Loving Your Gut & Food Attachment – EP26

Candice Wu 0:00

This episode is an exploration of my personal attachment to food, the legacy of food and my ancestry, and how to clear out beliefs around food and nourishment. Following the episode this week are three healing experientials, to offer guidance in talking to your gut, exploring your own ancestral legacy of food that lives in your bones, and moving through food cravings.

Candice Wu 0:24

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 0:38

My name is Candice Wu, and I’m a holistic healing facilitator, intuitive coach, and artist, sharing my personal journey of vulnerability, offering meditations and guided healing support, and having co-creative conversations with healers and wellness practitioners from all over the world.

Candice Wu 0:59

This episode is brought to you by the Soul Body Women’s Retreat in October 2018, and this retreat is truly special because not only does it connect soul and body, and support you in integration of who you deeply are, but moving beyond soul and into spirit, into pure consciousness so that you can free yourself of any binds and limits that come connected with soul or body, within the elements of sky and earth in Zion National Park. We will immerse ourselves in sacred healing and connection. For this and future retreats, you can find out more information at CandiceWu.com/retreats, and your support in joining or sharing your retreat helps me to make more healing albums, more content and podcast episodes. I’m truly appreciative for your support.

Candice Wu 1:56

One of the things that I love the most about traveling is that when I get to new a place, I see myself. I get to see what my beliefs are, what my attachments are, and what I know, what I don’t know, what I thought I knew, and all of that gets stirred up a bit until I learned the new things that this place offers me, and then that settles again.

Candice Wu 2:20

This fits right in with a recent astrology appointment that I had where the astrologer told me that because I have Pluto in my chart in a particular way, that I have chosen in this life or that this life has given me the experience of moving through growth as fast as I possibly can, as fast as humanly possible and I have definitely experienced that. It was very affirming, as well as relieving to hear that. And this time on my travels was no different. I definitely was thrown for quite a loop. And this is what this podcast is about this week, about my attachment to food that came up and all of the belief sets and energies that came through with traveling to Lombok, Indonesia.

Candice Wu 3:06

So, just to start to share my story of food with you is that all of my life I’ve used food to comfort myself, to nourish and to have a treat. When I was young, I felt very alone and having chips, sweets, anything junk foodwise, whether that was American junk food, or Chinese junk food would just help me through the day. Of course, I didn’t know I was using food that way but I was sneaking food into my room and always choosing the crunchy snacks and the sweets. Every time we went to the dentist, my mom would be really upset because I had terrible cavities. When I was about school age, I wanted American food and practically begged to my family to make macaroni and cheese, pizza, spaghetti and anything that just seemed “regular and normal”. And whenever I brought Chinese food to school, it was met with different reactions that were really upsetting to me. So, I just didn’t want to go there.

Candice Wu 4:14

Food in my family is a really big deal. Practically, everything centers around a meal, meeting up centers around meals, and I don’t think that’s unlike other families but there’s this sense of safety and luxury that comes with having plentiful food for everybody, which wasn’t the case three generations back. Even my great grandma on my father’s side was somebody who would eat every single grain of rice. Nothing was left behind.

Candice Wu 4:48

One year for Christmas, I decided to make her this pillow full of rice, which you could heat up in the microwave and have as a warmer for her hands because she was always so cold. When I handed it to her all warm, she seemed delighted, but then very quickly started to unravel what was inside. And she asked me if it was rice. And when I said yes, she seemed pretty surprised, but containing herself. And it wasn’t until she died and transitioned that, I found that little pillow, and it was completely emptied, and she had eaten the rice. So, that just shows just how important food is to my family, at least to the history of my lineage.

Candice Wu 5:34

About 10 years ago, I realized I was addicted to food. If I tried to change my diet, it just was so hard and scary and it brought up all sorts of emotions. And when I finally hit rock bottom of my health about nine years ago, I was told by my chiropractor that I was not allowed to eat certain foods, and he showed me exactly how my body was reacting with certain foods in my mouth or just even next to me, how different muscles would shut down, or different muscle groups. Using Applied Kinesiology on this way, was incredibly powerful for me to learn how to eat intuitively, because I would sense in and sense whether a certain food next to my body would give me a feeling of expansion or contraction, or he would test a muscle just to give me that sort of backup so I could see whether a food was shutting down a muscle group as well.

Candice Wu 6:33

Well, of course, I was completely devastated when I was told I shouldn’t eat dairy, I shouldn’t eat sugars, cookies, sweets of any sort, even fruit at that time. I was meant to stay off of grains and any refined carbs. I didn’t even know what I could eat anymore. After a while, I was getting the hang of it and I was eating pretty well and quickly and my health was improving. So, what I learned was that food was medicine.

