Candice Wu 0:00
This episode is about love and beauty, particularly about our soul's desire to find love and know love, to know what love is and what it isn't, to sort out all the things that have been tangled up with loving, so that we can experience a true and pure form of love, attention, and witness in this life.

Candice Wu 0:25
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 0:39
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 1:00
This episode is sponsored by the dream classes that I offer on Skillshare. These classes are something that arose from my love for dreaming. Whether I wake up from a dream, where I feel, I must remember this dream, wow, something happened here. Even if I don't understand it, or if I wake up and I feel like that was such a boring, mundane dream, I was just doing normal daily life stuff.

Candice Wu 1:30
Whether it's one or the other, I almost always experienced a very deep healing and connection with myself when I actually explore those dreams. When I go a little bit more into the experience of that dream, even if it's one tiny piece, then I feel like I've recovered another aspect of myself. I feel a new wisdom or a new energy that's alive in me that I can feel in my daily life. I can feel it right now, I can feel it in the next step I take. And this is what inspires the classes that I'm offering on Skillshare about dreaming. There are two classes right now, and the third one coming up very quickly. And these classes are about how to support your nervous system in your body, your physiology, and being able to better remember your dreams and to find more safety and grounding inside your being so that your dream worlds can flourish and really come alive, so that you can remember those things that you're dreaming, and glean that wisdom that I'm speaking about.

Candice Wu 2:41
When I find myself more activated, more like wired and the nervous system is a little bit out of balance or I feel ungrounded, or I feel distressed like things are building up or something happened a few days ago that I haven't really processed. If I'm not feeling grounded in myself, sometimes that affects my sleep, or it just affects my ability to remember what my dreams are. If it's affecting my sleep, I often feel that I can't get into a deep breath state where my dreams or my REM sleep is happening and my dreams are happening. And in other cases, I don't feel like writing my dreams down because I feel so exhausted.

Candice Wu 3:23
So, these exercises I've created and gathered up from all of my experiences, I put together in these Skillshare classes here. You can find those at CandiceWu.com/dreamclass1, or CandiceWu.com/dreamphysiology. If you click on the show notes, you can find the link that all connects you up with two free months of Skillshare premium membership where you can receive the classes for free and get access to all sorts of other tutorials and teachers as well.

Candice Wu 4:01
Hello, and welcome back to the Embody Podcast. It's wonderful to have you here. I have this lovely topic today about love. And I've been mulling this over four weeks. It's such a challenging topic, and yet it's also completely simple. This episode was inspired by a listener's question from two weeks ago, the episode about toxic ancestors. The question that she asked was, “Can you receive love and strength from ancestors or relatives still alive if they're mentally sick, toxic or unhealthy?” And our follow up question had to do with, “What if love is mixed up with abuse? What if we have learned that abuse comes with love?” And that really inspired this conversation that was already going on in me about love and what can be mixed up with love that begins to attract unhealthy relationships to each other and to ourselves in our daily life as an adult.

Candice Wu 5:09
And before we jump in, I just want to talk a little bit about beauty and awe. And for me lately, connecting with a sense of beauty, what I find beautiful and unveiling beauty, the awe in moments or music or the experience of something has just made me feel so in love. So in love with myself, so in love with the world around me. And it's those moments of beauty, of connection with beauty, that feels like it opens up a part of my own beauty, a part of my own inner, inner love for myself that is truly who I am. What I find beautiful and I'm reminded did of myself, I'm reminded of the love that I am the beauty that I am. And something that transcends the daily stuff of life and the things that can bug me down or trigger me even, but to recover a sense of myself through things that are beautiful.

Candice Wu 6:24
So, for me lately, it's been doing ballet, this teacher I have just reminds me, I guess she has the energy of finding beauty and every moment. She's a beautiful ballerina. And she always says, “This is yummy, make it yummy!” And I just love that because she does feel that the juicy, yumminess and every moment. And when she gives a look to the side, even with one small, arm movement that seems insignificant in ballet. She looks over and her eyelashes go up and her gaze turns and I just feel like, “Oh, I'm just in love with that, that movement.” And so, I'm adapting and adopting that into my life. So, ballet is truly bringing out this sense of beauty and letting my body move with that beauty and align with that awe is so fun. And I've loved listening to classical music. For some reason, I like just plugging in my headphones and having it only in my ears. And lately I've been listening on repeat to the song, I'm not gonna say this right? By Josu Gallastegui, and I'll put it in the show notes and link that for you, but it's called Plie (Larghetto), and it's just gorgeous. It's the song I warm up to in ballet in my classes, and I'm still not sick of it. It's been weeks, maybe months. But the last week it's been on high repeat.

