Candice Wu 0:00

This week is part three of the whole conversation around taking, receiving and giving, and the balance of each of these. In this conversation, I explore who is the part of you that’s giving, and the balance of when you give and what that does in a relationship as to its relation to when you receive our take, how to balance relationships in terms of taking, giving and receiving, and what happens in the dynamic. I also talk about self-love and giving to the self as well as how that relates to our dynamics in relationships on the human level.

Candice Wu 0:42

This episode is part three of taking, receiving and giving and the balance of each of these as well as cleansing our dynamics and believes that are in relation to these three ways of being in life. I share some of my own thoughts on the balance of taking, receiving and giving as well as the thoughts of Bert Hellinger from Love’s Hidden Symmetry. Bert Hellinger is the founder of family constellations and explores these hidden dynamics.

Candice Wu 1:18

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 1:31

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

Candice Wu 1:53

It’s so important to let die what needs to die. If you think about rotting fruit and you just let it sit there and you don’t throw it out or buried in the earth, it just sits there and keeps on rotting and decaying, and often what is within us that wants to be released and felt, and honored to release or end can fester. What wants to complete itself can be overdue. Have you ever had a relationship where it just needed to end or change in some way or something needs to be acknowledged or felt, and because that delayed or it was maybe hard to do so it got worse?

Candice Wu 2:43

Well, this is my experience at times and when I first experienced the death meditation by Ana T. Forrest, through her work of Forrest Yoga, and healing, it was really profound. It was a simulation of death, which brought me to face the experience of if I were to die in 12 hours, what would I want to say do or feel and experience? What would it mean to live? And so, with that experience, I have found inspiration and adapted the Ally with Death Experiential, which is a way to experience that simulation of death through an audio experience, and through prompts that ask of you to look at what needs to end in your life, what belief sets are you carrying that really weigh you down or create suffering, what in your outer world needs to happen, what needs to be said, what needs to be acknowledged, so that you can fully live life and come back to your playful, intuitive, creative, sensing, curious self. And if that’s not something you know, that part of you is, curious and playful parts of you, maybe that doing this can allow that to come and shine through.

Candice Wu 4:12

So, my adaptation of this experience includes the body it includes what happens inside as you’re feeling this, what are you noticing in your body, emotions, images. This is my own creation of what has helped me in partnering with the energy of death to let things truly release and die, and to imagine a death, and to let that happen so that I can find renewal and revitalization.

Candice Wu 4:47

If you’re interested in this experience, it’s fantastic for the winter or for your moon cycle or a phase of the moon cycle, in general, or anytime you’re feeling way down. stuck, anxious, depressed. If there are things you know you need to face or something that seems like it wants to be acknowledged within you, this is a great opportunity to experience it. It’s a 75-minute audio experience, and it’s full of stirring and provocative music that’s handpan music by a friend of mine, Larry St. Germain. He’s an artist and a musician, and he was so excited to take on this project and just poured his heart and soul into the fine-tuning, the mood and the energy that hold space for us to truly look in places, in the dark places, and face what it is that we need to really honor.

Candice Wu 5:52

So, that’s music by Larry Saint Germain, and it’s produced and edited by Chris Spiegl, who’s the editor of the Embody Podcast, and he did a fantastic job of amalgamating his chunks of sound to fit right in with my voice and fill in and hold the space for. You can find this experience at CandiceWu.com/death.

Candice Wu 6:17

Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining me today. This is going to be an interesting conversation. I’m literally in a robe because it’s cold here in Michigan. I have a cup of tea. I hope you’ll join me with something comforting to yourself in this topic of giving. It’s really beautiful to be able to give to yourself and receive what you’re giving to yourself. That to me means taking time for self-care and doing that in a way that’s woven through your day. So, that is part of you. Not just something you set aside to do, which is a beautiful thing, too, but having this cup of tea here, and receiving the benefit, really feeling into how that feels to give to yourself, the pleasure it is or where it feels comforting or soothing. So, I invite you to do that today. Whatever it is that would make you feel soothed in this moment, whether that’s a little bit of contact to your body or getting a blanket or if you’re in transit, to do something that supports your body in feeling more comfortable and cared for.

Candice Wu 7:43

I just spent about five days in New York on a visit, and so glad to be home in this cozy place in Michigan. There’s snow on the ground. It’s the week of Thanksgiving here in the United States and I just love this cozy feeling before the holidays, but I also want to acknowledge that I didn’t always feel that way, and I know for many people, holidays are a hard time, and that can relate to all sorts of family dynamics, belonging or expectations, but also, hurts and wounds of the past. So, here, as you’re coming towards any holidays of your culture or your ethnicity, maybe it’s a chance to look at what hurt or wounds have been here, what’s the feeling you have now and just take a moment to honor those rather than being harsh on yourself or critical or trying to push these parts of you away. And also, it might be a time to push these parts of you to the side in a sense of, if you need to have some boundaries around what you’re feeling to move towards what’s pleasurable as we started in the beginning of this podcast.

Candice Wu 9:06

So, I would like to just jump into this podcast today. The last couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about taking, taking what’s given to us, taking what we need, taking up space, and all of the dynamics underneath it that may prevent us from really being able to take what’s ours. We’ve also been talking about taking versus receiving and the active feeling around taking, the active assertion that’s needed to take, to take our place in our lives and in our ancestry. And also, the topic of receiving and how it is to receive, to receive love to receive all the things that are coming our way, and how we can step into by taking our place, step into all of what it is that is here for us, that is specific perfectly designed for us to receive in this life and to take in this life.

Candice Wu 10:06

I’ve talked about taking our place as a way of taking your true position in your family lineage, and also, in yourself, in who you are, the essence of you. What I didn’t talk about is taking our parents as they are, and how much that is a part of and the essential groundwork to being at peace in ourselves and loving ourselves, and feeling whole. Before I jump into that, if you want to hear the previous conversations, you can find that at CandiceWu.com/taking and CandiceWu.com/receiving. That’s part one into and they’re also linked to the show notes of this episode. If you’d like to catch up with that, you can start and that’s totally fine, too, I think. This conversation it all loops together.

Candice Wu 11:06

So, taking our parents as they are. I often hear people saying I don’t want to be like my parents or having criticisms of their parents, rejecting them in some way, and what that does, I know from my own experience, in myself and with my clients is that there’s a way in which that rejection holds the place marker for what we feel and what our young self feels or has felt or needs to feel, and that can be this beacon to where it is that our soul wants us to heal. And at the same time, if we leave it there, as we leave it there, there’s a way that we reject who we are in ourselves. There is a way I reject myself if I reject my mother or some piece of my mother.

Candice Wu 12:06

If we go towards the spiritual truth of the wholeness of who we are, we are all possibility. We are capable of every way of being, and if I reject this certain part of my mother, maybe the way that she is stubborn or something like that, then I also reject that part of me that has stubbornness or is possibly stubborn. And when I do that, there is a constriction inside of me. There’s some part of me that blocks itself off to the wholeness of all energy, which also relates to pleasant feelings and pleasant qualities or more desirable, societally desirable qualities. Our soul wants us to be multidimensional and multifaceted, and in every single way of being, so that if we ever need that way, we’re able to do it, and we have the flexibility, but also, that that’s just the essence of our fullness, period.