Candice Wu 7:04

So, over the years, I experienced my body get healthier, my soul and my spirit become healthier, my emotional space much healthier. And I knew that food was a part of it. Especially being a really sensitive human being, I learned quickly that foods could affect me greatly, was almost as if I just turned on this switch that made me realize and have awareness for the fact that food was doing something in my body. Gradually, I released more and more attachments to certain foods that I was craving, especially when I would flow in and out of choosing the foods that I knew were healthy for me or that I knew at that time were healthy for me. And choosing foods that I knew would be detrimental to me in some way or that would come at a cost, would always balance this with the amount of emotional stress that I was having or physical stress that was having If I was more stressed in a certain day, then I would eat a little healthier.

Candice Wu 8:05

So, I have this nice dance with food. People always wonder whether or not I’m vegan or vegetarian, and the truth is that I am not. I had studied Ayurveda, and a little bit of Chinese medicine, and what I found in that was that for my body constitution, it is really not quite that good for me to eat only vegetables, legumes or beans without eating meat, because I can feel so ungrounded and also cold in my body. So, the way that I balance that is just to eat meat a little bit more sparingly or when my body wants it. And whenever I can, I seek out meat that has been raised in a humane way and respectful way, so, from farmers or treated in ways that I can respect and that I can get behind.

Candice Wu 9:01

So different times in my life, I’ve leaned more towards certain foods than others, certain seasons, bring out different aspects and elements in my body, in all of our bodies that I balance out with food. So, to deepen this conversation, I actually see food as anything that you take in through any of your senses. Food is constant, food is any sound that you hear, any smell, any touch, an experience, an emotion that you’re feeling. So, it can come from the inside. How we talk to ourselves and treat ourselves as well as the activities that we’re doing throughout the day, everything that we take in through our eyes, nose, ears, touch, all of that is food. Our food can be nourishing, or it can be toxic, or somewhere in between.

Candice Wu 9:53

So, for me, on the heels of what I experienced as spiritual and existential crisis about eight weeks ago, where just a lot of different spiritual experiences and emotions were coming to the surface to be healed, as well as physical symptoms coming up with that, I was exhausted and by the time I felt that I was rejuvenating and feeling enough rest, and it was the fire was dying down a bit, my grandma passed away. So, it disrupted my rest state, and I went through an entire process of grieving and being with my family. After a couple of weeks, I returned to Indonesia, but this time, to an island called Lombok, which is the next-door island to Bali.

Candice Wu 10:45

My first few days they were incredible. I was taking in saltwater from the beaches, and fresh air openness. What I experienced about this island is that it’s really charming. It has a lack of regulation, which gives a lot of freedom, people creating and innovating, and developing the area, but it also had a downside. And for me, this downside hit me hard. It was the lack of regulation on food and the lack of fresh food. And while in Bali, it was easy to find a place you could live that had a kitchen so you could cook for yourself. In Lombok, it was a lot harder. So, just looking back on my whole experience of the spiritual crisis, grandma passing away, and then heading over to a place where I just couldn’t get the right nourishment, my body took quite a hit. At some point, I had picked up something and I knew very quickly because my gut was in a lot of pain and I had indigestion and a couple of other digestive symptoms.

Candice Wu 11:50

And to give you an idea of the other food I was taking in besides physical food through my mouth. I just landed in Lombok during the middle of Ramadan, which is a holiday of fasting for Muslims. During Ramadan, the prayers over the loudspeakers coming from the mosques are about double from what they seem to be normally, and they’re quite loud and often happen in the middle of the night. This was a male voice coming into my ears all the time. And just this underlying energy of a male-dominated population was starting to get to me at some level. All the while, I felt that my body was experiencing a shift in vibration and energy, and I wanted to eat differently anyway. But by the time I had picked up a bug or something, I just couldn’t eat anything. That is I couldn’t eat anything without feeling awful for an entire, at least 15 hours.

Candice Wu 12:54

So, I’m the kind of person that thinks about, “Okay, is this a challenge that I wanted to take on spiritually? Is this something I want to release in terms of an attachment or learn a new way of being or release some sort of limitation that I’ve previously had on myself? Or is this just a time where I need to take control and do something different?” So, in this case, was I meant to just experience something different with food and surrender to that, and feel through it so that I could release it? Or was I meant to go find a place with the kitchen and cook my own food at least whatever I could find so that I could have it as fresh as I could make it? I didn’t know the answer, but my body was pissed. It was fascinating to me that my body seemed to be forcing me to fast because that was the thing that felt the best. All the while, Ramadan was going on and people were fasting. So, it was just a curious thing: was I catching in on the energy of that or what was really happening.

Candice Wu 14:00

During this process, I realized how attached I was to having healthy foods and to have foods that I cook myself. And there’s definitely a lot to that. We all know that cooking for yourself is much better than going out to a restaurant and that should be done sparingly. So, it was completely challenging that I had to eat out almost every meal. I also began to question whether or not I was meant to eat meats at this time. A friend asked me, “Does meat make you feel sad?” And I just had no idea. For the longest time, I felt meat was really grounding and satisfying to my body, especially being such a small person. And I started to feel a little more sensitive to what meat was doing for me. Well, more so, I seem to have quite a reset where I was allowed to have any food so I could examine what that relationship was for me at this point. So, I gave into that I was completely willing to give up meat and to find some other vegan or vegetarian diet and figure it out.

