Freedom + Expansion : The Terrifying Gifts of Spiritual and Existential Crisis AKA WTF is Going on? #AmIGoingCrazy? – EP13

Candice Wu 0:00

Hello, this is Candice Wu on the Embody Podcast. I am a holistic healing facilitator, intuitive coach, and artist. And in this podcast we explore remembering and embodying your true nature, alignment with your soul, embodied healing and deeply loving and expressing yourself authentically. It’s a loving support to advance your own healing process as we will journey through healing experiences and meditations together from a creative blend of yoga, family constellations, Somatic Experiencing, spiritual and soul work.

Candice Wu 0:32

I share my personal experiences as well as have co-creative conversations with wellness practitioners and healers from all over the world. Show notes for this episode can be found on CandiceWu.com/podcast.

Candice Wu 0:47

Today’s episode is brought to you by the Sound Sleep Alchemy Album. And this album is full of healing meditations to help you feel embodied, centered, and have quality rest. Your support in this helps me make more healing albums, create more content, and produce more podcast episodes. Thank you so much for being awesome. Now let’s get to the show.

Candice Wu 1:11

Today, I am in Bali, in an area called Ubud and it is beautiful. In most areas I found, some areas I found were really sad and scary actually to see the amount of plastics just strewn about, especially on the beach shore near the airport. I’m here now up in Ubud, which is more in the center of the island, and I’m surrounded by rice fields and grassy terraces, palm trees, tropical plants and birds, geckos, all inside of the jungle, but I haven’t yet been able to explore very much. I’ve been sleeping, I’ve been hiding in my cave, resting, crying, healing, writing and connecting with loved ones, as I’ve been experiencing a spiritual and existential flu/crisis, which I will share with you in this episode along with how I’ve been moving through it, and some resources in case you’re interested or are having a similar experience. So, let’s begin.

Candice Wu 2:16

I recently saw this quote, “Even monkeys fall out of trees.” It’s a Japanese proverb, and I felt it was just perfect for today’s episode because sometimes my clients wonder what’s happening with me in my inner world, and if I’m actually human-like they are, do I actually feel things? Do I actually have challenges or struggles? Or am I just in a Zen mode all the time? Of course, I have struggles and of course, I feel things. And this sharing today is to give a very in the moment experience, one that’s not completely processed and integrated as I’m still experiencing yet.

Candice Wu 2:55

Even a couple of minutes ago, before I began recording this podcast, I had this wave of sadness come through, and I didn’t quite know where it came from, or what it was about, but I felt into what might be healing for it. And one of the things that I really enjoy a lot is wandering around, especially when I’m in a new place. an unfamiliar place, the adventurous exploratory parts of me want to just wander and mosey, step at my own pace, or move quickly and just see what’s here. So, when I thought about that, I felt the sadness release.

Candice Wu 3:37

And also today, as I’m sharing, I’ve been thinking about really being real and sharing a human experience, being vulnerable and embodying what’s happening in the moment with non-resistance. When I think of vulnerability, I think of tenderness and softness to the moment, what’s deep in our hearts or souls and what’s intimate, and having the courage to share that. Brené Brown, one of my favorite leaders in vulnerability and shame, says that vulnerability is uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

Candice Wu 4:17

So, in my sharing today, I will explore what it is like at the moment for me to experience an existential and spiritual crisis or sickness/flu. And I say sickness or flu with a lot of playfulness, because it’s really about spiritual aspects of myself, parts of my being that wants to develop or evolve, that are coming to the surface, and we can name it like flu or sickness like our physical body goes through, because it can feel really uncomfortable. But it’s really about something my soul deeply wants me to learn and to grow into, and so there’s a lot of positivity connected with that, a lot of growth and transformation.

Candice Wu 5:03

A little bit more about why I’m sharing this with you today is that I want to be congruent with what I encourage others to do, which is to fully love themselves and to express themselves in ways that feel good to them. I’ve often had judgment about what I share, I feel sometimes self-conscious or critical of myself, or a fear that what I’m saying is not worthy or valuable to other people, or stupid, sometimes. But for now, I delight and feeling open at times, and to break through some of the energetic bubbles, energetic boundaries of who I was before, to reach for and hold more of me, more of my wholeness.