Candice Wu 13:23

That is my belief at least, and what I have felt is that when I’ve embraced that stubbornness in me, then I’m able to see myself with more humanity, compassion, and yet, I know why it is that I may have rejected this quality in my mother because perhaps it brought me hurt or in relation to her as a child. And so, these are these place markers, these rejections of our parents, place markers for what we ourselves are wanting to heal and look at, that’s why people around us are our teachers, especially when it brings us an unpleasant experience, just that they’re holding something for us to learn.

Candice Wu 14:15

So, taking our parents as they are, is challenging because it often requires us to feel the feelings that we have in relation to the way that they are, and we often needed our parents to hold that space or wished that they could to hold that space so that it felt safe enough to feel those feelings and that isn’t always there. So, it creates a bit of a bind, in a way, but as adults, we can find resource and other ways to support us in coming to that true acceptance, not just acceptance, but agreement of who our parents are, and when I feel in that place of full agreement of who my parents are with all of what and who they are, and what came before them, it’s a bigger picture than just them. I feel much more in agreement with myself.

Candice Wu 15:15

So, instead of saying, “Oh, my father’s a jerk,” and leaving it there, where my judgment, our perception is distorted because of my emotions, which is natural in a way or we tend towards that, where’s there a bit of neutrality, that may be the truth is he was absent, but that there is a greater reality. We’re truth to that. Where’s the compassion to see where that originated, that it didn’t start with him as Mark Wolynn, a family constellations writer and facilitator says it didn’t start with you in his book. Whether there’s a greater experience of the family system that makes its way down to me, where my experience of hurt has a place. And can we allow ourselves the grace of feeling what we feel and what we need to acknowledge that human experience not to ignore that to honor it, but also see farther back, and to honor a bigger picture? Jim Kolakowski, my first yoga teacher and spiritual teacher I really admire, he was on the podcast as well. He says if we could see the bigger picture, like the biggest picture, we wouldn’t be upset anymore. This we would understand so much more.

Candice Wu 16:44

So, that’s a preface to this conversation of giving is that piece of taking our parents as they are, that I didn’t talk about in that first conversation of taking and it’s so easy essential, and I’ll mention Bert Hellinger later in this episode, which is part of why I recall that piece that I wanted to share that’s so essential to the family constellations work, and the gift that constellations can bring is this very powerful honoring of who the people are behind us that give us the freedom and ability to honor ourselves, and that’s the preface to this conversation of giving.

Candice Wu 17:39

Giving, I have said in the first podcast of taking that it can be often overrated, like we just seem to hear messages or at least I do, that we should give and give, and give and give, and yet, somehow that doesn’t quite feel right. I often find that giving can come out of an incongruence with love, that it’s coming from another place. Have you ever received something from someone with a slight feeling of something more coming with it? Maybe there’s guilt coming with it or obligation or some feeling of debt or there’s, I don’t know, pity coming with it, sympathy, and maybe that’s okay, but this conversation here is to take a look at what it does come with for you in terms of you giving and how you receive or take in those relationships.

Candice Wu 18:44

I’ve certainly used giving as a way of trying to receive validation and love, belonging, and that comes from my early imprints of life that if I gave of myself, not just in gestures or gifts, but if I gave up myself, if I gave up who I was and became someone for someone else, then I would feel worthy. It went to the core it was like my existence was to give, my existence was for others, and that became extremely painful, over time, as I became aware of it. It did help me survive, and so, I appreciate that I survived and I’m able to look at all the pain that came out of that in a very loving way at this point in life, and over time.

Candice Wu 19:46

How does that sit with you to does anything come up for you now, as this conversation opens your relationship with giving, your relationship with what it means to give and what happens when you give? What you might expect or desire? And this is all happening, perhaps, on a subtle level. So, even if you’re like, “No, no, no, I’m pretty clear about that,” you might consider looking a little deep, more deeply and more nuanced, and just see what turns out for you.

Candice Wu 20:29

When I think about giving some words come up with giving time, giving attention, giving energy, gifts, foods, cards, offering attention, hugs, kisses, love, compliments, giving thanks, giving up, giving myself, what that means. When we give what feels like too much only we can know what that is. There’s a polarity. There’s a polarity on the other side of giving too much is asking for too much. What you want from other people, what is underneath that giving might be something that you are wishing for and drawing for energetically.

Candice Wu 21:31

Now, I want to read an excerpt from Love’s Hidden Symmetry. What makes love work in relationships, and this is a book by Bert Hellinger, Gunthard Weber, and Hunter Beaumont. Three very prominent family constellations, people and Bert Hellinger being a founder of this modality and work, culminating the work, and I’m on page 12, 13 and 14 if you have the book or if you’re hoping to get it, but here is this conversation about the conscience and balance in giving and taking.

Candice Wu 22:11

And they say, “Our relationships and our experiences of guilt and innocence begin with giving and taking. We feel entitled when we give, we feel obligated when we take. The oscillation between entitlement and obligation is the second fundamental dynamic of guilt and innocence in every relationship. It serves all our relationships since both giver and taker know peace only when both have given and taken equally. When we receive something from someone, we lose our innocence and our independence. When we take, we feel indebted and beholden to the giver. We feel this obligation is discomfort and pressure, and we try to overcome it by giving something back. We can’t truly take anything without feeling the need to give, and taking is a form of guilt. Innosense in the service of this exchange becomes manifest as the comfortable feeling of entitlement that comes when we take fully and when we give a little more in return, then we have taken, we feel innocently carefree and light-hearted when we’ve taken fully, and our needs have been satisfied and when we’ve also given fully in return.”

Candice Wu 23:31

So, in this conversation, what we’re talking about is that when we accept, we take from someone we receive, that it’s typical to feel that sense of guilt and obligation, and that the balance of some energy exchanges is off-balance, but it can be balanced when we give back. I find that to be true and the very basis of relationships of human, of the humankind, which we are here for or we are here in, and where he says, this statement, “it’s better for you to feel obligated to me than for me to feel obligated to you,” is something that really rang true for me when I started to look at my relationships with others and how I was using giving in order to gain something.

Candice Wu 24:29

So, this is beyond just a balance and exchange of energy that’s natural and clean of other things. What I find is that giving is often connected with these other things, of wanting validation and wanting more in return than just a thank you, and wanting someplace of our belonging to be secured by what we’re giving and what we get out of that. With that idea that “it’s better for you to feel obligated to me than for me to feel obligated to you,” they talk about the helper syndrome and say that such self-centered striving for freedom from need is fundamentally hostile to relationships. Whoever wants only to give without taking clings to an illusion of superiority, rejects the bounty of life and denies equality to his or her partner. Others soon want nothing from those who refuse to take and become resentful and withdraw from them.