Candice Wu 15:12

When I started to add foods back in, I just started with fruit and it still made my body really upset. So, I knew it was deeper. I knew I had to go to the spiritual and emotional level to see what was underneath all of it. Up into this time, it was just so painful that I didn’t even want to pay attention to what was going on inside. So, I sat with myself and tuned into my gut, and I spoke with it as if it were a person, and it just tuned in to see what it looked like in terms of the sensations I was feeling and what emotions were coming up. And I asked it, “What are you?” What came through at that time were lots of statements that I just didn’t even understand. For example, “I can’t take it anymore. Everyone just go away. Everything just go away.” I just felt grief, and the words that came where “I feel the grief of the world”.

Candice Wu 16:14

All I could do was just cry, and I had no idea of really why. What I later realized with my healing coach were a few different facets that were coming into play. I didn’t even think of the fact that this was on the heels of Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade suicides. And what my healer said was that a lot of people are tuning in to see whether or not they want to check out, and that just hit the spot for me. It felt like this giant heaviness of I can’t live in this world. I can’t be here but it felt like it wasn’t quite mine. It didn’t feel like it was so connected to me, but somehow I was holding it. And some part of me had space for that. As I stayed with that, it just started to dissolve, but it took some time. It was really heavy and thick. And what that energy of the world’s consciousness seemed to trigger in me was my ancestries story.

Candice Wu 17:12

What I understand about my maternal grandfather is that his parents starved to death. And my grandpa and his brothers, and sisters had to basically like crawl to get help. And they were so weak. I don’t know who helped them or what happened, but they did get help, and most of them lived a long life. But my great grandparents starved to death. So, what’s undigested in the family ancestry gets passed down. And that’s one of the aspects that we land into this life with, not to mention that we have the remains of our soul as well and past life, if we believe in past life we believe in a sort of soul history.

Candice Wu 18:04

So, whatever it is that didn’t get resolved, integrated or processed in the past, remains in the gut of the soul, and the literal gut of our bodies. The stomach is the holder of information, of all of those things that we talked about earlier of food, anything you take into the senses, so made complete sense to me that here I am fasting because I can’t eat. And at some point, I moved into this threshold where I didn’t want to eat because everything hurt so badly. And then this story of my great grandparents starving to death comes up for me again. When a story in the soul of the family hasn’t been acknowledged or honored, as I said integrated, then it begs of that in later generations, and it’s almost as if my body wanted to starve itself, that I was drawn towards that experience here, to know it, to know it and move forward with recognizing that it was their experience, and it’s not one that I have to repeat.

Candice Wu 19:13

So, going back to the story of food and my family line, this is a significant moment, and it gave a way for the reactions that happened afterward, where people in my family learned to nourish themselves and they had enough, and they were able to have abundance. Having good foods and a lot of food was the way that my family knew they were safe, that they knew they were alive. Food was their source of living. And that is exactly what I was grappling with. Is food my source of living? Is food My only source of living and did I have to starve myself? Did I have to starve myself from life?

Candice Wu 19:57

When I work with myself emotionally, one thing kinda leads to another and I start to flush out all sorts of belief sets that go around to this topic. I started to wonder, am I the one that’s always suffering in the family? Do I have to suffer all the time? Do I have to be unhealthy to be seen? I remember getting a lot of attention when I wouldn’t finish my dinner and was told that I couldn’t leave until I finished it. And someone would have to sit there with me. It seems in retrospect that I wasn’t so alone in those moments. I was getting some attention that I just desperately needed.

Candice Wu 20:35

And next to that, I remember being very sick a few times in my young life, and that was the only time I experienced a certain kind of attention that I didn’t get when I wasn’t sick. So, I began to wonder with myself, did I, do I have the belief that I’m only allowed to be seen if I’m sick or emotionally suffering? Am I allowed to be seen in my joy, in my happiness? I knew these beliefs were resonating with me when my body would just cry and feel some relief and heat move out.

Candice Wu 21:11

So, I healed another aspect of this whole thing, and by the time I got to Bali, I was just thrilled to be able to cook my own food and have fresher foods. And yet, then I started having cravings again, cravings for nuts and like a lot of them or chips or sweets, for Swedish meatballs, which is something that I had when I was younger. So, I asked myself, “What am I really hungry for” What am I truly craving?” But I also wanted to heal it on a body level and just let myself feel into the thing I was craving and noticed the emotions that came from that if I pictured allowing myself to have that food. So, at this point, a couple of other emotional pieces about food came up, but I’ve also been opening my awareness, my energy, to the different things in my life that do nourish me, which is something I have practiced and known for some time that other things can nourish you besides food. But there’s something different when the body and the viscera, and the energy in you changes, so that you have more available and you to be able to take in the nourishment of other things.