Candice Wu 5:49

So, in the past, not sharing as much came from many places. There’s a perfectionist part of me that has often made things prettier, gussied things up, made things polished in order to present them. And sometimes we’re just not that way, and there can be so much relief in feeling like I can share even the messy parts of me and find that worthy. I can be in my human experience without having it all boxed up and perfect, and be respected as well.

Candice Wu 6:24

Coming from being an art teacher, a yoga teacher than a therapist and being in the mental health field, life seemed to feel for me at times, like I was going from one box to another, like fitting into this role and then to that role. And even sometimes people call me a spiritual guide or a teacher, and that seems to come with some different ideas and perceptions of what that means as well. In this very moment, I’m experiencing, feeling more like a connector and a real later like in relation to others rather than a teacher. And feeling like life is like a laboratory and being in a loving space with myself so that I can heal and move through some of shame or self-consciousness that comes up.

Candice Wu 7:12

So, what I’ve been going through, in the last couple of weeks, as I’ve been in Bali, I have felt that the understanding I have of myself, my identity, and my reality have actually been shattered. It feels like a blowing apart of my worldviews and values, some that I can name and others that I can’t even name. And I’m left with questions like, what is the meaning of life? What’s the meaning of everything? Why do I exist? What am I even doing here? What am I here for, and what is anything worth anymore? I have felt feelings of hopelessness, fear, freedom, depression, sadness, grief and loss. And it feels like different parts of me are breaking down and feeling like I don’t know who I am anymore or at least parts of me feel that way.

Candice Wu 8:09

You might be wondering what happened. Well, I noticed it when I arrived in Bali, about three weeks ago. I’m going to be sharing a few personal things with you, and this is one of them. I was experiencing some pain and complications in my uterus after a minor procedure before I left to arrive in Bali. So, for me when I feel pain or discomfort, emotions or other body sensations, where I used to think, “Okay, maybe I need to go to a doctor.” Not that I wouldn’t go to a doctor now, but when I used to think that that was my first point of healing, I now think about working with my body from a spiritual level as well as the somatic level, and energetic level. And then seeing how that works, and if it becomes worse, or it doesn’t help it or I feel really stuck with it, then to not just get support from healers, but possibly go to a doctor, a medical doctor, if I need to.

Candice Wu 9:12

So, when I felt this pain in my body, I first had a healing session with my heart and soul coach. And we worked with it from a physical somatic level, a sensing level. What came through was a lot of understanding because she completely understood where I was coming from with the sensations in my body and how to work with me, as we’ve had a relationship over time. And the energy that came through that seemed to be stuck in my uterus was archetypal, and what I mean is that it was related to the feminine archetype and the consciousness of our time, the consciousness of our society right now, and the pain of being a woman.

Candice Wu 10:06

The themes of women carrying the brunt of pain and doing it alone at times, women agreeing to change and modify their bodies, as if they weren’t enough, or to change them for men or for other people. And I think about in my culture, as I’m Chinese, Chinese foot binding, and how there was such a deep connection with men and women, feminine and masculine, around that act of foot binding. And as I’m feeling really sick in my body and pained, it also came with feelings of shame, feelings of having a disgusting body or needing to feel ashamed that I’m having some reactions in my body.

Candice Wu 10:56

So, some of this felt personal, related to my personal life, my history, the things that I’ve gone through, some of it felt ancestral, experiences that my family members in the past have gone through, and just the Chinese women in the Chinese culture had gone through. But then it went farther, it seemed, the archetypal piece was about feminine energy in general, and how the feminine has been skewed in a lot of ways, the energy of it, the belief sets that the feminine energy carries. It helps me to work with my healer because I could name some of these things and move some of these through my body.

Candice Wu 11:42

But all the while I felt depressed at times, sick and scared that my physical body wouldn’t heal. And the hopelessness and the fears came with all the questions that I was asking. It felt like a dismantling and disintegrating experience, like I was falling apart in ways. And I also could recognize that I was releasing, I was grieving and letting parts of me die, but it felt so painful. And in ways it felt like parts of me were missing or disappearing. Things I couldn’t really even name, it was just a felt sense. And that’s part of what makes spiritual crisis or existential crisis or deep spiritual healing experience. So, scary at times, because we can’t name everything that we’re feeling.