Candice Wu 25:41

So, when giving becomes so weighted, and someone does not take it all, and I see this when I hear compliments being given back and forth like someone says, “Oh, you did such a good job,” and this was like a team collaborative effort and you did such a good job and the other person says, “No, you did” or they like, they contribute all the credit to the other person back to the other person. It just feels like they’re tossing this ball and back and forth, and it’s getting bigger and bigger, but nobody will really hold it, and to really hold it, perhaps, needs that acceptance of some level of guilt or some discomfort.

Candice Wu 26:23

When I look at all this, my reaction is that yes, I have found this to be true, but also that it’s mixed up with those early dynamics of what we needed from our parents, and we carry around any leftover needs to other relationships. And so, when that ball gets bounced back and forth with more, more need for validation, and instead of just accepting it, we give it to the other person and we hope that they’ll take it, but we hope that they’ll take it and give us something back, and yet, we still can’t take that. I’m describing something very particular which may or may not be part of your experience, but I wonder if you see this in your life or in other people, in yourself. We are the places that it’s very hard to receive and take. Even just a compliment, just to accept it fully. Do you bounce it back to somebody else? Is there a feeling of obligation or guilt? Are you able to feel that and hold that or do you stay in the innocent place where in a way you require others to feel that guilt or obligation instead of you?

Candice Wu 27:53

And maybe guilt and obligation or not the right words for what’s being bounced back and forth, I can imagine others’ feelings there, but there’s this quality of a very basic human need that’s being tossed back and forth that is also being denied back and forth. So, going back to Love’s Hidden Symmetry and what these authors suggest is that a full exchange, fully receiving and fully taking is what creates a very equal balance in relationships.

Candice Wu 28:31

Can you fully receive and fully take? There’s a way that neutralizes and doesn’t let it bounce back and forth, but there’s a place for it to absorb in and to build more. They also talk about when reciprocity is impossible, for example, when the power dynamic is in a way that you’re not meant to or that it isn’t possible to for things to be equal in a give and take, for example, parents to children or when someone is very sick, and they really cannot give back in a certain way, and the answer might be to give it forward, give it forward or to thank and acknowledge that this is something, a gift that one cannot give back. And often that also balances that given take.

Candice Wu 29:37

So, I see this in many relationships, and also, with giving to yourself, with self-love, with healing, with healing the parts of me that have wanted and needed from other people, I’ve come to find a different place, a lighter place where that giving doesn’t ask for as much from other people, and I don’t know if it’s selfless giving, there’s this common conversation or pressure in society to be selfless when you give and not expect anything in return. I think that also comes from very deep philosophies, a spirituality of many kinds, and we have to be careful about that because when we fake it, it becomes this underlying, unconscious or energetic or pushed down, repressed dynamic. And we do make ourselves better than human. In that way, we say we’re not subject to those human desires that we actually have, that we’re pushing down and hiding, and we will pretend that we don’t need anything, and yet, it acts on this unspoken level that can be visceral and palpable.

Candice Wu 31:04

But I do believe that there is a place of selfless giving or giving without expectation, but it comes with earning it. It comes with really looking and feeling through, and having the capacity to feel through where we use giving, taking or receiving to feel belonging or feel worth or to reject it or to ask for it, and what those three x indicate as far as those young dynamics or maybe even past life dynamics that come into this life.

Candice Wu 31:48

I have this view, also, because when I work with horses, I may have told this story in another podcast, but I can see this clear reflection of the places in me or the times in me that I want something back when I give. So, I give a carrot to a horse, and there are some days that I feel like, “Yep, just giving it to them and they’ll enjoy it. However, they enjoy it. Maybe they’ll drop it to the ground even, maybe they don’t want it or maybe they gobble it up and just walk away.” And I’m fine with that. That just is satisfying in itself, but when I first started giving food to horses, I could see that I wanted something back. I wanted them to love me. I wanted them to cuddle with me and give me some sort of loving attention that said, “I like you and I honor, I value you and you’re something to me.” And of course, when they just grabbed the apple out of my hand and walked away and ate it, and didn’t look back, there was something in me that had to look at my own experience in what I was projecting onto that horse, those needs that I was expecting them to fulfill for me.

Candice Wu 33:18

So, working with horses gives me this very clean look at how I can give and not expect, and I don’t know that working with horses is free of the balance of give and take, especially in this setup of when horses are under the care of humans and there is a power dynamic, but it gives me a bit of a cleaner look than most human relationships do. So, it might be a fun exercise for each of us if we gave to someone, if we give a gift or if we give a compliment or give our time and energy, and they just experience it however they experience it and don’t say anything, not even, “Thank you” or, you know, they take it and then receive it. What would we or what would you expect from them in those moments? Would you expect a gracious “thank you?” Would you expect something later in return?

Candice Wu 34:29

I think it’s just important to recognize this level of who we are, and perhaps, how that’s tied to a younger self or another part of us that really needs something, and that actually the kindness that we do to both ourselves and others, when we honor what’s truly there in our desires, we honor our humanity and we clean up the dynamics that are within us, that are between us from these things that we push down and secretly asked for.

Candice Wu 35:09

So, another way to look at this is to look at the opposite. When you receive or when you take, is there a level of your own guilt or unworthiness coming up that you don’t deserve that or feel uncomfortable taking it? Does that ask more of someone else when you reject it or when you slightly bounce it back the other way or fully do that? To you play into the experience that giving means that someone holds a debt to you and that you hold a debt to someone else when you receive? I could feel that very palpably. In my experience in the past that when people gave, I felt so uncomfortable, and that I had to almost immediately give back something or else I wasn’t worthy of that initial giving, I wasn’t worthy of being in a relationship, and how much tension and anxiety was written in that.

Candice Wu 36:23

And so, if you receive something in this way, what does it mean about when you give? What are you asking others for? Is there a way that you’re asking for a favor, care or love, and how much of it? Because it’s okay to ask for care and love. It’s okay to ask for validation. It’s okay to want these human things. How much of that is a healthy level in your adult life, and how much of that is your child’s need? And how much of that asks from another place of a past life or fulfilling, balancing out something from the past life? All of It’s okay. For me, I just rather know where it’s coming from and how much I’m asking of someone, and when I acknowledge that, it seems to go better, for me and the other person. It almost feels like, this, it’s better when we acknowledge that this is a giant boulder rather than pretending it’s a rock and it feels like a boulder when I ask someone to hold that for me or move it from one place to another.

Candice Wu 37:43

There are very subtle ways that we are asking for more or we’re asking for something and not claiming it, and this conversation here, for me, it’s very interesting to just look at that, and clear up some of those things to know where I’m asking of others, something more than perhaps, the relationship can hold or wants to hold, and to be able to give some of those things to myself so that there’s less burden on my relationships, and there’s more delight, and there’s more loving, true acts of loving that I can receive and give, and holding myself. And when I stay unconscious to it all, it just seems like there’s some level of action that has a pull in the relationship that I’d rather know about than not.