Candice Wu 22:27

So, if any of this is resonating with you, I wanted to just talk a little bit about food and how you might explore this for yourself. If it inspires you, you might start to explore what you consider as food and what your family lineage has considered as food. What foods literally, physically do you draw towards and which ones do you think you can have and which ones can you not have? What are the reactions you have and what’s embedded in that? What types of food nourish your heart and your soul?

Candice Wu 23:01

See if you can make a list and just flush out all of the different thoughts you have about food, all the belief sets, how much food costs or when you can have it or what’s related to food and what do you associate with it? It might just be interesting to do that and see what comes up. And also start to tune in when you eat food. Notice how it feels to you, notice what it tastes like. We know about mindful eating and taking it slowly, sensing into what you’re eating, but also feel your emotions when you’re eating it and afterward. Notice what foods make you feel happy or what makes you feel sad or heavy. When your body’s in balance, it knows exactly what it needs to eat so that it can stay in balance. Do you have cravings that come or foods that you just want a lot of or foods that you are addicted to?

Candice Wu 23:59

If you would like to explore your family ancestry’s food story, what you’ve been handed as far as your relationship to food, or to talk to your gut and explore what’s going on in there. or if you want to work through cravings, check out the following three healing experiences that I’ll put out in each a separate podcast later this week, so that you can practice, explore and move through an embodied exercise around your attachments to food, and what’s held in your body. Exploring this and moving through some of these practices can give you a newfound freedom with food, as well as what nourishes you and what’s draining you or being toxic to your life, as well as give you a new freedom, a disconnection from things that limits you, or things that you feel that you need to have in your life or else that can free up a lot of energy and give you even more vitality in your life so that you can find what’s even clearer and more you in your life.

Candice Wu 25:10

So, while this exploration might be interesting to you, it might be heavy or emotional or sometimes distressing, because so much is embedded in food and nourishment, love and how we receive love or haven’t received love. All of that might come up. Just be kind to yourself, and remember to add in a touch of play and amusement, and lightness, so that you can witness yourself. So, I hope that this story and these tips have been interesting for you.

Candice Wu 25:43

Stay tuned in this next week for the three different healing experiences that I’ll share with you. And as always, feel free to reach out if you need some support with it or if you have any thoughts or questions, and if this or other episodes has spoken to you where you like what I’m doing here like to support, please go to CandiceWu.com/patreon to make a donation of any amount. I’m so appreciative of you considering that and every single cent just goes towards this podcast and all the things that I create for my heart.

Candice Wu 26:18

Thank you so much, and as always, you can sign up for my newsletter to become a part of the Embody Community and receive meditations, healing tips, and self-love tips. And as we leave today, I’m just sending you lots of love to nourish your spirit. Take care and see you next time.

Hello, and welcome. You’re listening to the Embody Podcast, a show about remembering and embodying your true nature, inner wisdom, embodied healing, and self-love.

My name is Candice Wu, and I’m a holistic healing facilitator, intuitive coach, and artist, sharing my personal journey of vulnerability, offering meditations and guided healing support, and having co-creative conversations with healers and wellness practitioners from all over the world.

This is the first meditation of three from the series of Loving Your Gut and Food Attachment. You can find the full podcast at CandiceWu.com/food. In this guided exploration, I’ll lead you through revealing your ancestry story around food, the meanings around food, and the connections with food.

Intro to Meditation

During this meditation, I will support you and guide you through with my words as well as pauses so that you can have the time to be held in this space and energy while exploring, and if at any time It feels overwhelming or a bit too much, just take a pause, let it go, open your eyes, and just notice something pleasurable around you to ground yourself in here and now, and whenever you feel like it come back to this exercise or just take little bites at a time, all of the breaks will help with metabolize seeing this experience as well.

Let’s Begin

Let’s begin by finding a comfortable seated position.

Feel free to close your eyes or look down whichever is more comfortable, and take them moment to just release all of the past, anything that’s happened up until this moment. Release all of the future.

Let yourself align to this present moment in time, and I’ll lead you through this exploration by asking several questions with pauses in between, and with each question, I invite you to feel into your sense by imagining, feeling, seeing, and noticing any emotions or sensations in the body. You might hear words or thoughts, just notice all of your experience and take everything as information, even if you experienced nothing at all.

The difference between thinking about it and analyzing it versus noticing it, staying in a calm space, and just letting any information come to you, is more of a passive process where you just receive a notice versus an active process of thinking.

So, as you deepen in your presence right here and now, notice your body, is it sensing all of the outlines of your body, your breath, where your hips are sitting on the floor or chair and letting yourself be supported by what’s underneath you as well as earth below you. Let your breath reach all the way down to your belly, your hips, your legs, your knees, your ankles, and feet.

