capacity and have I always had it? And the answer is no, I haven’t always had this, it’s only been about nine years, since I’ve been able to feel. Quite truthfully, I’ve spent over a quarter of my life numb and protecting, not feeling and almost in a paralyzed state in a lot of ways. I grew up in a Chinese family and we never spoke about emotions at all, I had no vocabulary for naming what was going on inside and speaking about our inner world was really not a thing we did.

Candice Wu 6:12

We mostly spoke about food and what we would be eating, where anyone was going or what we were doing, but emotions are experienced in the body, what was going on other than being physically sick, didn’t have any space. As a very sensitive child, I imagine I just didn’t have any support with what I was feeling. And I now look back and know that I experienced a lot that would have listed many, many, many feelings but couldn’t feel any of them.

Candice Wu 6:46

When I got to middle school, I remember rebelling a lot and feeling like my voice could finally come out. And I could finally speak to some emotions, because I had learned from people around me, my friends and teachers. But when I brought these emotions home to my family, especially when they were uncomfortable feelings, again, there was no place for them and I felt shamed.

Candice Wu 7:10

For a Chinese family, typically, it is very important to show respect to your elders, and it was associated with not feeling emotions, not telling your elders how you feel towards them if it’s a bad feeling, quote, and quote, bad feeling. So, if I felt sad about something that happened, or angry with somebody or angry with a situation, all of that was meant to be kept inside because if it came out, I would get some sort of punishment.

Candice Wu 7:43

I was used to, all my life thinking my way through things because that had gotten me the farthest. And so, when I got to my first embodied therapist, about nine years ago, nine or 10 years, I had no idea that I had very little range of emotion, and I had no way to deal with all the emotions that were going on inside.

Candice Wu 8:06

I had heard about EMDR therapy from a few colleagues at that time, I was an art teacher, and I decided to give it a go. EMDR represents Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It uses eye movements or some sort of bilateral stimulation of tapping back and forth, or vibration in your hands to bring the awareness and energy from the frontal cortex, the thinking mind, the place that makes decisions for us, all the way down to the brainstem, where the amygdala and the limbic system is.

Candice Wu 8:39

The limbic system processes all sorts of emotions and experiences, and at a very basic explanation, it helps us understand when we’re in threat. So, it holds our instinctual survival mechanisms, that’s why it’s called the reptilian brain. It’s looking out for our basic needs for survival. So, the amygdala and the limbic system located roughly at the base of the head and the neck, the connection of the neck connects up with a polyvagus nerve going all the way down into the body. And this nerve connects to all the major organs in the body.

Candice Wu 9:16

So, I went from thinking through all my experiences and trying to problem solve and control my environment and make changes to being in the body, feeling what was happening with body sensation, and noticing emotion and naming emotion. All of this, which I realized was far too scary to feel based on the fact that I had experienced a lot of trauma. I had experienced emotional neglect and abandonment at a very early age. And I’d also experienced a lot of emotional verbal, relational abuse.

Candice Wu 9:54

What I learned at that time was that this type of trauma, which a lot of therapists calls multi-trauma is much more challenging at times to move through because it’s a continual trauma day after day, without really knowing much different and so it’s trauma over trauma over trauma. So, by the time I visited this therapist, I had at least 24, 25 years of build up of emotion that never moved, that was repressed, and fight and flight responses that just were stuck in my body, causing my nervous system to be anxious all the time, to have headaches all the time, and tension all over my body.

Candice Wu 10:37

Along with this, I was having various physical symptoms like heart palpitations, numbness down my right side and digestive issues. And I just never felt good. I was purely faking my way through life. I was smiling all the time and acting like I was happy, because this is the way I had learned to protect myself all those years. This is the way I learned to make different connections with people, outside of my family as well. And it gave me a very false sense of who I was, because deep down I was filled with negative beliefs of myself and my self-worth.

Candice Wu 11:16

So, when I saw this therapist who is located in Evanston, Illinois, she and I realized that I had about five different emotions that I could even name or feel, that included happy, sad, tired, mad, and maybe surprised. For me, anger was very limited, it was perhaps in like two modes. One mode was complete repression, where my body would just feel tension, everywhere. And the second mode was rage that just spilled me over into tears and self-defeat. Any experience of frustration or anger seemed to just channel into sadness and hurt.

Candice Wu 12:05

So, I felt quite powerless all the time, and during the process of therapy, I realized that that was a reflection of almost all of my early years that being powerless was the safer way to go. My biggest goal in therapy at that time was to develop a larger range of emotion because everything was categorized practically into those five emotions. I’m not even sure tired is an emotion, but it’s definitely an energetic state. So you can see how limited my experience was.

Candice Wu 12:37

EMDR brought me from that analytical and thinking, problem-solving mindset down to my body so that I could actually breathe again, and I could feel into my body, and session after session we would spend sitting with what I felt. EMDR is really interesting because it’s integrative and it connects up to the body sensation, emotion, the image of what happened or memory of something that happened, or the fear that you have of something in the future, as well as the thoughts that come with it, the beliefs of self.