Candice Wu 8:11
So, I'm also finding more and more presence, and allowing myself to notice in moments, just what is beautiful. And what is pleasurable, how I'm connecting with someone and where the joy is in that. And unveiling in each moment what's here already that's, that's just romantic and sensual and sweet.

Candice Wu 8:40
So with that, I guess it's a great way to start the topic about love. But I want to ask you, what is beautiful for you? what draws you in and brings you a sense of awe? What brings you to a sense of your own beauty and your own self, your own energy? Have there been any moments where you have felt that sense of beauty or sensuality or romance that's beyond just a romantic love experience, but one that really connects you to your whole being in your vulnerability, and a deeper experience of self?

Candice Wu 9:36
When I was really, really thick in my healing work, especially at the beginning, I would say about 10 years ago, I just couldn't really feel into a sense of beauty, I didn't feel safe enough. And I do realize that at this point, I'm feeling much more inner freedom and inner safety, much more ability, and capacity to handle almost any feelings that I experience and have worked through so much of my traumatic experiences that they feel. They don't feel like they're tugging me all the time and they actually daily don't feel like they're talking me at all in some ways. And it's taken just a lot of work to get here. But I wish I would have tuned into this sense of beauty. Before, through Somatic experiencing the work of Peter Levine and other trauma workers, tuning into pleasure and tuning into safety, belonging, sensuality or something that feels good, can truly help the healing process because it reminds you of your safety now. It reminds you of that sense of self and beauty that, that is you, that is part of you and is you. And so it can be I hope all of the painful feelings move along. I don't know if I would have been able to just do that on my own. And to tune into that either I would not quite be in the feeling or be able to hold the feeling for even more than like a second or something. And I think I was just much more drawn to the painful experiences because I knew I needed to heal them and I needed them to be different.

Candice Wu 11:29
So, just wanted to mention that because if you're experiencing a lot of heavy experiences right now, or you're working through your trauma, I encourage you to get support, number one, but also to tune into beauty and pleasurable moments so that your nervous system, your body, your soul can feel reminded of who you truly are, the love that's already inside of you. And the beauty that wants to be seen right now in the present moment, as a way to support the healing and to even advance and accelerate the healing.

Candice Wu 12:06
There are a few blog posts that I've written on pleasure and sensuality, and tuning into that, and I'll link those in the show notes. And now let's jump into the topic of love.

Candice Wu 12:22
It's no wonder that love is such a hard thing for people to describe. Because it's my belief that it has turned very complicated, we have been quite confused about what love is and what love isn't. There are plenty of people trying to describe love and parse it out into the different types of love. The Greeks did it with eight different kinds of love, which I'll talk about briefly later. We want to define it all the time, we want to know what it is we want to be able to feel it. We're not sure when we feel it and when we don't. We think we're feeling it, but are we really? And so this whole conversation is part of what I want to talk about today. And like I said, I've been mulling this over for quite some time. And I think that that's part of the reason I've been trying to sort out how I can put this into words, because can you really describe it in words? I think not quite. It's definitely an embodied experience.

Candice Wu 13:27
And so how do we bring a level of communication of around love to words, which is part of the first thing that's coming to mind right now is that love is a full experience in the whole body. It's not just words. And because it's an embodied experience, it can be clouded with all sorts of experiences that included trauma, or hurt or wounding or betrayal within our relationships, within the experience of our body, while we're in relation to another person, or community.

Candice Wu 14:08
But let's back it up for a moment. I do believe that we are all here to love. We're all here to learn how to love and learn what love is, and what it isn't. And we yearn for the experience of love. And for me, it is who we are. I also hesitate to fail that in a way because I can't presume for everybody that that's why they're here. And we again describe love completely differently. So, what is love? What do I mean by that, and I want to offer my opinions and my thoughts. But I want to create conversation and open up exploration for each other, for you, and to invite you to have this exploration with yourself, to find what it is for you, if you're interested in it. To look at it in the way that feels like it resonates with you.