Candice Wu 38:52

So, how do we align with a truly loving act of giving and receiving, a delight in the act of it, like, delighting and how the horse just takes that carrot and does what he wants with it, rather than expecting them to do something specific with it or after. My experience, also, comes from Vedic science, where one of my favorite concepts is Pragya, and that is the concept of pure action, complete action, meaning, when you do any action, it comes so connected, it comes out of an intention that’s so connected and clear, and whole that is conscious. An action that comes from why you’re doing it, and all of us or as much of us is in that action as possible, then that action does not need outcomes or fruits of that action in order to feel complete.

Candice Wu 40:10

There are many concepts in Vedic science and philosophy around “action that does not rely on the fruits of that action to fulfill itself”, and the beautiful thing is when that happens, typically, the outcomes and fruits of that labor are quite abundant, but without the pressure on that to come to fruition. So, Pragya, this experience of complete action can be applied to giving when we give, we just delight. We can just delight in the act of giving and feel complete in that, but if there are parts of us, our younger self, other parts of us that want and that don’t feel complete in it and that want something more than that will play itself out, too, so, even though we think that we are complete in our giving or in our action in that moment, there might be unconscious parts or subtle aspects of us that are playing out or it might be conscious. The more we can hold it in our consciousness, the more I can hold my younger self’s hand, and give my younger self what it needs, instead of expecting someone else to give it. Then that action feels complete or more complete, as complete as it can.

Candice Wu 41:53

Not sure if there’s ever a time that one is fully, fully, fully conscious of every single thing, but we continue to unfurl and see more of ourselves as the days go on, and when we look at this dynamic, it is a paradigm and dynamic we live in, at certain times, and we don’t have to, so there’s something more, there’s a different way of being, there’s that human reality of what we wish for and wished for, and where that comes from, and there’s also a level of self-loving where we can give to ourselves so that that isn’t expected in between a relationship, but that doesn’t make us a place where we do that doesn’t make us superior and not needing anyone at all, not needing others to give to us at all, not needing love or validation from anyone at all that can be so violent, on the other hand. So, where’s that balance for you?

Candice Wu 43:12

Another way that I notice what is tied in and entangled with giving and taking is how do I feel when I don’t give, and if others are giving. There was a time in grad school that we were asked to bring food to share, and I did it. I think I was too tired or didn’t have time, and then I just thought, “Oh, forget it. It’ll be fine.” But when I got there, and everyone had brought something and I didn’t, I felt so guilty, and I think that might be what Bert Hellinger, Gunthard Weber, and Hunter Beaumont were talking about in this book, Love’s Hidden Symmetry, that you feel the guilt when you take, and I remember feeling in that moment, “Well, can I exercise the feeling of taking and receiving without having given here? Am I able to just allow this basic human experience of taking and receiving?” And I noticed that that might allow others to take also and not always have to give, that kind of breaks up the dynamic of the back and forth, but it was also my way of justifying that I should just try to take, but that I could separate taking, and this experience of only taking and not giving from defining my worth or feeling judgment about myself, and then I can also separate someone else’s worth or any judgment from when they just take and accept without giving back.

Candice Wu 45:05

Is this something you resonate with? Have you experienced when you don’t give? What happens there? What thoughts go through your mind — judgments, feelings, sensations? What impulses happen? So, for me to be in the wholeness of everything, I think that level of self-loving as well as acknowledging the human level of what I desire, need, and the young parts of me that desire and need, holding all of that in this sphere of what I can see and look at, gives me the best place to have lighter interactions and clean up my ways of giving and receiving, and taking.

Candice Wu 45:56

For me, that gives me a way to feel in alignment and congruence with the way I’d like to be in this life and the way I’d like to relate to others. So, both feeling that self-loving, fulfilled, that is earned, and noticing indicators of where there are unconscious places that I asked for more than I’m claiming or that I asked for something in return and continue to find more and more subtle layers of worthiness, feeling worthy of taking and receiving, feeling worthy of giving and not expecting others to be of certain way as they receive it or don’t receive it, and this interesting place where if others asked more of me when they give me something if I can sense that or if there’s a wish on their side that something is returned. Do I want to play into that dynamic? Do I want to name it? Do I want to just acknowledge it internally? What’s the most loving thing to do in that moment for myself and others or what do I want to do and play with and experiment with? We don’t have to live in the same dynamic as someone asserts towards us.

Candice Wu 47:32

So, what comes up for you now, at the end of this conversation, in this balance of giving and taking, and what’s tied up in your dynamics, as we approach Thanksgiving in the United States, even in our saying thanks. How can we do that in a more genuine and full way? And if that’s challenging, being compassionate and gentle with ourselves to look at what’s there, what’s embedded in that, what’s embedded in the impulse to give back right away if that’s what we feel, or to not even take it at all. Is your “thank you” way of saying, “No, I can’t accept this.” Why do you say that? Or you shouldn’t have. What does that say? And to have that loving for yourself that just allows all of it to be experimental and playful, and a way to see more of ourselves, because we’re all in this, we’re all experiencing some of these dynamics somewhere, because we are human, and this is our playground to explore other ways we can share and assert ourselves, and receive and relate.

Candice Wu 49:12

So, this Thanksgiving, I want to give thanks to myself for the grace in that playfulness and curiosity, and exploring, doing it without judgment if possible, and just loving myself where that judgment does come up, and I invite you to do the same, and I also want to send a very big thanks from my heart for all of you out there that listened to the podcast, that share it with other people that feel inspired naturally, and also, those that are supporting the podcast in other ways by giving some money, financial contribution to nourish the podcast on the back end, and to keep it going in that way. This goes back all the way to the beginning of when I started the podcast of why or from what place I was doing the podcast.

Candice Wu 50:17

I actually felt like this was in a lot of ways for me, like a gift to myself that I could just have this platform to express things, to push my own edges, and share things that have been harboring inside of me, but also ideas and knowledge, and practices that I wanted to just put out there in some format. And people would ask me, does it cost you money? Or are you getting anything in return? Is that a good marketing platform? Things like that, like people in the business world.

Candice Wu 50:56

I feel that I really ran with this Vedic concept and philosophy of pure action, of being in congruence with the clear and pure intention of why I wanted to do this podcast, which wasn’t to expect some outcomes, but it was the action of doing it just for doing it and the delight of that, that this podcast has actually given me many returns and other ways, and all of you have been a part of that, just by receiving and giving me feedback and sharing kind words, sharing your support.

Candice Wu 51:42

You know, this is interesting timing because this is the 99th episode, and next week will be the 100th episode of the Embody Podcast. It’s crazy, and the count does not include all the meditations and experiential that would be, I don’t know, 130 if we counted all those pieces as separate, but all those experientials relate to their umbrella, their parent episode, which is 100 episodes.

Candice Wu 52:16

So, while we’re here, I want to just share that you can find all those episodes at CandiceWu.com/podcast, and you can even search episodes that relate to what you might, what kind of nourishment you might need or topics you’re wanting to explore, and you can go to CandiceWu.com/meditations to find all the experiential and meditations that I’ve created and shared as well as those of my guests on the podcast.