Candice Wu 13:15

I learned how to take a present-day experience that was activating, upsetting or triggering, connected up with something that happened very early on, or some sense of that experience, some familiarity, and essentially clear out this entire channel or branch of experience that was connected with certain belief sets. This gave me a lot of resolution for these underlying negative beliefs that I had about myself such as, I’m not enough, I’m unimportant, I am unlovable, or insignificant, all the way to the beliefs of I’m a bad person, I’m horrible, and nothing.

Candice Wu 13:56

One of the things that helps me greatly in transitioning from this mental mindset, mental control to the experience of the body, was that we took the body sensations and emotions and rated how much I was feeling them in the beginning, and at the end, as well as rating the belief sets that I felt from the negative beliefs to the belief I wanted to feel, and how much was I feeling that belief from the beginning of the processing, and then to the end. This gave me a really tangible way to see my progress, and to feel into the fact that this belief of myself was changing, because I was processing and resolving, and completing the things that weren’t complete in the past.

Candice Wu 14:44

Looking back now, I remember trying other things that were quite similar to EMDR that use the same mechanism that come from different traditions. I read this book called Brain Wave Vibration by Ilchi Lee, and it describes moving your head side to side just very slightly, so that you activate the brainstem and you can come to a new baseline of calmness and relaxation.

Candice Wu 15:12

I practice that every day along with some of the practices that came from EMDR, which is installing or resourcing positivity, pleasant experiences. So, it was able to develop a capacity for feeling challenging emotions, as well as the positive ones. And it gave me a very flexible and a free way to move through life over time.

Candice Wu 15:40

I also found that different practices in yoga reflected the same practice. there is a series of eye movement exercises that you can do right to left, right to left, or up and down, or side to side, or in circles. And all of that is to develop and simulate the strength of the eye muscles, the ability to see and to have awareness and insight that is beyond what you can see now. It was a wonderful experience to see that the yogic practices were matching right up with something very scientific in terms of the Western “I”. And later I came to study EMDR and practice it myself. So, learning that that process had a match in indigenous practices such as yoga was very exciting to me. And these are some practices that I still use today with clients if they’re interested in that.

Candice Wu 16:37

So, the process of feeling, body sensation and emotions was not entirely easy. Yes, of course, I started to feel more joy and pleasure and freedom, the ability to be flexible with how I move through life, and trying not to control everything outside of me, that became easier and easier. But I do recall days of leaving therapy, just completely in tears, and taking the whole weekend to recover, or lying on the floor raw and overwhelmed. I was in this process of doing as much healing work as fast as I could humanly do.

Candice Wu 17:20

So, you might be wondering how I got from there to where I am now. And it was over the course of at least five years of EMDR therapy. Somewhere in that process, I began to realize that I had a huge gift of feeling and sensing, and that I could even feel and sense what others might be feeling or what an environment was experiencing, and be able to interpret and see what was happening, that my ability to feel was a sensitivity and gift.

Candice Wu 17:53

At the end of some sessions, I would come to this place of expansion, spaciousness, and joy, where I just felt like, I in the exact right place in my life. And I know that I meant to do something with this, something deeper than teaching art, which was what I was doing at the time,

Candice Wu 18:09

I was getting much stronger in myself and facing so many fears, resolving them, and finding that who I was, on the inside was a much stronger and powerful person than I ever knew. So, when I first had the idea to go to grad school for Clinical Psychology, I was completely terrified. All I knew was this life of having stability and security of a job that gave me insurance and a contract for a year as a teacher. So, going to grad school with no health insurance, spending, and investing a lot of money, just freaked me out.

Candice Wu 18:49

But I took that leap and it was the best thing that I ever did for this aspect of my career. I also studied yoga and Ayurveda more deeply at that time, and other indigenous healing practices and meditations. And when I found family constellations, my world was completely changed. Family constellations is a type of healing modality that is completely embodied, and without knowing mental information or knowledge about anything, or dynamics with people, our family ancestry, and what’s happened way back in the generational line, we can know through the body sensation, intuition, and the sense.

Candice Wu 19:34

And so, this made entire sense to me because I saw how physical ailments connected right up with some sort of ancestral or intergenerational upset or loss. How someone’s ulcers, were a result of something they couldn’t digest in their gut because it was way too hard back then, perhaps something like war or losing a child. Even little synchronicities of the body that I experienced, for example, always twisting my left ankle, or my right side being a little tighter. Even things like my right eye being a little bit weaker than my left eye, insight.

Candice Wu 20:21

Family constellations let’s all of those aspects be seen in a way that makes a complete connection and sense through the body, through what’s needed through movement, through felt sense. So, when I found that it was another way for me to understand how emotion connected with the body, and how the whole family system, not just the primary family that’s alive, but anyone dead, and that came before my parents, and grandparents and before them, can affect my DNA, my body, my emotions now.

Candice Wu 21:01

And when I also found somatic experiencing a couple of years after that, I realized that I had been doing those practices in yoga and constellations. But then I developed a more refined idea of the science behind emotions, and the science behind trauma. Looking back at the days, I was lying down on the ground raw, and completely overwhelmed and scared in terror. I wish I had known about some of the somatic experiencing practices to slow down in temper, the experience to not get retraumatized in ways. And to pendulate going to a pleasant experience to help me move through that with more ease.