Candice Wu 15:12
So what I found with myself and with working with my clients, as well as studying Family Constellations, and Somatic Experiencing, and other types of embodied healing and growth work, is that one way to describe love is that it's pure attention and witness. One that can sit with and be with what's exactly here and vulnerable and real in the moment. One that feels genuine and authentic, unmasked, and bare. One that's raw to the core and connected with the heart and the soul. This to me is love. It's where your attention is truly located, where it's directed. That is love.

Candice Wu 16:18
In family constellations, I often see and other facilitators discuss this as well, that where someone's attention is, is where the flow of love is going. And if you think about or imagine your entire family system behind you standing in order, with your parents behind you and other caretakers, if there were any others, your biological parents, if you have adoptive parents or other people. But if you have your parents, your grandparents and everyone standing behind you, your siblings if you have any next to you. And if everyone's standing in order, with their attention and their presence, their fullness towards you, and everyone behind them with their fullness, moving forward and directed forward.

Candice Wu 17:19
It's like a big triangle people behind you, then you might feel completely full of love, resource, strength, stability, rootedness and grounded grounding, coming through to you. The flow of love is just directly coming forward. And then that love can come through you into your life into who you love, into who loves you into what you love, and what loves you back. And it's when the direction of somebody's attention goes somewhere else, that a piece of ourselves is broken in a way or we want that direction of attention towards us, we need it. And so it's when someone's direction of attention behind us like our mother is facing somewhere because they need to pay attention there, there's something that happened there like a loss or hurt, that part of them is still with because it's not complete, then we feel that impact.

Candice Wu 18:29
And that's what's there for the mother, and that's what's there for the child. So, this example is just one, one experience, one image of where our attention goes is where the love is and where the love wants to be seen and recovered. And we can direct that towards the daily life of who we are. Where our attention goes is where our love is going.

Candice Wu 18:57
Yet still, with this conversation, I'm not quite sure defining what love is, but getting closer to this sense that love is attention. Because everything in this existence is here for us to experience, is here for us to love in terms of to be able to experience it, to be able to hold it within our expansive awareness. And the things that we are not able to hold our soul, the universe that comes through us, wants us to be able to, wants us to be able to look where there's pain, wants us to be able to look where there's joy, wants us to be able to expand so much we're able to feel all of it. And with all of it, with that ability to feel all of it, we actually gain freedom, freedom to choose where we place our attention, because when we avoid something that we don't want to experience, we're actually held hostage by that. We resist it and part of our energy, part of our attention, part of our love goes to avoid it, to resist it, to have nothing to do with it, it's like you're sticking your hand down and pushing it away. And you walk around trying to not look that way and trying to push this experience or emotion to the side, then not all of you is present for the things you are actually wanting to experience or consciously wanting to experience, rather.

Candice Wu 20:28
So, the deepest parts of who we are, want us to be able to experience everything. And that's a full, very full form of love at a spiritual level, at a human being level as well. So, on the podcast, we talk a lot about self-love, loving yourself, being able to be with yourself, and hold yourself with loving, with compassion, with understanding, and to fill up the places in you that have wanted something, have needed something with all that you've needed. And fill those places those wounds in you with love to pour love into the places of disconnection and where our hearts have been broken.

Candice Wu 21:19
And what I find as we do that is that our capacity to receive love in the present moment, to receive experiences where we feel loved, and to love other people, to feel true relationship with what's going on around us and within us. That grows bigger when we heal up those spaces in ourselves. When we heal the belief sets that we have about love, we sort out what love is and what isn't. So, if you just reflect on yourself, are you experiencing places where you continue to struggle or you attract relationships that feel wounding or hurtful, or you feel fear and constant anxiety about your safety or being judged?

Candice Wu 22:15
The experience of love, we learn that through relationship. When we first come into the being of this life, we have it through energy and touch, we're in the womb of our mother. We have it through sound, the sound of her voice, their voice or father's voice, other voices around us and the emotions that are felt around us, what is acceptable and what is not. And as we're born into a human body, we need touch to help us regulate and we need touch to be able to sense where our body is, where we are here, and to sense our safety, to be able to create the building blocks, to feeling in this experience of humaneness.

Candice Wu 23:06
And, so, that attention that's needed that direction of energy, that is the first experience of love, and touch. That is the first experience of love all within those first, and early years.

