Candice Wu 0:00
Hello, this is Candice. Today, I’d like to share with you a bit about the Sound Sleep Alchemy Album. This lovely album was born from the inspiration of my clients, friends, colleagues and families struggles with sleep. When I’m in a room, and I asked who has trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, almost every single person in the room raises their hand. I’ve certainly had my own experiences of terrible insomnia, and for me as well as my clients and people around me, they found that we needed to go deeper than just simple sleep hygiene. We needed to go to the root and we needed to work with many levels of our system. I’m happy to share now that most days I have restful sleep, and when I don’t, there are many ways that I reached for to support myself.
Candice Wu 0:50
In the sound sleep alchemy album, I share these ways with you, and I encourage you if you choose to use this album, to let this be a process of unfolding deeper parts of you and gaining sound sleep all the while. This album is a combination of practices from many ancient and modern traditions, including yoga tantra, Ayurveda, somatic experiencing, spiritual and energetic practices, scientifically informed and embodied healing techniques, Chinese medicine, and family and systemic constellations. With the sound sleep album, you’ll receive a resource guide, 11 guided meditations and healing experiential, a guide for yoga poses, and a guide for acupressure points.
Candice Wu 1:43
Along with this, you’ll get the Ayurvedic Doshas 101, an explanation of the three types of energies that are spoken for an ayurvedic system. In the resource guide, you’ll get an understanding of the different types of sleep issues, and the reasons for those issues through the ayurvedic perspective. Ayurveda is a holistic form of medicine through the Indian tradition, and I found that it gives a lovely understanding of how you can have better sleep depending on what type of sleep issue you have. So, the resource guide offers you this understanding as well as antidotes for each level of the physiology of your being which includes your physical body, your energy body, the mental and emotional body, and your spiritual self, and the level of your being that is your pure consciousness. With each of these levels of the system of your body system, I provide recommendations and suggest the specific type of meditation that relates to this level of your being.
Candice Wu 2:55
And now, I’d like to share with you an understanding of each guided meditations and what those specifically do for you. The first meditation is called the Down to Earth body scan. This meditation guides you in scanning the body from head to toe, giving you a way to bring your awareness inward, and helping you develop a loving witness to your inner landscape. It brings grounding, centeredness, and allows you to sense into what’s happening inside.
Candice Wu 3:30
The next meditation is called Organic Breathing, and this is a guided meditation to help you tune into your natural breath and allow your body’s innate healing intelligence to activate. So, it’s not about restricting your breath or controlling it in a certain way, it’s allowing what’s already happening in your breathing to be noticed, which then allows your breath and your body to regulate.
Candice Wu 3:58
The third meditation is called Resourcing Safety, Love and Peace. I’ve included this meditation to help you in body safety, and to support yourself with peaceful and loving feelings by drawing upon a person, place or thing that invokes the feeling of safety. We need to practice feeling safe, and feeling into love and peace, because that’s what we want more of, and also because it helps us to ground when we’re feeling overwhelmed. All of that is necessary to support restful sleep, we need to be grounded, feeling safe, and feeling into our piece.
Candice Wu 4:38
The next guided audio is called Soothing Self-touch and Body Care. This meditation is actually an experiential, which helps you feel into what kind of touches soothing for your body, which helps your nervous system feel safe and at ease, and your body to feel taken care of. When we touch the outer level of our body, the skin, it reminds our nervous system that we have a physical boundary, the boundary of the body, which contains all of our emotions, all the sensations we feel, and it reminds our body that it can process them, that it can feel safe here, which is completely necessary to feel into a deep sleep.
Candice Wu 5:27
The “Digesting the Day” meditation is one of my favorites. This helps me the most when I wake up in the middle of the night or if I’m having a hard time falling asleep. In this meditation I guide you through feeling what’s happening in the body 20 minutes at a time, from that moment in time all the way to the morning of that day, and what this does is it allows the body to process through all of the emotions and sensations that have been undigested throughout your day. In doing so, it helps the body feel ease and release, and clear so that you can have an easeful sleep.
Candice Wu 6:08
The next meditation that I offer in the sleep album is Taking Internal Inventory. This supports you and clearing space internally, in your emotional state, in your spiritual state and attuning to peace. Sometimes, our nervous system can forget what peace feels like when we feel overloaded or focused on the daily grind and stressors, and this meditation supports sorting and clearing your inner space so that you have a natural ease and peaceful feeling which cultivates peace in the body over time, and this kind of peace and ease helps the nervous system feel that it can rest and have downtime.
Candice Wu 6:50
Another meditation and the album is called Yoga Nidra: Yogic Sleep for Releasing and Embodying New Beliefs. Yoga Nidra is yogic sleep. What this is, is a deep guided meditation that brings you to a state of consciousness called Turiya. This is a state of consciousness between waking and sleep state, which allows you to drop into the subconscious. From this space, you can plant the seed of an intention and cultivate who you’d like to be in the beliefs you’d like to believe from a very deep place, sort of like homeopathy for the soul, dropping in and intention a seed, and letting it spread through the whole body. Yoga Nidra helps me feel completely grounded, and in fact, gives me a very deep rest that almost feels more restful than sleep, and over time, this helps the nervous system remember what it’s like to feel rest, that it can easily fall asleep when you want to.