Candice Wu 21:47

So, I’ve had some bumpy rides, in the course of learning to navigate emotion and to be in my body, but overall, I’m so happy that I was able to find all these pieces and put them together to something that brings a lot more ease now.

Candice Wu 22:05

What I learned the most about emotions is that they’re completely helpful. Emotions are aspects of our experience that want to help us, they are showing us inside something that we feel, so that we can take the next course of action, to protect ourselves or to give us the best outcome, and to show us where we’re truly alive in our self.

Candice Wu 22:29

So, without feeling some of the more challenging emotions, I wasn’t even able to feel happy, joy or aliveliness, either. Brené Brown talks about the fact that we can’t numb out negative feelings, we can’t just numb out depression and sadness, without numbing out all the rest.

Candice Wu 22:48

And that’s exactly what I found in building my range of emotion. I saw it not just like a range in terms of one line and all these different emotions on a spectrum, but more so like a circle. That, if my range was this size before, like the size of a quarter, let’s say, that I was slowly expanding that circle so I could feel more like a golf ball size of a range, and then larger, that expanding into the challenging emotions also expanded the positive emotions. And expanding the pleasant feeling also deepened me into some more challenging and traumatic experiences that wanted to be healed.

Candice Wu 23:32

If you ask me prior to 10 years ago, I probably would have been someone who would say, yeah, how can I get rid of this anxiety or depression? Well, actually, it probably was more like, “What, I’m anxious and I’m depressed?” And then shifted towards, “Yeah, how can I get rid of it?” And what I’ve learned in the course of this nine to 10 years is that it’s not about getting rid of any emotions at all. Those are extremely important and valuable resources that we have. It’s about how to navigate them, to partner with them. And that the experience of emotions changes over time, it’s less uncomfortable and threatening. And it moves towards that it’s actually pleasant to feel emotions, and they’re useful.

Candice Wu 24:22

I hated feeling certain emotions for a long time, I hated feeling anger, I hated feeling deep hurt, and I would do anything to avoid it. Obviously, I did, I numbed out. But looking back, it all makes sense, numbing out and protecting in that way was the best thing I could have done to survive the circumstances, and that there was not enough support, help or resource to give me that safety that was needed to feel.

Candice Wu 24:51

Trauma is the experience of something being incomplete. We’re in the past, we experienced something that was terrifying, scary, overwhelming, because we didn’t have enough resource. If we didn’t have the right kind of compassionate and loving support after something happened. Or even during the thing that happened, if there was something our instinctual animal body wanted to do, but didn’t get to, we leave that situation incomplete. And it gets stored in our nervous system as a fight, flight or frozen response.

Candice Wu 25:27

This is a beautiful and very hopeful thing to see trauma this way because if we understand that there was something incomplete about a past experience, or where there wasn’t enough resource in the past, we can give that resource now, provide the safety now, and complete what needs to be completed.

Candice Wu 25:52

And that applies to anything in our personal life, anything in the intergenerational line, any tragedy that happened that perhaps didn’t get to be grieved, or some reaching out to reconnect that needed to happen, to restore the love, anything in terms of your personal life, your lineage, past life, if you believe in that, or if you don’t just random images and feelings that you have, that seem to want to need something. You can complete that now, you can provide that love or safety that wasn’t there in the past.

Candice Wu 26:31

So, working with all of these types of traumas in my life have given me the capacity to feel alive, free, joyful, and feel any emotion now, and know how to use it in a way that helps me. I want to offer a spectrum of how I’ve experienced emotion over time and this will in some ways intertwined with a developmental process. And when I speak about development, what I mean is the process of learning how to feel over time from infancy to adulthood, which is something that got disrupted in my experience.

Candice Wu 27:09

So, I’ll share the evolution of my personal emotional experience, and recognize that your path might not be mine, and mine is not yours, but I hope that it might give some idea of how emotion can be experienced if you’re experiencing it in a different way. And especially if you’re experiencing some suffering or resistance with your emotions, I hope that this can give a new idea.

Candice Wu 27:34

So, for me, stage one was my experience of repression and protection. This is where I just completely avoided feeling. I felt nothing, I hated feeling any emotion, and didn’t know how to get myself to resolve any emotion. I felt like it could just be endless. And I experienced depression, lots of fear and overwhelm. I needed to shape and control my environment and others to get what I needed. And that ultimately became frustrating as well, I had a lot of self-judgment, but I didn’t know it.

Candice Wu 28:13

This is akin to playing dead as an animal, that if we feel experiences that are threatening, and we get into a state of fight and flight in order to protect ourselves, but we can’t use that energy, we aren’t able to do that effectively or safely, we might just play dead, and hope that our predator goes away, just hope that this bad thing stops. So, I spent a lot of my life in this mode.

Candice Wu 28:40

In the second stage, I began to feel the ability to experience in my body with a safe person. So, with my therapist, and in this place, I still hated feeling a lot of feelings, I just really didn’t like it, and it was scary and hard. But I began to tolerate some emotion and some body-sensation, and there was a slow progression towards tolerating more. With this, I began to experience more joy and spaciousness, more energy coming back to me, less tension in my body, and my digestion started to increase.

Candice Wu 29:20

That’s when I learned how intertwined the emotions and the body sensations were to my physical sensation to physical ailments, because over time, learning to digest my emotional state, and the experiences that happened to me greatly improved my digestive experience. So, I was able to digest food, physical food much better, I realized that they’re one in the same.