Invite Your Ancestry

Now, we open to inviting the soul of your ancestry, all of the people in your ancestry in the highest order and highest light.

We invite them to be here with full respect and honoring, and as you open to all of your family members, your parents, your grandparents, great grandparents and anyone behind them, aunts and uncles, start to sense what your body feels, what your emotions are, any sensations happening on the inside, any movements or images that come with it.

And now, add the additional aspect of physical food.

In whatever symbol, food comes into you. It might be the kinds of foods that you typically eat in your family or have eaten or just some symbol that can hold the energy and story of food to your family system, and just let food come in almost as if it’s embodied, it has life, it’s able to move and also give information.

And as you notice food in the picture, sense how the family may be drawn towards the food.

Be open and curious.

Again, everything is information, also notice what kinds of food this family is drawn to, when, what it looks like when food is in the picture?

How much food, how little?

Was it full and abundant in general or lacking?

Were there changes around that through the family lineage? If you go all the way back as far back as you can, seven generations or even farther.

Just allow yourself to receive a sense, an impression of what the relationship to food was all the way back, and as you come down the line closer towards yourself, notice what happens.

Notice what happens in yourself and what you sense in your picture, in your mind.

Now, open the idea of food to a broader meaning — food as nourishment on all levels that’s relationally with love, connection and kindness or joy and experiencing pleasure or anything that was fed in through the senses that might be unpleasant.

Notice what emotions were fed in the system. What emotions are coming down from the line of the ancestry.

Sense into what may be conscious as well as unconscious, where people seemed one way, but perhaps underneath there was another feeling.

Is there a sense of any emotion as you pause in each generation? Either going from you towards your parents and farther back or the other way around coming from as far back as you can. Just walking the field of your ancestry forward.

Notice what your family system is hungry for, if you open the definition of the word hunger to anything that you desire or crave, anything that you want deeply.

What did people in your family deeply ache for?

What do you ache for? What are you hungry for?

Look at the Constellation

And now, take a moment and imagine for your family system, whatever it is hungry for, perhaps that’s as a whole or to specific people in your sense.

Imagine that they can receive right here and now the things that they’re hungry for, that they really desire and yearn for.

Whatever it is, from wherever or whoever, allow your family to receive that, and then allow that experience to trickle down to you, and see how that feels inside of you, noticing your emotions, your body sensations, movements, your sense.

Be curious about anything that shows up, and take as long as you need to sense into what your family system is hungry for and what it needs.

Feel the difference as your family receives what it needs, what it might have missed out on, what it craves, perhaps that safety or love, acknowledgement, honor, compassion, whatever it is, consider it as medicine for the ancestry, giving the food that your family craved.

When you’re ready, check in with yourself to notice what is it that you are hungry for. Is it the same? is what’s your family needed? Are you hungry for freedom or presence, love? What are you aching for?

Wherever that is, imagine receiving that as well, whether that’s from your ancestry, from the people in your family or just dropping down from the sky, sort of an energetic homie apathy coming down to give you exactly what you’re wishing for, and notice what it would feel like to receive this.

Notice what happens inside your body, your breath, your sense of being in your body, and any emotions you feel, how your body holds itself, and let yourself integrate and digest this feeling. Just staying with it, and giving your awareness.

And now, just take a moment to honor everything that came through for you, anything you sensed, felt or saw, any insight or wisdom, and even anything that seemed challenge or distressing.

Just take a moment, and again see your ancestry behind you, everyone in order — from your parents, your grandparents, great grandparents and farther back, as far back as you can imagine, and just coming back to our original exploration of noticing how this family connects and relates to food.

This time, both physical food, and food on all levels of nourishment, food in terms of what the experiences, sounds, smells and tastes are that everyone took in, and this time, just expanding an even farther to any experiences that your family has gone through, that might have been challenging, traumatic, distressing, as all of that is food as well.

Notice

Take a moment to notice where in the ancestry something was disrupted, like a connection or reaching out from one to another or an imbalance in a relationship and upset, perhaps tragic experiences like war, immigration, betrayal or abuse, disconnection in any way, just noticing upsetting or challenging experiences as also food that was fueling into the system or came from the system of your family, and notice which experiences are digested, resolved, where people are at peace with it.

Notice which experiences seem unintegrated or unfinished, silenced, perhaps or nobody talked about it or wanted to face it. You may have a sense of something happening, but not know mentally what was there, and again, just taking that as information and allowing yourself to stay curious with it.

And as you sense down the line towards you, notice what you’ve inherited in your family lineage. What food? What nourishment?

What upsetting experiences or emotions, perhaps have you been handed because they were unfinished? Notice if there’s any pain that you’re connected to with someone farther back behind you, and also, notice nourishment in terms of loving and safe connection with people behind you that you receive from — love and strength, resource, knowledge.

Allow yourself to notice all of what’s coming your way.