Candice Wu 7:59
The next meditation is called A Dose of Moonlight. It’s an energy healing visualization for better sleep. It’s using energy and light, imagining color of light, to bring a feeling of healing into the body. This helps the body turn on its natural capacity to heal, and gives the body a reminder of peace and love. During this type of meditation, you might experience that peace and love or healing or you might experience other emotions come through, and that also may be a healing step.
Candice Wu 8:36
The next meditation is called Rest Recovery: Middle of the Night Relief. If you do have sleep troubles, you may have woken up in the middle of the night feeling more and more stressed. As time goes on, that you might be tired in the morning or that you might not wake up when your alarm goes off, and this meditation helps you and support you in just that space. You can turn this meditation on when you’ve woken up in the middle of the night or if you can’t fall asleep, and this helps to support you in acknowledging and honoring whatever emotions are happening inside you at that moment, any stress you’re having any thoughts that you’re having that may contribute to your stress, and support you in releasing those and coming back to a restful state, helping your nervous system come down from that stress, so that you can recover and have a good night sleep or the rest of the night’s sleep.
Candice Wu 9:42
Loving Kindness Meditation is a meditation that is practiced by many people. In the Buddhist tradition, it’s called Metta, and it’s a practice of giving and receiving a feeling of love and safety from you to a loved one, and from a loved one to you, and then you to yourself. Ultimately, this supports in cultivating and expansive feeling of inner self-love and radiance.
Candice Wu 10:12
The next audio is an experiential and it’s called Illuminate Your Ancestral Sleep Story. This practice comes from family constellations and somatic practices. It’s where intuitive visualization meets meditation. In this guided audio, we unfold the dynamics of you and your ancestries’ story about sleep. When something is incomplete or unresolved in the dynamics of our lives or in our ancestors lives, this can be inherited and remain in your life today, and sometimes these relate directly to sleep, and other times they don’t, that their overwhelming experiences or losses that were hard, which caused the nervous system to feel under threat. In this meditation, I support you in revealing what’s there in your family ancestry and in your life, so that you can resolve those pieces and bring love and healing to them. Ultimately, all of that process supports a clearer nervous system, more rest and more safety for the body so that it can sleep better.
Candice Wu 11:30
That completes the list of audio meditations and guided healing experiential, and like to share just a little bit about the marma points and yoga poses that I offer in the album. Marma points come from the Vedic tradition, and they are similar to acupressure points in Chinese medicine. Marma points are the tender junctions or the tender points along the energetic channels of the body. The energetic channels provide the mapping of the physical body. When the energy channels are flowing, then your body feels healthy and strong, and you have good sleep. And when some are blocked, you may have trouble sleeping and other diseases in the body.
Candice Wu 12:19
This album gives you 11 different acupressure points to support your body in balancing the energetic channels in your body, which also are the blueprint for your emotional state. All of these marma points support you in feeling more at ease, grounded and able to digest the daily dose of experiences so that you can sleep well. The Sound Sleep Alchemy Album also offers journal explorer stories for exploring what keeps you up at night, an exploration of all the aspects of who you are and how you’re taking care of yourself, how you’re expressing yourself from your natural self, the truth of who you are. Other questions include — What makes you feel most self-expressed or most like yourself or what percentage of the time are you spending doing what makes you feel most like yourself?
Candice Wu 13:14
There’s a section about taking inventory of your beliefs around sleep and what sleep means to you, which can release some of the issues around sleep. There’s also a section about letting die what is decaying, and resolving what’s unresolved. Just looking at what’s undigested or unresolved in your life, which can be a source of keeping you up at night. The section with the yoga poses is called Good Night Moon Yoga Poses and it includes restorative and gentle asana. These include poses that offer a shift in your energy and in your physical body, so that you feel more balanced and have more restful sleep as well as feel more alert in the day time.
Candice Wu 14:01
As you can see, there’s a lot jam-packed in this album, and I hope you enjoy it. This album is curated for you to know yourself better, to sleep more soundly, to support your body and integration and grounding, and to reveal deeper aspects of what may be troubling your sleep, and what your body may be telling you through your symptoms of insomnia or sleep problems. At the very deepest level, this album is meant to support you in embodying who you truly are, and the love that you’re worthy of.
Candice Wu 14:37
I hope you enjoy this album and feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. Be gentle with yourself and stay curious about what each level of experience offers you. I hope you sleep well. So, if you’re having sleep problems, know that you don’t have to, you don’t have to live this way and that there are many ways to support better sleep. If you’re interested in this album, feel free to find it at my website, CandiceWu.com/soundsleep.
Candice Wu 15:11
I hope you sleep well and see you next time.