Candice Wu 29:46

So, in this stage, I also was noticing my self-judgment, more often, and while I sometimes believed myself in those judgments, I was able to see them and work with that. And because I had someone to say, support me, I was able to name and identify what was happening, name, the feelings that were going on. And this is something that we need as children, as infants, we need someone to help us to name what we feel because what we’re feeling is just so ambiguous and nebulous.

Candice Wu 30:19

When we get the proper emotional attunement, somebody to sense into where we are, and what we’re feeling, we’re able to thrive because we feel held in safety, we feel that someone is mirroring our experience, and that it’s okay. And when we have support in identifying our emotions, then we can begin that sorting process of what is happening inside, and we can communicate what’s happening so that we can get support and help move the feeling.

Candice Wu 30:51

The third stage of my experience is that I was able to feel a little bit of emotion that was challenging on my own. So, while before, I was only able to feel challenging emotions with my therapist, I started to do it at home, where I could process what was going on the same way we were processing in session.

Candice Wu 31:15

At this point, I was just tolerating it, I knew that in therapy, I was finding some completion with emotions and resolve, I was feeling better at the end of sessions. And so, I knew I could take that template home and work with it, but it wasn’t easy. I would get stuck often. And just bring that back to my therapist. So, luckily, I had therapy every week, it was consistent. And my self-judgment at the time was decreasing quite a bit. And I noticed that even more. And I realized that most of the beliefs that I had were not true.

Candice Wu 31:52

I was not identifying with these beliefs as much, and that gave me the space in between my awareness and my belief sets to be able to see myself, and to see who I wasn’t. Also, during this stage, I was noticing where I would be triggered in the past in situations with the same experience and circumstance, but that now, I wasn’t experiencing it that way anymore. I was feeling less intensity of emotion or none at all.

Candice Wu 32:23

In the fourth stage, roughly and all of these stages kind of overlap and interweave, I began to enjoy my experiences, enjoy my body sensation and emotion. And I could accept some feelings and like them while I was with my therapist, play with them. And that I began to tolerate more of these experiences by myself. I felt a lot of resolve and my beliefs changing internally so that I didn’t have to control my environment as much I was able to transform something inside.

Candice Wu 32:59

Changing things on the inside and transforming this way also helped me to create a better life naturally, was that I was attracting experiences or perceiving experiences in different ways that I felt a lot more joy and love, and connection with people. Of course, there were still feelings, certain emotions that were challenging, that maybe I would get stuck with, and I would just bring that again back to my therapist.

Candice Wu 33:24

And the fifth stage that I want to name is that I began to feel pleasure in almost every single emotion. Before that, I just knew that somehow I would get there to feel that way, to feel pleasure, but I wasn’t exactly feeling that. I still had resistance to certain emotions, especially anger, that was a very hard one for me. But now, I feel that every single emotion is enjoyable. I believe that’s because I built a lot of trust in myself, a lot of capacity and resilience over time, where I have safety internally in my nervous system, as well as the distance from the emotion so that I don’t believe that the emotions are everything or that I am these emotions or beliefs, that there’s space between me and all of this experience that I’m witnessing with much more equanimity, and neutrality.

Candice Wu 34:21

So, I can feel a large range of emotion and feel peace in that. I can move through most experiences by myself, but still, I’m human, and there are times where there are rough spots, and I reach out. And that helps me move through experiences with more love and compassion.

Candice Wu 34:39

And I’ll just add one more stage that I’m noticing in myself now is shifting to easier ways to move through experiences instead of feeling it all emotionally and in my body. I believe that our physiology wants us to be able to use emotions, and use body experience to our advantage, to use them as tools in everything that we are doing here, all the lessons that we’re learning, and moving through life the way we want to. And so if we can’t feel, emotionally, if we can’t feel body sensation, and use that as an ally, then our soul is going to want us to.

Candice Wu 35:22

I experienced this as a sort of one stage of what we need to experience as humans. And when you have that ability, then you can move into different ways of processing different technologies of moving things through spiritually or energetically that don’t require the amount of grueling emotion. And that amount of grueling emotion also if experienced differently, it’s not that it goes away necessarily, but more so, it’s an easier experience more pleasant, as I mentioned earlier.

Candice Wu 35:57

So, now shifting into using more imagery and using higher vibrational energy, lightness, and play, and amusement to shift things energetically, to use color and movement. While some of these ways were already being integrated in my experience over these last nine years, sometimes I felt like it was extremely important to feel something bodily and emotionally, because it was a human experience. And by using imagery only, it wasn’t touching to the core of the trauma. And at that time, I didn’t really understand how some of these higher vibrational energies could work because I needed a very human experience.

Candice Wu 36:45

The trauma happened in a real human experience, and it needed to be resolved with a different human experience. Some people talk about spiritual bypass or using their spirituality to help them understand and heal, which I think is a very powerful tool. And there is such a thing as spiritual bypass, that if we’re only using some sort of spiritual guidance or understanding to get us through an experience, then we may actually be using it in a way that resists the whole experience, the whole bodily and emotional experience as well. But I think it’s good to remember that different experiences call for different tools.