Candice Wu 12:31

I felt so untethered and unanchored. And where I was asking, “Who was I? Who am I anymore?” I didn’t really have any answers. It’s like the experience of looking for something that you really love in your room, and you just keep looking and it’s not there, and you’re a bit frantic or panicked because you really love that thing. And how can you deal without it, or maybe you can, and you just don’t know. So, I experienced then beyond that physical pain that I was having, which actually moved quite quickly in the healing session, I started to have a sore throat. I’ve had a lot of experience with my body and feeling physically sick, where if I feel physically sick, as I said earlier, I work with what’s coming up in my spirit, what’s coming up in my soul, in my development of myself. And so I thought, “Okay, let’s see what the sore throat is about.”

Candice Wu 13:30

So, I grounded my body and touched into my heart and the body sensations that were happening. And it really helped to connect with loved ones at that time, that just fueled more of the ability and me to love myself and hold space for myself. And as I was able to cry and grieve about what was coming up, to feel some safety, something moved, and the sore throat went away rather quickly, in about maybe five hours from the time that I experienced some emotions about, what was coming up, which I don’t even remember anymore, it’s been so many things. But while that happened, and a sore throat went away, I felt very fatigued still.

Candice Wu 14:14

And then came many other iterations of sick, I had this like dry phlegm in my head and back of the throat. So, I had another big cry, and more grieving, and then it came pouring through like a wetter kind of congestion, that I could blow my nose and it could move, I could feel it just like loosening up in my body, which was parallel to the emotions loosening up in me, the stuckness was shifting. And then another big cry and that congestion seemed to move higher up and release, and within a couple of hours, the entire feeling of a head cold just moved and was gone, and I had so much energy. It was able to feel a little bit more like myself, to do normal daily things with a bit of energy and strength in me versus feeling like all I wanted to do is lie in bed and move really slowly and take care of myself, pamper myself.

Candice Wu 15:20

And I continue to feel waves of grief, meaninglessness loss, all the questions that would come up, and the feelings of purposelessness, in quite a scary way. My healer called it a wildfire in my body, that there was so much heat and activation waiting to be released in my body, to be moved from my past experiences, from my lineage, from who knows where, and from all of the unconscious energies in the collective unconscious, and the collective soul, all living in my body and myself.

Candice Wu 15:56

The following week was no break. I experienced my body shaking, and an aching fever that lasted only about two hours, but it was like torture for two hours. And through it, I stayed grounded. Luckily, I stayed aware and just let the body move the sensations, a lot of Somatic Experiencing practice has helped with that. And I was able to stay non-attached and let the feeling just right its way through my body and out. I am so grateful that I had support from my partner during that time, and I’ve been nourishing myself with lots of fluids and good foods, and healing visualizations. But then it didn’t stop there, I had some infection and inflammation in my body, and I’m still working through that now. But I’m in much better spirits and the waves of grief and purposelessness, fears those seem to be a little less intense.

Candice Wu 17:01

I am really grateful that I have trusted my soul to guide me. I feel that I’ve set up space and time here in Bali, that I don’t have to totally function in a super busy lifestyle like I used to. And that it can experience this spiritual tidal wave is one of my friends would call it a spiritual two by for that I can experience this with some breathing room. And it’s been really helpful that I learned about spiritual crisis in grad school from solid teachers, that studied indigenous cultures and spiritual work. And that I can put that together with all of the spiritual, emotional and physical healing that I’ve done in the past 10 years especially. And that with a lot of that work, it developed my body and my nervous system capacity to be able to withstand and be resilient to very intense emotions.

Candice Wu 18:03

It’s been helpful that I know how to ground my body and to stay centered in witnessing from a neutral place and sending myself-love, which is not always an experience that I’ve known how to do. And I’m also grateful that I have the capacity to reach out to people to ask for help and to ask for favors, sometimes. And that’s been well received.

Candice Wu 18:31

The good thing, too, is that, at this point in my life, I do feel like I know myself pretty well, and that I felt a very strong sense of purpose in my life about my healing work, about what I’ve been expressing and doing in the world. And those parts of me, still feel that, at least at the point at which I’m talking to you right now. There were days and nights, and hours where I’m I just felt like all of what I understood about myself, didn’t make any sense anymore. And what’s interesting to notice about my experience, too, is that I had quite a natural pendulation, this back and forth, of opening and expansion and elation, lots of energy, positive energy flow through me, especially around my birthday. And that podcast episode that I had recorded about, The Deepest Form of Self-love is Being You. And I felt this great vibration move through me, and it makes sense in some ways that then I swung over to feeling some other deep feelings, deep healing coming through.