And for now, you can either choose to just acknowledge what’s here, and honor all that’s here with you or you can choose to leave those experiences that belong to your family system, to certain members of your family or the whole, and just receive the best of your family at the moment.

Receive

Receive the gifts and the love, and the resource, just the very best, and imagine feeling a sense of gratitude for all that you receive that’s good.

We can respect and love our family members by leaving their experiences with them, and not repeating or taking on what’s not ours. So, release anything that isn’t yours back to who it belongs to or where it belongs.

You can do so by imagining whatever that energy is, in terms of an object or a color of light, and just letting it send back to whoever it belongs to. Notice the experience in your own body as you release that or as you honor yourself family members with their own experiences and story.

And however it is that they related to physical food, you can also take or leave what you’d like.

If there are certain dynamics or relationships to food, food addiction or abusing food in a way or not caring what foods were eaten, physical foods, feel free to leave any of those ways behind, and just received the good in terms of how food is related to, ways that food was a part of your relationships or experiences that were pleasurable or nourishing, and receive just the very best of your relationship with food from the family ancestry.

And again, just tuning into what you sense in your own body, any emotion, sensation in the body, sense of openness or contraction, your breath or a feeling of groundedness, and take a few more breaths to let all of this integrate, noticing any thing that’s there, and letting it happen even more.

Closing

And now, thank your family ancestry once more, just thanking all of the members of your family for being here, and being here in this light and love no matter what emotions came up or experiences came up, and just take the time to ground yourself in your own presence.

Give any movement that your body would like, a stretch if you need, and as you open your eyes, sense your surroundings, and just receive your connection with anything that looks pleasurable around you. Notice that you’re here in the present moment, taking any sound or smells or the taste of the air, and thank yourself for doing this exploration.

End

You’ve just explored pretty deeply the experiences of your ancestry around food, physical food as well as any experiences that they’ve taken in that you are sensing today or that are living in your body, in your energy or in the soul of your family. Don’t worry if nothing came to you, because this practice deepens over time and you become more and more sensitive and aware, and sometimes nothing’s there or that on a given day, nothing’s ready to be seen.

And if anything was challenging or overwhelming for you, I encourage you to reach out to a loved one or friend or healer or therapist. I’m always available in case you’d like to reach out to me, and just take a few more minutes with yourself to just rest and honor yourself for the work that you’ve done today, the emotional work, the work of digesting what’s in the family system that’s been inherited and what’s in you.

So, I’ll leave you with just a few moments of silence and then some music to close, and I invite you to join me for the next two healing experientials, which will be about cravings, working with cravings as well as having a conversation with your gut, for gut health and connection.

Thank you so much for joining me, and I look forward to seeing you next time.

Candice Wu 0:06
Hello, and welcome. You’re listening to the Embody Podcast, a show about remembering and embodying your true nature, inner wisdom, embodied healing, and self-love.

My name is Candice Wu, and I’m a holistic healing facilitator, intuitive coach, and artist, sharing my personal journey of vulnerability, offering meditations and guided healing support, and having co-creative conversations with healers and wellness practitioners from all over the world.

Hello, and welcome. You’re joining me today for the second healing experiential in the series around Loving Your Gut and Food Attachment. You can find the introductory podcast to this at CandiceWu.com/food as well as the other two meditations that go in the series.

Intro

Today, we’re going to work with cravings, being addicted to food at some point in my life, I’ve had cravings for certain foods when I stopped having them or wanted to cleanse, and I’ve also had cravings for experiences.

This meditation can support you with moving through your cravings of any sort, including foods, substances, a type of activity, a person, a place or anything that you just really desire, that you may not want to give yourself in real life, and also, anything that you really deeply yearn for that perhaps is so intense that it’s uncomfortable for you.

The interesting thing is that when I have a food craving or some craving for an experience, and I imagine it and allow myself to have the feeling that I imagine I would get from having this food, I can receive some healing, but if I actually, in real life, go ahead and have that thing, if it was food, for example, it doesn’t quite give me that satisfying feeling or the healing, that helps me resolve that craving. It just kind of feeds the cycle.

So, this meditation is to support you in shedding some of the intensity around that, helping you get to the underlying meaning around what it is that you crave and why, and allowing whatever that energy is around that craving to be brought back to its original source, where it can be resolved at a very deep level.

Sometimes, it takes many times of working with this practice to move through one craving. In fact, it took me years to process a connection with a person that I seem to just continue to ache for even though in reality couldn’t exist.

My Experience

Through this sort of practice, I was able to release myself and free myself of that deep connection and bond that left me addicted to a certain relationship and dynamic. Because a fantasy, also, can be followed through to have an outcome that is also part of the fantasy. We can give ourselves that without actually doing the real thing in real life, and our psyche, our soul doesn’t know the difference but can receive that healing.