Candice Wu 37:26

So, to be able to tap into both are very important tools to have. So, to sum up the whole experience of all the different stages of my emotional evolution, I went from resisting and hating most of my body and emotional experience, with a lot of suffering and a lot of avoidance, a very limited experience of myself, and identifying with all the beliefs and emotions that were coming up to a place of witness and freedom. The ability to navigate a lot of emotions, and to experience them differently, to find pleasure in them, to find the wisdom, empowerment, and clarity that comes with allying with all of the emotions and sensations that happened inside.

Candice Wu 38:14

Nine years ago, I would have never have said that I would enjoy my emotions, that would just make absolutely no sense to me, but now, there’s just no way to live without them. They’re so easily moved now and essential for most of my experiences. The interesting thing that I noticed while doing this podcast, this is actually my third attempt at recording this podcast. What happens sometimes is that I’ll say something, I’ll start the podcast, I’ll even do a whole chunk of what I want to say, and then I’ll feel exhausted or frustrated. When that happens, I find that there’s something I’m resisting or something that’s coming up in me that wants to be seen or healed, before I can find myself in a grounded place.

Candice Wu 39:01

So, these three attempts have happened over the course of three days, actually. And within that, I felt a huge amount of rage come up. And I actually don’t know where to place that rage, but I was able to move it through with some somatic experiencing work, and imagining, screaming at something, fighting something, that just helped the energy move. I think it’s no coincidence that at the same time, I felt some major gut pain and indigestion. It may have been triggered first buy something I ate that didn’t sit well with me, but it didn’t move very quickly, and so, all of this emotion came through with the physical abdominal pain that I was having.

Candice Wu 39:49

And in the grand scheme of what I’ve been going through in the last several months, I believe that this is just another piece that wanted to cleanse and especially cleanse through while I’m speaking about the topic of emotion and my process over time.

Candice Wu 40:02

So, I hope this was an interesting podcast for you, and that this helps you to see where you are on your emotional evolution or where you want to go in terms of your progress, and your journey. I want to do something different this time. This segment of the podcast is primarily just talking about my experience and what I’ve learned and in terms of emotions.

Candice Wu 40:25

Following this, the next three podcasts that will come out within this week will be three different meditation and healing experiences that you can use on your own. And I’m doing this in separate segments so that if you like to come back to certain experiences, certain meditations, you can practice them over and over easily by just going to that podcast.

Candice Wu 40:48

So, the three podcasts will include resourcing strength and safety, and we may use some I movement or tapping with that to help the body and the nervous system really instill, and embody that. The second one will be moving from a pleasant experience to an unpleasant one, so that you can build your capacity and range of emotion. And this will help you move through emotion in an easeful way so that it doesn’t feel so violent, raw or overwhelming.

Candice Wu 41:20

And the third experience I want to offer within this topic is a piece of the emotional switchboard activity that I described that I did with my therapist. But I’ll have an adaptation of that so that you can do this on your own with my guidance. So, if you’re desiring more peace inside your body, or the ability to navigate certain emotions that are challenging, with more ease, you can practice those meditations at any time.

Candice Wu 41:50

So, that concludes the podcast for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I appreciate all the feedback that I’m receiving. Feel free to reach out if there’s anything you’d like to talk about around this podcast.

Candice Wu 42:02

And before you go I’d like to invite you to listen to more meditations, explorations and interviews on my podcast at CandiceWu.com/podcast. And you can also subscribe to my weekly newsletter and become a member of the Embody Community on CandiceWu.com/embody, where you can get lots of free resources, other meditations, and information about my retreats, workshops, and private sessions.

Candice Wu 42:30

The show notes for this podcast can be found on my website as well, and I would be so touched if you considered becoming a contributor and supporter at my website at CandiceWu.com/patreon.

Candice Wu 42:43

So, stay tuned for the following meditations that will come out this week and see you next time on the Embody Podcast.

Introduction

Hello and welcome.

This is the first of three guided audio healing meditations that connect up with the episode of From Emotional Numbness to Wholeness.

You can find this podcast at CandiceWu.com/podcast or CandiceWu.com/emotions. So let’s begin.

In this guided practice, we will resource safety and install that into the body so that it’s imprinted even deeper.

This practice is my combination of many different healing modalities, including Somatic Experiencing, tapping, EMDR, and Family Constellations.

Resource Safety

So let’s begin by finding a comfortable seated position.

Feel free to close your eyes, or look down, whichever feels more comfortable. Just release your connection to the outside world. Letting go of the day so far, of work, and any stress that you’ve had.

Begin to feel the rhythm of your breath without changing it at all and notice anything that’s happening on the inside.

Feel the outlines of your body and begin to imagine the entire shape of your body in whatever form it is in right now.

Let your breath move all the way down to your belly and your hips, to your legs and to your feet.

Notice what you can feel on the inside and what you can’t feel.

Feeling Life Yourself

Now notice what comes up when I ask, what brings you a feeling of feeling like yourself? Who, what, or where brings you this feeling of feeling just like yourself? Perhaps a feeling of calmness, safety, or love.

This might be an animal, a spiritual figure, an imagined creature or space, a place in nature, or any person that has given you this feeling before, whether they’re dead or alive.