Candice Wu 19:51

And I feel that during this time, to not attach this to my identity, to not say, “Okay, I am depressed, that is just who I am, or I am a mess and just labeling myself and connecting so much that that’s who I am.” Instead, just knowing that this will pass and letting all of what’s inside of me be seen but to stay curious and let it move has been an essential aspect of how I’ve moved through this and how I’ve navigated it.

Candice Wu 20:25

And I’ve experienced something similar like this before. So, it wasn’t the first time that I’ve experienced these kinds of questions or feelings in my body. And so this time with much more capacity to move through it. And what I know now is that when we open up internally, when I open up more parts of myself, traumatic or pleasurable sensations that can be activating to the body, it can come through and the capacity of my body to integrate it, to ground myself, to feel safe, to be just until I love myself can make all the difference and making it easeful or really uncomfortable.

Candice Wu 21:07

From a biological nervous system perspective, we can understand that if we go too quickly with our healing, that it can feel overwhelming. And that can bring us into a fight or flight mode or even a freeze like a frozen state. It’s called Tonic immobility, and there are so many ways to resource our body to feel safe through uncomfortable emotions, even intense ones.

Candice Wu 21:37

And one other aspect that’s been incredibly helpful for me is the practice of voice dialogue. To me, it’s a healing practice and a practice of awareness, but it’s essentially talking with parts of myself that there are sub-personalities that all have different agendas and different emotions, body sensations even, and it’s been helpful to separate these parts of me so that I can see which part is saying, “I hate the world and nothing matters.” And that I can dialogue with that single part of me, so that I can know even more about myself. And it also helps me to be able to ground myself in other parts of myself that know differently that don’t hate the world, and that feel like I can be loving or that I do have a handle on things that I have some safety.

Candice Wu 22:35

There are many different practices that touch into this, like internal family systems, parts work, inner child work, and soul work, all of it to look at the different and many parts of us and how they interact inside.

Candice Wu 22:53

So, I want to shift gears into what I mean by spiritual and what is the spiritual crisis, or spiritual flu or existential crisis. But before I go there, I want to mention how I almost saw this coming from myself. If I look back on the messages that my friends were giving me, by text, and in our conversations and the things that we were dialoguing about, it was as if I was getting some sort of preface or warning or preparation to the fact that something big was coming along to me. And that’s given me some wisdom to just stop and listen to what’s happening and what themes are going on in my conversations. And what I heard, what I noticed about those conversations was that my friends were talking about synchronicity and things breaking apart in order to break open and breakthrough.

Candice Wu 23:53

And also I had a friend who was sending me links about spiritual crisis and spiritual emergency that she was learning about it for the first time. And it reminded me of my knowledge, I was even able to share some of that understanding of when spiritual work gets to the point of crisis, with my friend, and I think it brought back and opened up this aspect of me so that I could really see myself moved through it in a way that I understood what was happening.

Candice Wu 24:23

So, what do I mean by spiritual? To me, spirituality is the relationship of ourselves to the whole, to the universe, how we relate to everything around us and within us, and what is created by us, what is created through us and how we perceive this relationship. Spiritual doesn’t mean it is necessarily tied to any religion or practice or ritual. It is just the essence of our existence, of being, and of who we are and what we are in this universe, beyond our human existence, and including our human existence. So, spiritual experiences, I often think is anything not spiritual. And to me the answer’s “No”, everything seems to relate to our existence, to our relationship to ourselves and to the universe, to the larger picture.

Candice Wu 25:24

And spiritual crisis applies in a spectrum from daily experiences that can bring you a lesson, a spiritual lesson or growth, to a spiritual flu, as my healer calls it for me, that it’s a little more intense, and maybe a period of time before this moves through, to spiritual crisis where it feels like you’re having very intense emotions, and feels like everything’s falling apart, perhaps, or that you’re having behaviors and perceptions or feelings that seem unusual. But you don’t have to be in a spiritual crisis mode to feel that your experience is connected spiritually, everything can be seen through that lens and felt through that lens, not to negate any other aspect of ourselves.

Candice Wu 26:19

But do you know that the spiritual aspect is the most subtle aspect of our entire being? And what I mean is that our physiology is made up of many layers. This is the wisdom of the koshas in yoga, and it’s the basis for all of my healing practice, or at least, this is the lens that I see through so that I can help my clients and those around me sort out what part of their physiology might need some attention.