Candice Wu 23:23
And this all sounds ideal if we haven't had the kind of attention that's full from people who have a full capacity to be in the present moment with all that is within a human baby experience. All the tears all, this all the fear, all the laughter, and the giggles. Just this juicy, full, vulnerable and unhampered experience. If the adults in our lives weren't able to hold all of those things with love, hold all of those with witness and attention, then we start to feel like parts of us are unable to show up in this world. We also start to learn that in order to be loved, we need to do certain things or not do certain things, or we need to be certain ways or not be certain ways.

Candice Wu 24:16
Carl Rogers, a psychologist who works with unconditional love talks about conditions of worth. And that's exactly what I'm talking about. What conditions did you need to put on yourself or were put on you or what were perceived for you to feel worthy, for you to be loved, for you to belong? So, as you can see, we're not quite talking about romantic love here.

Candice Wu 24:48
I mentioned earlier that the Greeks separated love into eight different types of love. And some of those include an erotic love or familial love, a long-standing and enduring love, a playful love, agape of the love of the soul, which is unconditional, spiritual and bigger than ourselves. Also, love of family and child storge. I'm not naming them all right now. And I'll link an article from lonerwolf.com that I found that was quite interesting on this, that described these eight types of love.

Candice Wu 25:26
Some people also round it to four types of love. I'll also link an article that I saw about that. But I'm not going to go into these descriptors, because what I am really talking about here is that unconditional, spiritual, universal and cosmic kind of love that is simple, pure, and clean. That is the love of attention and witness.

Candice Wu 25:53
That is the ability to be present. And see someone, see yourself with what's truly there. And I can most closely relate that to agape is what I've, as far as what I've read and seen. That's not what I'm well versed in, but to speak of a universal love. That's where I'm coming from today.

Candice Wu 26:22
So, that kind of universal love can be applied to any experience. You can experience a sexual experience and just love how that feels. And as you can even feel how in speaking it has like a flatness to that dimension. But you can feel a deeper connection with the sensuality of it, with the person you're with or people you're with. You can feel a connection to your own body, and feel a very deep presence with what is happening and what you're experiencing in the moment. That's the kind of love that underlies our experiences.

Candice Wu 26:59
So, when I say I love sushi, I just love sushi, I love sushi. There's a different quality to how I'm saying that. And that it almost feels deeper and deeper and deeper each time, I changed levels. But there's an aspect of finding the true beauty in something, the deep presence, and some people call it mindfulness, the being with the experience with all the senses, that encompasses this beautiful, deep love. And yet the spiritual kind of love, the universal love transcends all of that. It holds everything.

Candice Wu 27:47
So, back to why it is that we've confused love. When we're young, we have learned that there are certain ways we needed to be in order to receive love, in order to have attention, in order to feel like we belong.

Candice Wu 28:05
And so, the question of, is the love that we're experiencing is what we're experiencing, out of need our freedom is a question that I like to hold with myself is love a free choice or is it not? Because our early experiences are often bound with fear or survival mode or need.

Candice Wu 28:24
An example of what I mean is that early on, I did not experience crying very much. And in fact, if you ask my mom, she'll tell this story about how my aunt, I lived with my aunt for about a month, my family lived with her. And she said I was such a good baby, I never cried. And when I think about that, I don't think that not crying was part of my personality. I have to ask myself, why? And when I hear stuff like that, I asked why, or what, what could have made that become necessary in order to receive love. And for me, it was incredibly necessary to be happy, and to not have uncomfortable feelings, and to not let it all hang out but to hold it all in, so that I could receive attention and love. I experienced early on that if I had feelings of anger, sadness, and grief, if they were even a little bit or too big, that I wouldn't receive any attention for that, I would perhaps get invalidated and dismissed, maybe even abandoned.

Candice Wu 29:41
So, some of those experiences, I imagine were perceived. And there were other experiences that I do know to be real for me, that if I had certain emotions, or if I let my caregivers know, I was not happy with him or I was angry or I was hurt, that I would be called selfish or I would not be given the kind of presence that I needed to be able to digest that feeling and to be able to move through it. So, I kept it in and not crying, smiling all the time. being helpful and hiding away was what I learned early on how to love.

Candice Wu 30:26
So, on a deep level, I was loving my family by keeping silent. And I learned that loving meant to always be happy. And loving meant to not speak up about what I felt if it had to do with the person that's in front of me but to pretend everything was okay. So, my sense of love and loving got all tangled up with ways of being that, were actually very different attractive to me, and then later grew up to attract relationships, that ultimately gave me the same experience. And where I felt like I needed to act the same way with and if I started to share how I felt, truly, if I was upset with a situation or something felt unpleasant, the other person would react really harshly. Because I had found a match with that, that drew in this experience again, I hadn't quite resolved what loving was. And so, I attracted other people that also believed that I should keep that inside. And I shouldn't share that and it was too uncomfortable to hear all these feelings.