If this is challenging in any way, notice your reaction.

Notice your experience and just bring up whoever or whatever it is that brings you closest to that feeling of peace, love, or safety.

Once you’ve chosen one of those things, want you to imagine that person, place, thing or figure in your mind.

Notice what it looks like, what colors, how that person looks if it’s a person, what’s around you.

Notice how you might interact with this place or person or figure. What sound you hear, anything you smell and begin to let your whole body feel connected with this.

Now notice what body sensations are happening inside. Is there a place of expansion, a place of calmness or groundedness, warmth, tingly feeling, whatever it is, notice what’s happening inside.

Notice your emotions.

Be open to whatever experience of emotions there is without expecting it to be a positive one.

Notice if you feel any sort of joy or happiness, as well as sadness or grief, all of that is open.

If your awareness goes to something upsetting or something different, take a breath and come back to this person, place or object that brings you a feeling of love, peace or safety.

And whatever you’re feeling inside, let yourself feel into that even more as if your body is steeping in this love or peace.

Tapping to “Install the Resource”

If you are feeling a connection to this resource, feel free to take your palms on your thighs and tap your right fingers on your right thigh and then your left fingers on your left thigh.

Just back and forth just at this very slow pace. Let yourself feel your breath, feel any pleasant experience in your body as you tap. Let yourself feel even more into this experience.

If you were tapping, now just rest your hands and notice what happens next.

And if you get distracted again, just come back to this experience of tuning into a safe or loving person, place, thing.

You can do a second round of tapping, just tapping from right, left, right, left and slow down the tapping even more.

As you notice your entire bodily and emotional experience, there’s nothing to do or analyze or think about, just here, feeling what you feel.

And now just rest your hands and feel anything you’re feeling now.

Notice how much you’re feeling into that peace, love, or safety and feel free to repeat the tapping as many times as you’d like.

And if there’s any experience of overwhelm or upsetting experience, just pause. Slowly sense your surroundings and open the eyes and look around.

Notice your safety outside of you.

Coming Back to The Present

When you feel ready to come out of it for this moment, just release all that you are connecting with. Notice your breath.

Before even opening your eyes, sense your surroundings and slowly let yourself come back to the present moment.

Feel free to move your body in any way, wiggle your fingers, your toes. Just give yourself a couple of breaths to rest and integrate what just happened.

And when you’re ready, feel free to open your eyes. Just let your awareness go to anything that feels pleasant to look at around you.

Take your time to come back to this moment, allowing your body to integrate what you just practiced.

And as you adjust back to the present moment, feel free to stretch or move in any way that feels good. Going back to your breath, going back to your awareness outside of you.

And that concludes the meditation of resourcing safety.

A Resource You Can Call Upon

You’ve now created an inner resource that you can call upon anytime, and anytime you feel stressed, or you’re in a challenging emotion or you’d like to heal something that’s difficult, feel free to come to this resource.

When you feel like you need some soothing, comfort or a little extra love in your soul, in your body, feel free to call upon this resource, this safe person, place or thing that will help you to feel safe and loved.

Tapping — Bilateral Stimulation

The tapping that you practiced, tapping the right fingers to the thigh and the left fingers, you can do that as many times as you’d like to, as long as you’re still feeling that calm or safety, or love.

You can even cross your arms like you’re giving yourself a self-hug in the butterfly pose and tap the opposite shoulder.

But what that does is creates a bilateral stimulation of the brain so that your body integrates from right to left.

Your nervous system integrates another level of safety and it’s something that your body then remembers in itself, in its bones.

So feel free to keep this inner resource close to you for any tough or stressful day and stay tuned for the next meditation in this series where we will build on to this resource so that you can continue to increase your emotional capacity and range.

Thanks for tuning in today and see you next time on the Embody Podcast.

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to the Embody Podcast.

This is the second guided audio healing experience that relates to the podcast episode about emotions.

You can find this podcast called, From Emotional Numbness to Wholeness on my website at CandiceWu.com/podcast, or CandiceWu.com/emotions.

Pendulation

Today’s experience is coming from the practices of Somatic Experiencing as well as Yoga and is called pendulation.

So we’ll move from a pleasant experience to an unpleasant experience.

What this does is it helps to build the capacity of the nervous system and the energy system in the body to be able to feel more of your experience.

This includes both pleasant experience and challenging emotions so that you can begin to feel more freedom in your whole being.

Let’s Practice

So go ahead and find a comfortable seated position.

Take your time to arrive into this space of here and now, and just release all of the past so far. Everything that happened up until this moment, and release the future and any thoughts about the future.

And as you arrive into this space, where you are right now, start to notice your surroundings.

Sensing Pleasant Experience

Let your eyes land on three things that feel pleasant to look at, just noticing one at a time.

As you notice these things that are pleasant or comforting, notice what happens inside your body as you feel them.

Now notice three things in your space that seemed unpleasant.

As you become aware of these things, sense what it feels like inside your body, any sensation or emotion as you notice what’s unpleasant, and then shift back to what was pleasant for you.

When you feel ready to shift gears to your inward experience, feel free to look downward or close your eyes.

As you tune into your inner landscape, start to look for three places that seem pleasant inside.