We can let the original desire that’s underneath this experience reveal itself, so that wherever we’ve projected this desire into food, into a substance, into another person, whatever it is, we can reclaim that power back and let ourselves feel whole again, that we don’t need something outside of us in order to be okay, that the power is within us. And I don’t mean to say that we don’t need anything outside of us because we, of course, do at different times, but what I mean is to restore our own sense of power, healing power within and wholeness within.

So, let’s begin.

Let’s Begin the Experience

Find yourself in a comfortable seated position, and feel free to support your body with any pillows or blankets or anything it needs.

As you breathe into your body, release all of the day so far. Release your connection to the outside world, just letting this be a little time and space just for you.

Notice whatever is happening in your body right now without any judgment, let’s just pure witness and compassion, and imagine the energy of love completely surrounding you is high vibration that is just pure witness with non-judgment.

Let this love fill you up all the way through your body, to every cell and every bone, and connect right with the source of your being, the place that already knows this peace and love.

And just for a moment to bring in a resource, to bring in some strength and safety, imagine someone, something, an animal, place, person or thing that gives you a feeling of safety, calmness or a feeling that you are yourself.

This could also include an activity that makes you feel just like you, and for a few moments notice that experience of being connected with this person, animal place or thing or activity, and feel what it’s like in your body emotionally as well as physically.

This is a resource that you can come back to anytime if you’re feeling overwhelmed by this experience or need a little break. Just come back to this resource. Pause the podcast and take some time with it. Doing so, also helps your body and your nervous system digest the healing that’s taking place.

And now, open to whatever it is that you would like to work with around a craving, an addiction or something that you yearn for very much that you’d like to release some of that bond. Whatever it is that you feel that you crave, whether that’s the experience of something, a food, a person, a place, anything at all, bring a picture of that thing into your mind. Notice any details about this thing that you can remember.

Notice the sight of it, any smells, tastes, the way it would feel to touch, and notice any sensations in your body. Sense your breath, heat, tinglingness, achiness, a deep yearning or reaching for, how grounded or on grounded you are. Take all of that in as information that your body is sharing with you what this activates and you. Notice any emotion that comes with it.

And now, in slow motion, invite yourself to have this experience, have this food or be with this person, whatever it is that you chose to work with.

Let yourself have this experience in your imagination, but keep it nice and slow, so that your body can integrate and catch up with what it is that you’re looking at, and working with.

Track yourself, and notice whatever sensations and emotions are happening as you imagine receiving this experience, person food or connection.

Notice the pleasure if there is any as well as any pain or discomfort. Notice every bit of it, if it’s a food, taste it and savor it, and feel what you’re getting out of it. If it’s a connection, notice what that connection is like and what you get to receive. If it’s an experience, feel through the experience, and notice the physical and emotional experience of that.

Take your time, and stay slow with it, staying with whatever emotions or sensations you feel, just letting them move, letting them be, and honoring them.

Be open to an underlying layer of what it is that you’re receiving here. How does you end up feeling if you get this thing that you deeply crave?

Notice if you receive some comfort or inspiration or pleasure. Notice if it relieves you of something or helps you find some safety or respite. Let herself have that experience.

Take a little more time with it, feeling through any emotion, any thoughts, any feelings, staying in this loving, witnessing place. Feel what happens as the experience continues, and what it’s like as it comes close to the end.

Notice what’s here and you now, whether you still crave more or beginning to feel some satisfaction. Let yourself imagine exactly what you wish to receive out of this. You get to create that it does not have to be what the reality might be, but what you wish to receive.

And now, notice what it feels like as you’ve received it. Whatever food you ingested, in your mind or experience you had, you know what it’s like at the end of it where you’ve received it already, noticing what you get out of it, and again, picturing what it is you wish you would get.

And now, take a couple more breaths and release all of what you were imagining. Come back to feeling in your body whatever’s here, sensing your breath, your temperature, what emotions you feel inside, any sensations, how your body is doing.

Circle Back

If you’d like to come back to the resource that you chose in the very beginning, the one that gave you safety or love or feeling of being yourself, just to let your body integrate and come back to safety even more.

Closing

Thank yourself for practicing this today, and just acknowledge and honor yourself for whatever experience you had, no matter what it was, releasing any pressure on yourself for it to have to be a certain way, and just knowing that with practice over time, that this will continue to evolve for you.

Feel free to come back to this practice anytime to look at the next layer of what’s coming up for you around this particular craving or another craving you might have, and feel free to share your experiences with me. Stay tuned for the next healing meditation which will be about having a conversation with your gut, gut health, and loving your gut.

As we close today, I will leave you with a few moments of silence followed by some music, so that you can just relax and rest.

Candice Wu 0:06
Hello, and welcome. You’re listening to the Embody Podcast, a show about remembering and embodying your true nature, inner wisdom, embodied healing, and self-love.

My name is Candice Wu, and I’m a holistic healing facilitator, intuitive coach, and artist, sharing my personal journey of vulnerability, offering meditations and guided healing support, and having co-creative conversations with healers and wellness practitioners from all over the world.