Candice Wu 31:49
So, in the same way, love can mix with not having boundaries, or having walls in between you. Love can mix with food. And that food is the way to love people. But we don't really know how to be present with people.

Candice Wu 32:08
Love can mix with abuse, where you must accept abuse because this is the way we know how to love each other. This is the way we know how to give attention to one another. And we don't know other ways, or this is one of the ways. It can also be manipulation, where there's a twisting of truth or a coercing or control of another person in order to relate to them. And to keep them there. And this can be the way you know how to be with people. It can connect with dependency or codependency, where you need the other person and you find relationships where you need each other, where you depend on one another in ways that are actually ways that you can depend on yourself, but haven't learned yet or feel that this is the feeling that you have with love, that you are always going to take care of that person's emotions all the time. And you're going to be there every time they, they asked you to be in a very deeply merged way where you can't handle it by yourself. But then you also feel like this is how a loving relationship is, right?

Candice Wu 33:31
Or Loving can mix with concepts or ways of being around respect. For example, in my upbringing, being Chinese-American, I learned this Chinese traditional way of being of treating our elders with respect. I think it's a beautiful concept. It's a beautiful thing to do to honor your elders and to see their wisdom and to see their presence is important. However, this kind of “respect” in my family equated to always accepting how an elder treats you even if it's abusive, hurtful, or wounding. So, it meant you don't have boundaries for yourself, you don't tell them that you don't like what they've said or done. You don't tell them how you feel unless it feels happy, or appreciative, grateful, or loving, loving in terms of “I love what you said, thank you.” And so if you have any distasteful feeling or anger, hurt, discomfort or confusion, or a boundary like you didn't like it, you didn't want them to do X, Y or Z, you're meant to keep that to yourself. And it would be again selfish to share that. And so, loving meant to always stay silent and quiet if you had anything uncomfortable.

Candice Wu 35:05
Loving, in this case, meant you're responsible for the well being of your elders, you're responsible for rather their emotional happiness, and you were at fault for their discomfort, that they couldn't handle any discomfort. And this is the way to love elders to respect them in this way. So, loving can be mixed with how you behave and what you share and what you don't.

Candice Wu 35:38
Loving can be you, “Always listen to me and you always obey.” Even if it hurts you. Loving can mix up with not leaving a situation or not leaving a person and staying close and going against what you need. Maybe you need distance, and you need to be away in order to love. But that was threatening in some way. And it wasn't okay to take any distance or space, or as children, we often survive and endure a lot of experiences because we have to, we have to depend on our parents, are caretakers for safety. So, sometimes we can grow up and keep that same way of being, of not leaving a hard situation and enduring it, handling it, surviving it, because we can and because we did and we know that way of loving people, we just stick with them. Even if it's painful.

Candice Wu 36:44
Loving can mix up with doing what others want of you and keeping them happy being responsible for their happiness and not choosing what's truly for you and right for you.

Candice Wu 37:00
Love and sex get very tangled up. We often think that sex is one and the same as love. Some people experienced that and some people in monogamous relationships experience that. We fear that if we have sexual interactions or feelings or fantasies towards someone else besides the one that we love, then it doesn't, it then it means we don't love them at all. And that may not be true. It may be true, but it may not be true.

Candice Wu 37:32
Some people believe that if you have sex with me, you love me, or if you don't have sex with me, you don't love me.

Candice Wu 37:42
In polyamorous relationships and philosophies, there's the idea that we can love many people. This universal sense of love. If you love someone, you can also love another person, there's room for more. And that is not necessarily monogamous or polyamorous in its view, it's just a tendency that I see that in polyamorous relationships, there's a bit more openness about that. But you can see how with that example, that the idea that we can only love one person, there's only one true love.

Candice Wu 38:21
It's a very romantic idea. And it's also very archetypal, it runs a deep thread within many of us. And we're working that out. We're trying to figure out what, what it really is. Is that really true? If you love someone else, do you really also love me? Is that even possible? Can we love more than one person? And can it be a deep love?