You might notice a place that feels neutral, calm or just okay, if nothing feels pleasant at all. And it can even be as tiny as a pinky finger or one toe or ear. It might be a whole area or part of your body.

Which part feels pleasant?

Sensing Unpleasant Experience

And then shift your awareness when you’re ready to three areas that feel unpleasant inside.

This could be a feeling of tension somewhere, tightness or holding, an achy feeling or tingly feeling that feels uncertain, any emotion that feels challenging.

Shifting Back

Just after dipping your toes in, we’ll shift back to one place that felt pleasant inside.

Notice how it feels to go back to that pleasant sensation.

And if there’s nothing there, look for another place or open the eyes and just look at the pleasant object or thing that was in your space.

This is called pendulation, going from pleasant to unpleasant and back and forth.

And this may be as far as your practice goes today. If this was already a challenging or overwhelming experience for you or deep enough.

If you’d like to go further, you can continue on with me to this next segment.

Connecting With Resource To Build Capacity

For this next segment, think about your resource.

This might have been the resource you developed in the last meditation with me.

What resource is something that makes you feel supported, strong, loved or safe, could be a person, place, thing or spiritual figure, imagined or real.

So, call up your resource and then also bring up an experience that was either mildly challenging or upsetting, or ranging from mild to something deeper.

If you are already at a higher capacity of processing, you might choose something that you fear.

Now, notice your resource and just stay with that resource and feel the pleasant experience or safety that comes with it.

Notice how it feels in your body, sense the emotion or sensation that’s happening inside as you tune into this loving resource.

You might fill up on this safe feeling and connection.

Shifting Back towards Unpleasant

And when you feel the readiness, shift towards the unpleasant experience, or the fear and imagine what that part looks like.

In your mind’s eye, you can place this unpleasant experience or fear as far or as close to you as you would like, and notice your experience, that is what changes on the inside.

And when you feel like you’ve had a dose of that, shift back towards the pleasant resource, even if you’re not overwhelmed, but especially if you feel overwhelmed.

Notice your breath, and what happens is you come back to safety, and stay here for as long as you’d like.

When you feel ready, you can shift your attention back to the challenging experience.

Dip your toes in and feel into that experience noticing whatever sensation or emotion is happening, and go back and forth to the pleasant resource and experience to the unpleasant, back and forth at whatever pace feels right for you, just like we did with your surroundings.

What’s Happening?

Notice what happens when you go back to the unpleasant experience. Does it change or is it staying the same?

And when you feel ready to conclude your experience, let yourself land back with your resource, whether that’s a pleasant and safe person, place or thing or, coming back to your surroundings, looking at something that feels pleasant outside and take a little extra space and time to let your body integrate what just happened here.

Coming Back into the Present and Applying This in Life

As you arrived back in this present moment, send some gratitude to yourself for having practiced pendulation, for going into a difficult experience and moving back and forth.

Know that you can use this tool for any moment in time where you’re feeling a challenge — Where you’re feeling stressed, overwhelmed or an emotion inside, that just seems to be too much.

Whatever it is that you normally reach for if you’re feeling overwhelmed or need soothing or love, you can use pendulation to replace that.

So for example, if you typically reach towards food, when you’re not feeling well, so food to make you feel better, or if you’re reaching towards watching TV, or social media, instead of that, try noticing what you feel and if it’s uncomfortable, take a breath or two with it, shift to your resource, feel into that safety, love or calmness and then go back and forth.

Just taking a little dose at a time of the challenging experience.

When you pendulate, what you do is you help your nervous system know that actually, in this moment, you are safe.

Even if you’re feeling something that doesn’t feel that safe, or if you’re feeling something uncomfortable.

The Purpose

What that does is helps you build capacity to feel a larger range of emotion over time, and to feel more free and flexible within challenging emotions moving in and out of them.

It’s a really good thing to let yourself feel safety, even when you’re not feeling overwhelmed.

So before you even get to overwhelm if you switch to safety, take a couple of breaths with that for as long as you’d like, and then go back to the challenging experience or the unpleasant experience, then your body just stays in that safety and feels ease through processing whatever it is, that the challenging thing is.

So thanks for practicing with me today and feel free to take this practice along with you or listen to the meditation as many times as you need to, and whenever you need to.

Stay tuned later this week for one more healing meditation that can help you to increase your emotional range and capacity. Thanks for listening in and see you next time on the Embody Podcast.

Introduction

You’re listening to the third of a series of three different meditations and healing exercises that are connected with the podcast episode called, From Emotional Numbness to Wholeness.

If you’re interested in this episode and the exploration of emotional range, you can find this episode at CandiceWu.com/emotions.

The Emotional Switchboard

In the podcast episode of the exploration of emotional capacity, I talked about a therapist that worked with me on what I believe she called the emotional switchboard.

This is where I took about 10 of the main emotions and installed them in terms of my personal experience of embodiment of these emotions.

What this did for me was give me the ability to identify easily what I was feeling, especially in experiences that I was processing from early life, which many of them were nonverbal. So I would like to offer this experience to you.

First, just know that if you start to feel overwhelmed by this experience at any time, just stop.

Notice your surroundings and let yourself come out of what we’re doing together.

It’s okay to take a break at any time, just pause the podcast and take that break.