Candice Wu 26:53

So, the layers of our physiology from the outermost layer to the innermost layer are the physical body, the energy body, the mental and emotional body, the spiritual body, or the level of the intellect, and then pure consciousness or the oneness in us, the pure being. It could do a whole nother podcast on the koshas, so, I will save all of that for another day. But the essence for today is that the spiritual aspects that innermost level of our entire being is pure consciousness, that we’re just complete energy, and no different than anything else that exists around us.

Candice Wu 27:43

And then there’s the second level out from there, which is our spiritual body, our intellect, the pure consciousness that lives within us, and that connects up with our individual soul. And in that realm, we have all of our beliefs sets that we think are who we are. And our purpose here is to look at who we really are. Are we those beliefs that we think we are? Are we who we’ve identified with and what we’ve identified with? And how we relate to the whole, based on those beliefs.

Candice Wu 28:22

So, the beauty of this system is that when you heal at the deep level of the spiritual essence of the spiritual part of you, you have an incredible and profound power to shift for that healing to radiate outward from there into the mental and emotional, the energy body, and then the physical body. So that the spiritual work we do if it can move all the way through all of those layers of who we are, which takes a lot of different kinds of practice, to let it move through all those layers, then you have the ability and the power to heal your physical body. So, if you have shoulder pain, or a chronic illness of some sort, all of these are messages from the spirit that are crying for help, that they’ve made it all the way out this energy is made it all the way out to the physical body means that it is a large cry or shout from your spirit to look at this.

Candice Wu 29:30

So, a little bit more about existential and spiritual crisis. Dr. Stanislav and Christina Grof, are two transpersonal psychologists in the founding of transpersonal psychology and coined the term spiritual emergency to describe this type of experience. What they said was that existential crisis is when the process of growth and change becomes chaotic and overwhelming. Individuals experiencing seeing such episodes may feel that their sense of identity is breaking down and that their old values no longer hold true. And that the very ground beneath their personal realities is radically shifting. In many cases, new realms of mystical and spiritual experience, enter their lives suddenly and dramatically, resulting in fear and confusion. They may feel tremendous anxiety, have difficulty coping with their daily lives, jobs, and relationships, and may even fear for their own sanity.

Candice Wu 30:31

So, some of the symptoms that you can experience in an existential crisis, a spiritual crisis, or even on that spectrum of your soul, telling you that there’s something that it wants you to learn are intense emotions, unusual thoughts and behaviors, perceptual changes, the feeling that it’s like a midlife crisis or a life crisis, you might be experiencing altered states of consciousness, shaking in your body or different felt senses in the body. And it might be like into an ego death, or the feeling of a broken heart, or the dark night of the soul. The words that I found that connected with me, too, were feeling like I was dying on the inside or falling apart, and at times being born again. Now, it was quite a painful birth.

Candice Wu 31:23

Some spiritual crises can come with or be activated by life experiences that are overwhelming or important, like your parents dying, or a car accident, losing a job or some sort of trauma or difficult experience. It can also be activated by psychic openings, or Kundalini rising is the experience of your energy rising up through the central channel of the body, it’s called Sushumna where this is your life force energy moving upwards and moving to higher vibrations. And if your body and your nervous system capacity isn’t ready for it, then it can feel very activating and overwhelming.

Candice Wu 32:12

A crisis can also come with other altered states of consciousness, mystical experiences, shamanic journeying, and other experiences that feel like you’re opening in some way. And on the other end of crisis, or during it through it at different times, you might experience a very powerful chance to reconfigure, recalibrate, and reclaim more expansiveness, more of who you are, breaking down some of the limits of who you thought you were, or who you felt you were to be. It can feel empowering and beneficial versus problematic if you can see it this way. It’s quite the chance to transcend parts of the ego or to move towards who you truly are. And in yoga, we call this the big S self. So, self with a capital S, that you are that, that you are, it’s that you are much greater than this human existence, then you think you are, that you are the consciousness that everything is made of.

Candice Wu 33:24

And the small S self-being the identity that you’ve tied yourself to who you think you are, the ego that you’re not, and that makes you feel fearful or separate from everything else. It’s the essence of yoga, yoga meaning union with the whole. So, through spiritual crisis, when you move through it, you might feel delightful, you might feel elation or some sort of spaciousness and freedom. You might experience different parts of you that you never really knew before. It can be a great and profound opportunity to renew, grow, birth, expand, experience, self with big S, feel whole and develop a different relationship with the universe, and with the whole.