Candice Wu 38:44
Love can tangle up also with money, and value and worth, and when we receive money through our family or when we don't or when we receive it from somebody that can feel like they love me a lot, or if someone isn't willing to spend money on you, you might question their love for you or they're like for you even. But especially through family lines, we expect that will receive money if they have it, if our family loves us, like inheritance, and gifts.

Candice Wu 39:28
And of course, everything I'm saying is not always true. And some of these may resonate with you and some may just seem totally ridiculous. But, I want to open up these ideas so that you can think about what has loving, mixed within your life, in your soul and in your being?

Candice Wu 39:48
There's also the sense that loving equals permanency, that if you truly love somebody, you are permanently there, and you never leave, you're there forever. And if it lasts forever, then it was true love. But that's so dismissive of the fact that you feel something right here and now. And what that is, is actually fear coming in, the fear that something may be gone later, or the fear that someone leaves or that you're left alone, the fear that something changes. So, that's not actually loving, that's trying to control something so that you don't have to feel the fear.

Candice Wu 40:30
So, this brings me to that idea, back to the idea of is it out of fear, or is it out of freedom? The early experiences of loving that we've had, that are a bit dysfunctional now that do causes suffering, can and are likely out of some survival mode, some fear, some need, that if we don't do this, then we might not receive what we need to feel safe, to feel love to feel belonging. And as adults, we're able to look back and not leave those as wounds in ourselves not leave this as the way things are, but to examine it, to feel through it, and to see where we needed to do certain things to protect ourselves when you were younger to have that kind of loving and attention. And now we don't need to do that anymore. We don't need our parents or caretakers for safety. We don't need to depend on those we used to depend on. And that means we don't need to use those same strategies that are intermingled with loving, that we have thought to be the way we have to love people, the way we should love people and the way we do love people. We can clear all that up, untangle at and experience a pure love now, a kind of love that's free that doesn't express out of, I need you, and I need you to love me back. But one of clear attention, presence, and witness. One of feeling the beauty, feeling the pain if the pain is there, the upset if upsets there, the joy of being with what is here and seeing the beauty in that. That is a deeper, universal or cosmic kind of love.

Candice Wu 42:33
So, if you've come to that question, what is love for yourself? How do I love? It's a beautiful thing, it's a great beginning an opening for you to see what, what is truly loving. What feels loving in you? And is it truly full? Or is it partially compromised? Is it a bit of fear? Is it a bit of grasping or grabbing onto something, which would signify fear? Or is it free? Is it open and able to move and end, and change and flow?

Candice Wu 43:13
So, we'll leave today's episode with some inquiry and exploration questions for you. And you can feel free to journal about these, you can pause the podcast and just stay with a question and meditate on it, or take it at your pace.

Candice Wu 43:31
As you journal about these, encourage you to go at your own pace, in terms of feeling into your responses, exploring and excavating what's there. Take your time to feel into the experience of these where a lot of stuff can be brought up. And I encourage you also to share this with someone you trust, someone that can support you through healing work, whether that's a therapist, healer, or a coach, someone who can be with you through these emotions. Where the transformation is, is not just in the thinking process of this in the clarity and understanding of it, but it's also in the body. We can't have one without the other and truly integrate a new way of being. We need to transform the emotions and the energy of it inside our whole body. And that's what allows us to actually experience something different, it actually allows us to experience love, not just have a mental concept of love in our mind. So, when I asked these questions and bring these questions out for you, with you here, be sure to feel into the body and let the body show you what it feels about these topics and these ideas.

Candice Wu 44:50
So, if you want to get a notepad, or journal or computer out to explore these questions, feel free to pause the podcast here. And if you're ready to do this with me, I will start with the first question. How did you have to act for love when you were young? What did you have to do in order to receive love?

Candice Wu 45:32
And I realized I'm not giving much time here. So, this is where I invite you to pause the podcast for as long as you need. Or if you're just touching in on these questions and letting them marinate and you feel free to go on with me here.

Candice Wu 45:48
Fill in the blank. In order to belong, I had to ____. And in order to be loved, I had to____.

Candice Wu 46:17
And this next one is also fill in the blank. To be loving to others means that I need to _____.

Candice Wu 46:38
And this next question regards loyalty. Because we often feel like we need to be loyal in order to love. And so those are connected. And in order to be loyal to those I love, it meant that I needed to ___.

Candice Wu 47:08
And the next question, where do you begin to be unloving to yourself? At what moments? Or in what moments to begin to be unloving to yourself?