What we will do

So what we will do in this practice is we will focus on one emotion and you’re welcome to repeat this practice for any emotion that you’d like to.

But we’ll focus on just one together, and with that one emotion, I will talk you through opening that up into feeling in the body, noticing any images that come with it, whatever colors if there’s any color that comes with your experience of that, and how it is that you personally experienced that emotion.

I’ll guide you through imprinting that experience into your body and your nervous system and your awareness so that you can have a very easy sync with identifying that emotion when you do experience it in your life or if you’re processing it during a therapy or healing session, or whenever that emotion comes up for you.

Pick One Emotion

So first, let’s pick an emotion.

Some ideas that I have for you and the main ones that I did, when I did the emotional switchboard were happy, sad, angry, shame, embarrassment, fear, disgust, lust, surprise, excitement, and joy.

There are so many more emotions out there that you can choose.

So feel free to explore that at your own pace and if you are pretty new to working with your emotions and feeling them in the body, then I would recommend definitely to do something that is more on the pleasant side, something like happy and maybe surprise or excitement, lust.

You might pick something like joy or calm, anything that feels more pleasant.

And if you’re more well-practiced with your emotions, you can also do something pleasant to start because that helps build the safety in the body, but gradually moving to something that feels challenging for you.

So take a moment now and just breathe into your body and start to identify which emotion you’d like to focus on today.

With the emotion you chose, open your awareness to the idea of that emotion.

Watch your body and your heart open up to this emotion and let your mind open up to this emotion.

Let yourself feel into whatever this emotion feels like in your body, and be open to any image that comes to you about what this emotion might look like, if it had an image.

Let yourself be curious and observing as it might look like color, or shapes or an object, it can be anything.

And as you see what this emotion might look like to you, let it evolve until that picture seems to fit just right.

And as you see that image, feel into your body and notice what sensations are happening in the body, where you’re feeling any sensation at all.

Notice the sensation and where it’s located in the body.

Check all the way up and down the body to feel where this emotion might be located for you, and just let it evolve and change as you feel into it.

When you feel some sensations, start to notice if this sensation has a sort of feel to it, a texture, a way that the sensation is. Is it feeling achy, tingly, open, or any ways to describe it, just notice that.

And just as a reminder, if you’re doing a challenging emotion, it might be triggering, or overwhelming and take a break anytime.

And even if you’re feeling into a pleasant emotion, know that your body could feel that overwhelm as well, or feel triggered. And just take a break and come out of it.

Tapping to Register the Experience with Your Awareness

And if you’re continuing forward, take your hands on your thighs and just tap right fingers on your right thigh, left fingers on your left thigh back and forth, just like we did in the first meditation together.

And in this case, just doing a pace, that’s a little bit quicker. Right, left, right, left, as you feel into this image of the emotion that you chose along with the body sensations and how your body is experiencing it.

Now rest the hands.

Check to see if the image has changed at all or where the sensations are, and if that’s changed at all. Notice any movement that comes with it.

Now continue to do the tapping again, at just that medium pace and stay with the image, the emotion, the sensation, and any movement that comes, just feeling into it and again, letting it evolve, if it evolves.

The picture might change, the sensation might change. Just notice what it is now.

And now rest the hands again, take a breath, just letting all of it go, and when you come back to the image of the emotion that you chose, the sensations that come with it, the feeling sense, if it doesn’t change anymore, and it stays the same and just stay with that experience and let it soak into your body.

If it continues to change, perhaps the sensations or the image keeps on changing, just stay with that and keep letting it change until it seems like it comes to something more stable.

And when it does feel like it’s becoming a stable image and sensation, or felt sense in the body, then take the tapping on your thighs and do it even slower. So right to left, right and left.

And what I’ll do now is just take a little bit of time, and let you have some silence to let that soak in and install into the body.

Take a break with your hands every so often and just rest and feel free to do the tapping anytime you’d like to add in just a little bit more to deepen and expand into that experience.

Now as you’re in your experience, just bring all of that together, the body sensation, the image of the emotion, the concept of that emotion in any movement.

Let yourself realize and identify that all together.

Then your next couple of breaths just let all of it go. Come back to just noticing your breath.

And when you feel ready, give your body a little stretch or movement.

Coming Out of It and Taking a Break, Repeat if Desired

Start to sense your surroundings. If you had your eyes closed, feel free to open them and start to look around, just getting a sense of time and space being right here.

So now you’ve installed one emotion and you can check back with yourself to just see if you pull up that emotion.

See what happens in the body and over time that will sharpen and refine, it might even change.

But now you have another emotion that your body can identify with little more ease hopefully.

As I mentioned before, you can feel free to return to this practice and do it over and over for any emotion that you’d like to, especially the ones that are a bit challenging for you, you might want to stretch and explore into.

The ones that are pleasant sometimes are the most challenging in my experience.

Getting Support

With any of these meditations, if things come up, if you feel triggered or overwhelmed and not sure how to move through it, I am always here to support so feel free to reach out to me.

Thank you so much for listening in today and I hope this meditation series was helpful for you.

Again, if you’d like to listen to the first podcast in the series thereafter, if you’ve just jumped into this meditation, you can find the podcast at CandiceWu.com/emotions.