Hello, and welcome. This is the third healing experiential in connection with the podcast Loving Your Gut and Food Attachment. You can find the other two meditations as well as the introduction podcast at CandiceWu.com/food, and in this guided experience will lead you through a conversation with your gut. This is a practice that I do with myself, and it has developed over time. The first time I tried it, I was like, “What talking to my gut? How do you even do that?” And now, I’ve built a relationship with my body so that I can talk with different messages from the inside and just sense intuitively what the messages are. So, if this is new to you, please stay gentle and patient with yourself as it takes some time to develop.

Our stomach is the container and holder for food of all kinds. So, that means physical food, it means any experience, any emotion that’s happening inside, any sound, sight or touch that we have, any smells, anything that we take in through the senses. It includes positive and negative or pleasant and unpleasant experiences, and all of what’s contained in those experiences.

Just like if we ate two plates of food, and it was too much for a body or we ate too fast, the same can happen for our experiences. We might have had many positive or many upsetting experiences, all in succession or just a little too much or it was overwhelming in some way, and if we don’t digest that experience, it doesn’t fully get integrated and becomes toxic to our body. In a family lineag, if something isn’t digested and metabolized, it gets passed down to those who are younger, and in the newer generations. So, if there’s pain or an unresolved issue that isn’t resolved or brought to its natural and organic healing, then that sort of dynamic or emotion will get passed down to the later generations. That’s how we inherit an ancestral experience.

So, when we talk to our gut, we have no idea what may show up. It might be something related to the ancestry, it might be related to a soul history or your personal history or a societal experience that you’ve taken in or some sort of experience that’s not yet digested. The residue and remnants of whatever food that was are waiting to be held in awareness and integrated. So, let’s begin.

Find yourself a comfortable seated position or lie down on your back. Let your body release, and sense any place that’s already feeling grounded or relaxed.

Feel free to close your eyes or look down, whichever is more comfortable, and place your hands or one hand on your belly. As you breathe, let the breath reach all the way into the gut, all the way into your hips, even down to your legs and your feet. Open up the whole body and the heart, and just imagine the energy of love completely surrounding you, as if it were light, a blanket of light around you. Holding you in safety, compassion, non-judgment.

Now, sense into your belly, and notice any sensations in the gut, any place of holding, tightness or resistance as well as notice any pleasant sensation.

Take note specifically of the tissues, the cells of the gut, what you’re sensing in detail. There’s no need to think about it or analyze it, just sensing in and feeling.

Allow whatever sensations or emotions that are happening to just happen, and if at any time this feels overwhelming or you need a break, just let yourself open your eyes and feel into the present moment.

And now, as you feel into your gut, invite yourself to picture whatever you sense inside. If there’s a sensation of tension or flutteriness, picture what that looks like. Notice the colors or textures, the size and shape of what you feel, and be aware of any images that come to you as well no matter what they are.

Now, imagine you’re talking to your gut as if it were a friend, that you receive whatever your gut shows you, says to you or that you sense with an openness and curiosity, without trying to predict what it would say or think about it, but just asking, connecting and listening.

Now, ask your stomach: how are you doing? And just listen for any responses, any sense or images that come to your attention. Again, just being curious to whatever shows up in any feeling you get.

Acknowledge and honor any feeling or anything it says. Let it know that you hear it. Feel free to ask: is there anything you need right now? Whatever it says or shows you, imagine giving this to yourself, to your stomach or gut, and feel through what it’s like to receive whatever it is that it needs.

Now, ask your gut: is there anything you’d like me to know right now or any message such as you have for me? And just listen without any filter, and let yourself receive whatever it says, any wisdom it brings to you or any story or experience that’s there. Just acknowledging and honoring with respect, whatever is here, any sense or whisper of anything.

Now, I invite you to ask your stomach: is there anything that you need digested or anything left unresolved at this time?

Notice anything it shows you or any sense that you have even if it’s just a vague sense, and whatever is the hair, if it’s an image, if it’s a feeling sensation or an emotion, stay with it and allow it to be felt. Allow the power of your awareness to metabolize this experience, and take as long as you’d like here, knowing that you might not get all the way through everything today.

Now, just let yourself rest and release all of what came up, just feeling your hands if they’re still on your belly. Feel into any soothing or comfort that your hands can give right to your gut.

And now, imagine a loving light coming from the universe, from the source, all the way to you as if you’re downloading it right through your hands and into your belly, filling your gut with a feeling of safety, lightness, rest and love. Feel any part of you that can sense into that.

And as you take your time here, feel free to rest for as long as you’d like to. I’m going to leave you with about 30 seconds of quiet rest and silence, and at the end you’ll hear some music that’ll close out our meditation today, and as we leave today with some quiet rest, just let your body release and sink into the weight of gravity.

See you next time on the Embody Podcast.