Candice Wu 52:44

Thanks so much for joining me today, and I look forward to connecting with you with the 100th podcast next week. So, tune in for that if you’re interested. I have a very special guest that she and I share something very important in common, and you’ll find out what that is next week.

Candice Wu 53:03

Take care, and see you all next time on the Embody Podcast.

Candice Wu 0:00

Today’s episode is with special guests Suzi Tucker, where we look at how nuance requires courage, hoarding expression, and the questions around life and do we bother to take ourselves seriously? Can we look instead of not look, in order to honor our experiences? And do we let ourselves complete things so we can feel our own competence?

Candice Wu 0:25

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

Candice Wu 0:38

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 1:00

If this episode or other podcasts have touched you in any way, supported you in your life, or inspired you to heal or love yourself, I would be so grateful if you thought about contributing to my Patreon page. It’s a place where you can donate as little or as much as you’d like to. And in exchange, you can also get some lovely gifts with a new gift out there. That is a monthly call for a group of four people at a time where you can get embodied and soul support for whatever you’re going through in your life.

Candice Wu 1:33

This is not your typical coaching call where we just talk about what’s going on in your life. It’s where you can receive embodied support to move through your felt sense, to tap into your own and inner wisdom, and your intuition, as well as move through any pieces of blocks that are coming up in your experience. If you’d like to check it out, go to my page at CandiceWu.com/patreon. And now let’s jump into the episode.

Candice Wu 2:05

Welcome back, everyone. It’s great to have you here today. And it’s a really an honor to have Suzi Tucker on the show today.

Candice Wu 2:13

Suzi is one of my Family Constellations teachers. She facilitates Family Constellations beautifully, and she can just practically speak the language of anyone. She has this beautiful flair for tuning into the language set of you, and where you came from your ancestry, the things that you picked up along the way, to touch into the antidote and the missing pieces of what’s not been said, or the healing step that can be acknowledged.

Candice Wu 2:43

Whenever I talk to Suzi, I feel like we are working with life as a piece of artwork. And I just feel this artistry come through, where I can look at my life in a non-linear way, where I just feel the movements and the subtleties with more beauty.

Candice Wu 3:05

What I’ve experienced with Suzi, as a client, and as a student, is that, whatever words I’m bringing to the struggle of my situation, seem to just open up an entire field of what’s happened in my family ancestry, so that it can be honored and released and then I no longer have to carry it or be loyal to some pain or dynamic, and then I can be free or in my life now to step into the possibilities that I didn’t even know we’re there, to feel more ease and myself as I walk into any situation and just exist in this life now.

Candice Wu 3:45

Suzi’s also a writer, and it’s through writing that she became interested in the work of Bert Hellinger, who developed Family Constellations as the editor in chief of Zeig, Tucker, and Theisen publishers.

Candice Wu 3:57

While she was in her career in publishing, she co-founded the Bert Hellinger Institute and went on to study, teach, and facilitate Family Constellations on her own. She is incredibly gifted and quite magical. So here’s Suzi.

Candice Wu 4:13

Well, Suzi, I am so happy that you’re here with me today. And that we get to have this conversation. This is already a gift for me.

Candice Wu 4:21

Suzi, you’ve been my teacher and colleague. And that’s a little bit hard to say, because I see you in a different space. And we can talk about that a little bit. I just want to welcome you today.

Suzi Tucker 4:33

Thank you. It’s a gift for me as well, Candice. I enjoy these conversations in general, because, for me, they are just conversations. But, I wrote this too. I love how you’re showing up in the world. And it’s my great honor to join you for a little while today.

Suzi Tucker 4:55

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it’s funny, just as you’re talking, I’m thinking that one of the differences between my life now and, I always laugh, because I don’t know, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 20 years ago, is the kind of opening of portals of expression.

Candice Wu 4:55

Thank you. When you said that, that just meant so much to me, because it’s something I’ve been working on with you specifically. And I see how you show up in the world. And I read what you write. And, I just love how you’re sharing bits and pieces of your experience, and in a way that feels so humble and informative, and offering, and I appreciate that so much about you.

Suzi Tucker 5:27

I think that, when I think of how life has changed, can change, there is a place where there is so much inside of all of us. And there has been so much inside of me that at a certain point, the idea of not expressing it, became a really destructive feeling. And that simple expression, whether it’s to write or to, you know, I’m a crappy painter, but I love to paint. Or, I also do some drawing, which is worse than my painting. But I love that too. Or, walking or speaking to you.

Suzi Tucker 6:44

These portals of communication and expression alleviate sort of internal pressure there. I love the idea that I can bring something to somebody else. And that act of creativity is very, we try to avoid the word healing. But that’s the word that comes to me, a healing for me. So these moments are reciprocal.

Candice Wu 7:11

That’s lovely. Yeah, I can really resonate with that in a similar way. I was experiencing that I was hoarding, all the things I wanted to say. And that related so much to my family system, feeling like they didn’t have enough, and not being enough, and hoarding all of that. And it’s funny how that showed up in ways with objects in my family’s life, like objects in the home.

Suzi Tucker 7:40

Yeah.

Candice Wu 7:41

But then for me, it showed up in the way I was afraid to express myself, and still am, some days, but I’m just aware of the fact of letting that come through.

Suzi Tucker 7:54

I love that! I haven’t got to use that word before. But of course, I love words. So, I’m going to just, you know, very publicly here, listed from you.

Candice Wu 8:07

Feel free.

Suzi Tucker 8:09

But that idea of hoarding expression, I think, is a really useful idea. Because, again, you know, when you think about the, you know, this little hoarding, we collect so much, too much about it, topples over onto us and can actually suffocate us, right?

Candice Wu 8:31

Yeah.

Suzi Tucker 8:31

So that idea of hoarding emotion, hoarding expression, with the assumption that we’re somehow not worthy. And of course, in a way, that’s a dual assumption, because there is the sense, you know, I think always from our systems, in one way or another, that we’re not allowed, where we don’t have enough, or what we say is not important to not.

Suzi Tucker 8:55

And at the same time, there is a request, an implicit request that the world comes toward us to validate us. And so, it’s a funny sort of insecure, difficult place that also has, I think, a very young expectation or wish that comes with it. And of course, the more we wish, in a way, the more passive we are. And the more passive we are, the more suffocated we are, so these ways of expression.

Suzi Tucker 9:32

And when I see you do the interviews, and I see you do the podcasts in it, I haven’t seen the photographs that you post and the statements that you make, they’re like throwing pebbles into the water, and you don’t know where those circles are going to extend to you. You’re only, you know, it’s an act of faith to throw the pebble. And then there’s this beautiful thing of those circles reach some of us and we look back at you Candice and we say, “Yes, this has meaning to me.”

Suzi Tucker 10:06

And other people, perhaps the circles don’t reach, but you don’t even know it, because you’re tossing the next pebble. And they got that kind of consistent tossing of the pebbles, is where it’s at, on some level. And that’s humble, I suppose. And it has a certain audacity too. A kind of beautiful audacity.