Candice Wu 34:17

I like this definition or experience of spiritual evolution and spiritual crisis. It’s by Marlyse Carroll, the author of Am I Going Mad? The Unsettling Phenomena of Spiritual Evolution. She says, “We wonder if we were going mad when elements of non-ordinary realities reach our consciousness and find no links within our regular frame of reference.” She says that typically profound spiritual experiences present us with transpersonal or archetypal material, as I had mentioned before with my experience, and she says that such material represents deep unconscious forces that govern the psyche, the primal instincts, urges and images that live in the collective unconscious, all of which the ego is oblivious to, until they meet head-on that is, and she says, as a result of information overload, the ego can go into a state of chaos, during which time it cannot make sense of anything, because its mode of reality is not quite adequate for the material received.

Candice Wu 35:28

In extreme cases, if the ego is repeatedly flooded and overwhelmed by new material, it then stops operating as it normally does. I also want to note some of the cultural misunderstandings around trans personal experiences, spiritual crisis, or spiritual experiences in general, that in especially the United States, and in the Western world, we’re not quite taught or conditioned or prepared to understand how the spirit can guide us and how the spirit can bring worth such unusual experiences, at times, and such intense emotions. And so, of course, in a society like this, then if you are experiencing that, you can wonder if you are going mad, you can wonder if you’re going crazy, or if there’s something seriously wrong with you at your core.

Candice Wu 36:21

Not to say that if you’re feeling discomfort, that there isn’t something wrong, because there could be, there could be something in you that wants attention, rather, and wants completion. But it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you, in your very being. Indigenous cultures may be way more prepared to embrace and hold space for this type of experience and to have community resources and support for when you are having a crisis and you can’t necessarily function and you need a lot of love and tenderness to get through it.

Candice Wu 37:04

Dr. Carl Jung says that emotional and mental disturbances are an attempt of the mind to find wholeness. So, if we look at everything that we experience that is upsetting, or that is uncomfortable in our emotional state, we look at that as an attempt of the mind to find wholeness. And we bring that understanding, we might be able to resolve that within ourselves, or at least the journey towards that may be experienced differently.

Candice Wu 37:39

There’s also spiritual madness, and some people use that term when a person becomes psychotic or if it’s a very sudden and troublesome Kundalini awakening, a troublesome movement of energy going upward and out that the person feels so dismantled, that they can’t function at all. That leads me to the question of what is psychosis in this framework, and the same author says that psychosis is an extreme altered state of consciousness during which ego consciousness cannot handle the amount or quality of data that is bombarding it. What a different understanding than that it’s just something somebody has, is there’s a reason underneath it, there’s a way out of it then, and an understanding that we can have which gives a different kind of compassion.

Candice Wu 38:34

So, I want to end the episode with what I’ve been doing in terms of taking care of myself and helping myself through spiritual flu and spiritual crisis, as well as other ideas of what you can do if you’re experiencing this or if you know, somebody who is. For me, I’ve been working with an intuitive healer. This is somebody who I have an ongoing relationship with, and that understands this and understands me. And so, that’s been incredibly helpful to just fuel me with more compassion and more love when it’s been hard. And when I felt stuck, I’ve been meditating and feeling all sorts of body sensations move through me and staying grounded and not attaching too much to what’s happening, not believing every thought that I hear in myself, even though I can feel it and not resisting it, either. So, just harvesting it all and just seeing what’s there, without believing that that’s all who I am.

Candice Wu 39:41

I’ve been using a lot of somatic experiencing, which is the type of healing that is embodied and helps bring different tools for how to move through nervous system states where my body feels in a frozen state, or it feels in fight or flight or depressed, which is a quite frozen state. So, using different tools from there to pendulate and move back and forth from feeling discomfort to feeling safety, and pleasure, so that my nervous system can remember that I’m actually safe here. The world isn’t ending and things aren’t falling apart, even though I feel that way inside.

Candice Wu 40:21

I’ve been using family constellations, healing work, and I’ve worked with a practitioner that I like and trust, who is one of my teachers, actually. And she’s also helped me in feeling grounded in the presence of my loved ones, and also reconnecting parts of the lineage that may have been disconnected or stuck in experiences of trauma as well, just moving some of the ancestral pieces that are coming into my experience, and also resourcing safety and love.