Candice Wu 47:39
And the next question is, what would you do if you loved yourself right now?

Candice Wu 48:02
And the next question is, what ways of being do you want to shed that are mixed with love and loving? So in other words, what ideas around loving are you ready to shed? As an example, for me, I would shed the need to be silent in order to be loved, and loving, meaning that I have to be silent. So, what ways of being are you ready or wanting to shed around what it means to love?

Candice Wu 48:54
And right now, as you explore this, just take a couple of breaths. Notice any feelings that are coming up and notice any emotions or sensations in your body. Allow what's here, allow any images to appear or present themselves to you. You can also write those down for later exploration. And take this moment to ground and just see your surroundings and recognize you are here in your adult self right now.

Candice Wu 49:49
And just a few more questions that shift the gears a bit here. What is loving to you? What is an adult way to love, what is mature and free love?

Candice Wu 50:23
And don't worry if you have the answers or not. This is all exploration that is continued and evolves.

Candice Wu 50:39
The last question I have is, what is your capacity to receive love?

Candice Wu 50:57
And this question of what is your capacity to receive love is not an easy one to answer either. It's more just a sense of your own feeling of how much you're able to receive. And that just being a gauge for yourself of exploring, receiving love in a deeper way. Healing areas where you feel like you cannot receive or it's challenging to receive.

Candice Wu 51:28
Just feeling what your senses, can you open your palms up and out and receive love from the world? Or do you feel closed? Do you feel like your arms are crossed or the reaching out is stopped or blocked? Or what's coming to you? What is coming to you? What do you receive?

Candice Wu 52:04
And as we close this journaling and exploration section, take a moment and just let it all go and place your hands on your heart, if you feel comfortable, and take this moment to feel love and gratitude for yourself. The sense of warmth towards yourself of presence without judgment, of honoring exactly how you feel in this moment, being with yourself, being able to look at yourself inward, and accept, allow.

Candice Wu 53:03
And as you're ready to release your hands, keep a model wiggle if you want or stretch, stretch any part of your body or move if you want to. Just coming back to the moment.

Candice Wu 53:27
And I hope that you take all of these questions and your responses, your reactions with compassion and curiosity. As a reminder, this is all for exploration. There's no right or wrong here, and this whole podcast itself is meant to be taken with that same sort of exploration that we're all on this journey, to explore what is love and what isn't and to find what it is for ourselves and to be clearer and more free in ourselves to love, to love without fear or to love with fear, through fear.

Candice Wu 54:11
And with that, I am reminded of a Mary Oliver poem, the Mary Oliver poem that just made me fall in love with her work. It's called “The Summer Day”, and I'm going to read it to you now as we close.

Candice Wu 54:28
The summer day, who made the world, who made the swan and the black bear, who made the grasshopper, this grasshopper, I mean. The one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, was moving her jaws back and forth, instead of up and down, who's gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now, she lives her pale forms and thoroughly washes her face. Now, she snaps her wings open and floats away. I don't exactly know what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel in the grass, how to be idle and blessed how to stroll through the fields, which is what I've been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Candice Wu 55:54
So, with that, I encourage you to play with your exploration and find beauty for yourself. Find what love is for yourself.

Candice Wu 56:07
Thank you so much for joining me today. I'd love to hear your thoughts. If you want to share them with me, feel free to reach out to me if you like to, you can email me find me at my website, CandiceWu.com and if you want to stay in touch with me through my newsletters, I send out self-love notes as well as all the updates on podcasts, events, retreats, and topics that I'm exploring, as well as updates on my travels and can sign up for that it CandiceWu.com/embody.

Candice Wu 56:40
In the upcoming weeks, I hope to offer some experiences that will support you in receiving love, self-love, and embodying a feeling of love, sensing into beauty, forgiveness, and feeling what pure love is for you. So, tune in that coming up. And also, if you want to touch into the podcast that preceded this one about toxic ancestors and how to receive love and strength from ancestors that may be challenging or difficult to deal with, those who are dead and alive, you can find that episode at CandiceWu.com/EP61.

Candice Wu 57:28
Thanks so much for tuning in today and it's so great to have you here. I love hearing topics, questions, and feedback from my listener. So, that always inspires something new. And so if you have anything that's on your mind, anything that comes up as you're listening or things that are going on in your life, feel free to reach out and share them with me.

Candice Wu 57:52
Thank you, again, and I'll see you next time on the Embody Podcast.