Candice Wu 10:38

That’s a lovely image. I actually was having something similar the other day thinking about how I want to act and be, and the experience of how do I connect with anything that I’m doing, maybe it’s writing a bill for taxes and how can I feel into this, for whatever it is, and feel that it’s something that might be interesting or joyful or helpful to me, and let that be a bit of like, sprinkling of joy into my life, and just let each act contain that, as it goes out, and then it’s done. So I can feel the fullness of it. And because I think I can feel the dark side of things a lot easier now in my life, because I’ve worked so hard at it, but to feel the light of the joy in it, and how good something might be, as well in the fullness of a moment, then it feels just like a complete act.

Suzi Tucker 11:47

Sorry, as you’re talking, I got a picture of quite literally of, you know, pressing shut or licking the envelope and others are acts of completion. And I think actually something that we can take the opportunity if we are so absurdist to do that to, kind of, let ourselves complete things and let ourselves feel that kind of competence of completion. You know, I think that there is, you know, for me — of course, I go through phases of, you know, what I’m interested in as I’m teaching.

Suzi Tucker 12:27

And, you know, one of the things I’m really interested in is people feeling their own competence. And, of course, that’s because I feel more competent than I did, you know, three weeks ago and it’s a great relief because that’s a big space — competence is a big space. And I think competence is filled with these moments of small completions that’s related to integration as well, that if we don’t have these moments of small completions, then every next thing that we do has a little bit of residue that we feel and no longer attend to. And as we move on, you know, that residue builds. And, you know, we feel that drag of it even though our minds have forgotten what it’s related to. So, I love the idea of the moments of small completion.

Suzi Tucker 13:31

And the other thing that comes to mind is you’re paying your taxes. It is so big that I actually find very helpful to me when I’m in moments of anxiety that it has to do with taxes or doctors. Or you know, I interact it badly with somebody and I can feel that. And I’m not quite sure what to do about it at anybody.

Suzi Tucker 13:54

One of the things that was really helpful to me is kind of feeling myself close with all the people who are paying their taxes or going to the doctor, or who have interacted badly today. And it’s a funny thing, right? But, I think so much of the price we pay is because we feel isolated in whatever anxiety we’re experiencing.

Suzi Tucker 14:24

So, you know, in addition to graphs and all those good things that the mindfulness teachers teach us, I also have this sense of being shoulder to shoulder with others and not in isolation.

Candice Wu 14:38

That’s extremely helpful. I mean, I can just feel it. It’s like an easing up in my body that just lets it move a little easier. Like we don’t need to punish ourselves by being alone in it.

Suzi Tucker 14:57

Right. And then that’s — I think that’s a good, you know, another good word that’s kind of a self-punitive behavior. It’s very isolated. It’s very private. Other people don’t even know what we’re talking about.

Candice Wu 15:14

Yeah, thank you. Well, we just jumped right in Suzi. But I want to backtrack a little bit and offer some space for you to share who you are today. You’ve been doing Constellations work for a long time and would you introduce yourself to the audience listening?

Suzi Tucker 15:33

Of course, yeah. Haven’t done it.

Suzi Tucker 15:37

I’m Suzi Tucker and yeah, I’ve been doing Constellation work in one way or another since 1998, actually. Beginning in the book world where I met Constellation work and I met Bert Hellinger, Hunter Beaumont, Günter Weber who really were the pillars of Constellation work way back then.

Suzi Tucker 16:08

And so I started as a publisher literally publishing Bert’s first books, and working as an editor to sort of translate from the translation into what I thought, you know, it’s like a therapeutic audience might understand or find useful.

Suzi Tucker 16:33

So that was, you know, my first steps whereas the translator and I would say in a way, that’s where I feel my strength now as well. That I look to the core observations of the work and I attempt to translate them not protectively but translate that kind of essential piece that brought to the world. That itself is an assimilation of many, many things, and integration of many, many ways of thinking, and many thinkers. So I still see myself, sort of, as a translator in away. I started organizing for Bert in, I think, around 2000, and I started working with a man named Harald Hohnen, who was the main teacher then and a truly magnificent teacher. And we organized, on the East Coast, the first courses that actually taught, trained many of the people who are working in the field today still. And I am so proud when I see these different people. And then in my mind site, I see them in this circle at the New York Core Center on 23rd Street in Manhattan, learning from Hamiltonian and eventually that held, went back to Germany. And he kind of what I say is, he kind of kicked me in the butt frankly and it hurt.

Suzi Tucker 18:24

To facilitate and teach, I think, the way he saw it was what he had taught me. And I, you know, referred back to this site — You know, we started out talking about this idea of insecurity and how there’s a certain kind of conceit in that sometimes. And obviously, I speak from direct wherein I both felt very insecure and shy about the idea of teaching. And I think what he reacted to was — I was sort of asking for him to validate me and what his perspective was, was, “I gave you a gift, are you giving it back?” And it was the first time I started really kind of thinking about how a certain kind of insecurity asks too much of the world. And I started just going out there. Well, before I felt ready because, you know, I would still not be doing it. And I suppose if I waited to feel ready, and I started facilitating very small workshops in the early 2000s. And I started teaching and I just kept showing up. I was amazed by my own behavior. I was amazed that I was being tenacious about something. I would say, prior to these moments — the teaching — my great power was that if it didn’t succeed immediately, I would simply withdraw from whatever it was.

Suzi Tucker 20:11

I was experiencing myself differently without knowing why beforehand. I think I was engaged back then, in the beginnings of a real creative life. A sort of artist’s life, which is how I see facilitation to this day. You know, the idea of, “Who am I now?” Well, I don’t know because as soon as I articulate it, it will be passed. I know that my job is to show up, learn languages very quickly. You know, my kind of artist’s way here is to invite people in and enter into brief collaborations in which I offer a way of seeing that inspires them to a new way of seeing. And the way that I can do that, or the reason I can do that, is because I’m not caught in the self self-limiting beliefs or vista that they’re caught in. And so I get to join people in these moments of soft or brilliant, and sometimes they’re very subtle, and sometimes they’re dramatic collaborations. And that I keep showing up for because it’s like choreography or being in a symphony, or putting paint to canvas or words to a page, and getting to work with others and doing that. And learning how to integrate and learning how to keep going toward more.

Suzi Tucker 22:13

And you talked before about this idea of darkness. And I think, yeah, we all have that darkness, right? And what creativity does is it allows for an imbalance to happen so that largeness or lightness, or expansiveness, any of those words, becomes the bigger thing for a moment. And in that moment, it can encompass or envelop or integrate the darkness. And then the darkness can have a place and become a part of creativity, not separate from it.

Candice Wu 22:51

I can see that as you’re saying it. And you said, putting paint to canvas or words to a page, in my experience of working with you as a client and as a student, I experienced also this crossover of that, of like, words to the paint.

Suzi Tucker 23:11

That’s beautiful because —

Candice Wu 23:12

And that just leads me to — Yeah, go ahead.