Candice Wu 40:56

I’ve really enjoyed calling upon angels and spirit guides. For some time, I didn’t believe in that, and even if I didn’t believe in it, something about it helped. And now, it’s just, it’s not so important, whether it’s real or not. For me, it’s an experience that it is real and if it’s in my imagination? Great! If it’s not? Great. But I do feel like there are energies out there that are supportive for us to some degree. And when I just sit and open myself and open my heart and ask, ask for help. I just saying the words, “Please help. Please give me some guidance. Please let me feel love for myself. Please let me feel grounded and take care of myself.” That just helps the emotions break open for me, it brings up an enormous amount of love in my body in my heart, where then the healing can continue to move forward.

Candice Wu 41:58

What’s also helped is connecting with her friends that may understand or at least have an unconditional kind of love, where they’re not judgmental or giving me advice. But they’re supportive and loving and listening to the degree where it just feels like they’re alongside me. And I’ve quite light just going in my cave and just shutting off all electronics and all forms of communication, and just resting, putting an eye pillow on, putting my earplugs in and going away, internally.

Candice Wu 42:35

It’s been helpful to share my experience where then others are reaching out to me to share theirs, that I can express it and it’s not too attached to my identity and to get through some of the fears that it might be about who I am. And I’ve quite enjoyed reading Clarissa Pinkola Estés , her work on the wild women archetype and other poetry that she’s written, I really love the book, Women who Run with the Wolves, especially the story which speaks about the life, death and life cycle, which feels like what I’m going through in a lot of ways that this is the cycle that happens where parts of me need to end or parts of me need to release or die or shift, and then new life can come.

Candice Wu 43:22

And the last practice I want to mention today is voice dialogue where I had mentioned earlier, just talking with parts of me that seemed to be yelling or screaming for attention, or saying different emotions or questions that don’t seem like they’re part of my normal daily life. And as I tuned into those parts of me, I experienced that it was as if this divine feminine part of me wanted to tell a story. And so, that’s been incredibly helpful.

Candice Wu 43:56

And going out in nature is the last thing I want to mention actually, just going out and or looking out the window when I can’t go out. But seeing trees and the organic lines and the trees or different flowers, hearing the sounds around me, just to ground me and remind me that I’m actually safe and present here.

Candice Wu 44:18

So, if you are experiencing this or you know somebody who is, you might try some of those things that I’ve mentioned. Here are some other ideas of what you might do. Look into somebody who is an intuitive or spiritual coach or healer that you seem to resonate with, a transpersonal psychologist, or a shaman that might understand or give you some other tools and resources. Any practice that helps you integrate the cognitive aspects of you, the body, the soul and the energy, and gives you the feeling of acceptance and love, and support.

Candice Wu 45:00

I recommend practicing grounding your body, anything that helps you feel the boundaries and edges of your body, your feet on the ground, your hips on the ground, so that you can support the capacity of your nervous system to move all of the energies and unconscious pieces of what’s happening inside you out of your body and completing that. So, any type of bodywork like Somatic Experiencing or EMDR, family constellations, voice dialogue, internal family systems, shadow work or breathwork, art therapy, dance therapy, movement therapy, yoga, music therapy, and energy work. All of those touch on unconscious aspects of us, the parts of us that may not have words, the parts of us that are held in the viscera and the tissues, and the cells of our body that we may or may not even be aware of, can come through in sort of like a backdoor way when we do any of those practices.

Candice Wu 46:10

There’s also the Spiritual Emergence Network, which provides a free hotline, that if you’re experiencing anything that feels overwhelming, intense or unsettling, that you can call and talk with somebody who understands spiritual crisis or spiritual emergency, spiritual emergence.

Candice Wu 46:30

So, I hope that this has been interesting for you. I really appreciate you listening. And feel free to reach out if you are curious if you have questions, if you’d like to chat or if you need more support.

Candice Wu 46:44

Before you leave today, I’d like to invite you to subscribe to the weekly Embody Podcast at CandiceWu.com/podcast or to learn more about me get free resources, an embodiment and healing, meditations, and self-love by going to CandiceWu.com/embody.

Candice Wu 47:03

See you next time on the Embody Podcast.