Suzi Tucker 23:16

Well, I was just gonna say, I want to hear this leads me to, but just as you say — I have to say, that is actually my mother and my father. So, they just came and said —

Candice Wu 23:35

How do you want to say a little more on how you see that?

Suzi Tucker 23:37

Yeah. Well, I, you know, it’s something that is funny. I see it in increments, right? So in this moment, I saw thought so clearly. And I began to see it in a probably more formal way years ago, because it occurred to me to try to see it, right? To try to kind of create or feel into what it was that I was bringing forward.

Suzi Tucker 24:06

Now, it comes upon me in moments of surprise. It’s not formal anymore. So, my mother was all about language and she was actually a brilliant editor. And a very, very strong writer, although it’s something that she — I think, was always more comfortable — not happier, but more comfortable facilitating others. And my father was an artist and was a good drawer, could really render likenesses in a very, very good way. He drew. He was a fashion artist. So long time ago, you know, they would use fashion illustration in the New York Times or in the fashion magazines. And he did that before I knew him. And I have little, tiny, I guess, what were ads slipped out of magazines in a box that he did and, you know, very gestural and evocative drawings. And so I feel that words have that movement, have that possibility of gesture and movement, and cadence. And I think of him and I think, yeah, he was a poet with his lines on the page. And in a way through as an artist with her words so somehow they come together in me, at least in my interests.

Candice Wu 25:47

Yeah. That gives me chills. Yeah. I experience you as doing that, as using words. It’s almost like tuning right into the place where words either were silenced or what the experience of something really demands to be seen and experienced. And that you place that somehow the words seem to just come right out of your mouth.

Suzi Tucker 26:21

Yeah, that’s interesting. They, you know, some — No, no, what some? What I, you know — that it is also a collaborative experience. And that the words that come out of my mouth are in this sort of words that float or perhaps actually are underneath, maybe they’re not above, they’re actually underneath. Both my lineage, my system, and the lineage and system of the person with whom I’m working. And so it’s almost like they are the drops that when you scratch at the root of something, and liquid comes out, the liquid that feeds the flower or the plant, or the tree, that those words are underneath the systems. And that their silence not only for the client, but the client’s silence or experience of being quieted, or being directed to express in a certain way, is always nested in other people’s quiet, right?

Suzi Tucker 27:46

So the mother or the father who is heavy-handed in their expectation of a child, what he or she can say, right, is always nested in a previous experience of that. It doesn’t come from the mother or the father, it comes through the mother or father.

Suzi Tucker 28:11

And so my sense of what’s being expressed in those moments where it does resonate, where it’s not just me, sort of, imposing my will which sometimes happens as well, you know, I so much want somebody to get whatever it is that I see. That my voice gets high in my chest and has a kind of quality of untruth in it. But when I’m at my best, when I am most attuned, I’m actually hearing what is in the depths or the ground in the other person’s system. And it is always about in a way where the force of love got either circumvented, somehow, right?

Suzi Tucker 29:03

Almost cut off. Not cut off, but almost cut off and distorted somehow because I think, you know, the work that we do is all about love. But love is not necessarily a positive thing. Love is the force like the wind, right? So sometimes the wind blows too hard and topples us over, right? Or sometimes we feel that we can’t get a breath. We can’t — The wind is not blowing enough. There’s no breeze, we can’t move.

Suzi Tucker 29:40

So those words, those resonant words are in accord with just the right wind. You know, love, just the right love, just the right kind of sweet love that can keep us going. So, I feel all my language, when it’s at its best, is collaborative. I don’t have that language by myself. I only have it with you, or with whomever I’m sitting beside.

Candice Wu 30:14

That’s really powerful. It feels like it acknowledges so much. And that’s something I continue to learn from you is how do we embrace more in the picture and more behind us, and more that’s embedded or nested, as you said, in the experience.

Candice Wu 30:34

And I’m wondering about, if this is part of what you might speak about with, you have a program called, “The Right to Write.” And, you know, we’ve talked about — I think it was the first time that I wanted to facilitate, and you asked me, “Do I have a right to?” And I had — I didn’t know what it really meant. And I sat with it and thought about it, and felt it. And then somehow I came up with, “Yes, I do.” That I don’t even know, you know, what that was, but can you say more about this? And is this part of the “Right to Write” that you experience is collaborating? And that’s a very generalized question.

Suzi Tucker 31:27

No. It’s a great question. I just think it’s, I really get that if you’d sit back. And first of all, say, “What the hell is she asking me?”

Candice Wu 31:35

Yeah.

Suzi Tucker 31:36

And then, kind of, sit back and think. Well, also, I wonder like, you know, what is being asked? And I wonder, right?

Candice Wu 31:46

Yeah.

Suzi Tucker 31:47

And then the answer, you know, I feel that internal “yes” is exactly what allows one to kind of throw that first pebble because that’s really just really what it is. You know, do I have that kind of bandwidth to throw that first pebble? Because once I do that, something is going to come back to me and I’m prepared in a way to catch it and work with that and say, “Okay, again. Yes. Again.”

Suzi Tucker 31:47

So, you know, the “Right to Write”, I think is — this sense of, if we have to be perfect, and I always, you know, I always argue with the word “perfection” because I think people forget how idiosyncratic is that. Even that idea is — You know, people say, “I realized I didn’t have to be perfect.” But perfect is a completely fluid concept. One person’s perfection is absolutely not the other person’s perfection, right?

Candice Wu 32:59

Yeah. Right.

Suzi Tucker 33:01

But it is this sense of — You know, if I can allow for my own flaws to be fluid so that at some point that if I keep going those very things that are flaws that I detect as vulnerabilities, flaws, difficulties, outright things that I hate about myself, if I can stay fluid with them, actually they become strengths elsewhere, right?

Suzi Tucker 33:34

So what I have to be convinced of the right to write is the right to keep going.

Suzi Tucker 33:42

Now, we can say we wake up every day and we keep going. But that’s not what I mean, right?

Suzi Tucker 33:48

I mean, this sense that the parameters are — So the parameters which feel to me as limitations when I look back, they’re only limitations because I try to live within them, right? So, I must keep going. I have to actually allow myself to move outside of the limitations that are behind me right? In order to feel, you know, going back to this idea of competence, in order to feel my own permission to do so.

Suzi Tucker 34:33

In other words, you know, Bert Hellinger said many years ago in one of his many aphorisms, and you know, he has so many aphorisms. I don’t think he knows which are actually his, but he chooses deliberately what to quote anyway.

Candice Wu 34:51

Yeah.

Suzi Tucker 34:52

But one of the things that he said is that people are under the impression that insight leads to action and truthfully, action leads to insight. And others have said this, and I have said it a million times to myself. That when I sit back and think, that only gets me so far. I need to sit back and rest, and then stand up again and take a step. And then thought comes to me — New thought comes to me, and with each actual step that I take outside of the limitations of the past, which are only limitations for me, they’re not limitations for you know, I look back and I look at my mother and my father. And I look at their lineages, right? And for me, those are limitations going deeper into my life. But as I look back, I see for them, they were parameters, right?

Suzi Tucker 36:01

So in other words, forging the new path is exactly how I move out and exactly how I convince myself of my own right to do so. Because with each step that I take out of their limitations, out of those parameters that are not my parameters, my love grows for them, my respect grows for them, my gratitude groves, but I have to take this step for that to happen. Does that make any sense?

Candice Wu 36:40

Yes, it makes complete sense. I’m touching into the movement and the whole body moving for more to come. And for the response of inner and outer to arise, as well as what the parameters for your parents, or who’s behind you, become limitations or could have seemed to have been limitations for you, if you followed the same parameters and parameter and limitation if I’m getting you right, Suzi. And parameter and limitations sound so different. What sounds to me like, well, it relates to something that I experienced too, which is where I’m touching in is the parameters that my grandmother lived by, if I’m living by the same ones, they become limitation, but I can see an honor how actually, that was expansion for her.

Suzi Tucker 37:40

Absolutely. That’s beautifully said.

Candice Wu 37:44

And then it’s not for me anymore. It’s not an expansion for me. It was what I lived in, and what came through.

Suzi Tucker 37:51

Right.

Candice Wu 37:51

Minus a new expansion.

Suzi Tucker 37:53

That’s right. And that’s so perfectly said, because, you know, in your new expansion, there, you know, sort of like at your back, you can feel the warmth, and it’s fun to go back to the beginning of our conversation, at your back you could feel the warmth of completion. And in your body, you can feel the competence of movement. And at your front, we feel the lightness and possibility.

Candice Wu 38:23

Yes.

Suzi Tucker 38:25

And that becomes the warmth of completion for your children, for your students, Candice, for your clients, for your future. I can be that kind of warmth of completion for the future. And still, for me, it’s the lightness of what’s to come, those things.

Candice Wu 38:51

It just feels magical. Thank you, like I’m tingling inside. Thank you for that. Thank you for the words.

Suzi Tucker 39:01

Oh, you’re welcome. Yeah, I was laughing. You didn’t think I was so cynical.

Candice Wu 39:11

Why is that?

Suzi Tucker 39:14

I don’t know, in my mind, I think of myself as a deeply cynical —

Candice Wu 39:18

Oh, that’s funny!

Suzi Tucker 39:20

When I hear my words come out of my mouth, and I think well, I believe that was the parameters of my mother and father, it’s important to me because, you know, it’s sort of where humor comes from, but it actually is not fully mine at least not in that same way.

Candice Wu 39:45

Yeah. Well, the last time we spoke, we talked about the sentences that aren’t spoken in the family lineage. Those are the words that get passed down, or that we hold connection with, that want to be spoken. And I felt like that was just so helpful. Something about that completed or felt at the time, it completed a piece of understanding trauma to me.

Candice Wu 40:17

It’s like, how do we receive words about ourselves and the world that we may or may not have connection within our personal life, except then we’ve created connection with it or lived in it. But that really gave me a new understanding of words.

Suzi Tucker 40:36

I love that.

Candice Wu 40:37

Also, I’m just recalling back to when I first learned with you about the sentence, and I’m just wondering how that’s evolving for you? And what I’m referring to is, I don’t think I’ll say it as I learned it from you, but the aspect of a sentence and that association to a death sentence. Is that a death sentence, a sentence or speaking that sends us to that destructive place? Or, what kind of sentence are you saying to yourself or to the world?

Suzi Tucker 41:11

Right. And it’s funny, I would put it the opposite in a way because I think that in this case, the opposite actually includes what you’re saying, right? So it’s fun. It’s a funny, and maybe it goes back to the light and dark, right, that the madness can hold the dark, where the darkness tends to snuff out the light.

Suzi Tucker 41:35

The way I see it is as a life sentence, right? So a life sentence is either one of two things, it is either the sentence that we live with, for our life, right. And that tends to be driven by the generational experience. And it tends to be fear-driven sentence, whether it’s mean or it’s overly increasing, or it’s, you know, too much or too little, the reason it lacks nuances because it’s fear-driven and nuance requires courage in a way, to say I’m responsible and I love you and I have power and I feel vulnerable.

Suzi Tucker 42:23

Those are nuances that require a certain, very deep level of confidence to experience let alone say. So those kind of difficult life sentences are fear-driven messages that come through the generations, right?

Suzi Tucker 42:44

And they come from visceral reactions to things so you know in constellations one looks for the event often not so much to redress the event, for God’s sakes, who would I be to redress slavery or the Holocaust? Or, you know somebody’s home burning down when they were 2 years old, that to me is ridiculous, and that is a terrible conceit.

Suzi Tucker 43:17

However, to see that certain messages came through the direct reactions to those events, which are fear-driven people run away, you know, all the fight, flight, freeze things that we talked about in ourselves, of course, we’re nested in them too, right?

Suzi Tucker 43:38

The sentence that comes from freeze, so this sentence that comes from flight is, feels like they’re really big one or the sentence that comes from fight, those messages that come down through the generations and inform our bodies, often not our minds, not, we don’t know it, but we know it, right? Our gut says, “Be Afraid.” Our gut says, “Take out a knife.” Our gut says, “Reject before rejected.” Right?

Suzi Tucker 44:14

Whatever our gut says, in those instances, it’s not necessarily and I think often not an accurate read of what’s going on before us, but rather, a felt read of what went on behind us.

Suzi Tucker 44:33

So the good life sentences or the life sentences that are affirmations of life, are the sentences that Hellinger introduce this stem sentences. And I call them seed sentences. Because, I just like the idea of planting seeds, but there are sentences that are actually really in this system that are not, you know, they’re outside of, in addition to often forgotten sentences that are not fear-driven.

Suzi Tucker 45:11

They go back to the intrinsic faith of moving forward. So, there is an intrinsic part of every system that moves forward. And trauma gives us the impression that the system started in that place. But in fact, there was a time long before that. And the sense that we can kind of tap into the deepest parts of the system, the heartbeat, where the heart is still beating gives us the sentence that is not fear-driven, the message that is not fear-driven. And that message is always about, go into the future, live deep into your life. That’s the gift for us that reorganizes the past.

Candice Wu 46:15

I’m just laughing at myself because I guess I must have had so many death sentences to look at!

Candice Wu 46:23

Because now as you’re saying that, I remember this being about a life sentence.

Suzi Tucker 46:30

That is funny!

Suzi Tucker 46:31

Well, when you think about prisons, right? And you think, it’s saying a funny thing, or an interesting thing, you give somebody a death sentence, you take away all possibility, even the slightest time.

Candice Wu 46:49

Yeah.

Suzi Tucker 46:50

And you give somebody a life sentence. And not to say, that’s not going to be a very challenging life. But the one thing you don’t do is snuff out all possibility. So yeah, you know, I’m really interested, I think it is interesting for you, and you’ll think about it. I think the language that we speak to ourselves with is incredibly profound. And this phrase, self-talk, I said, “It’s like a — Yeah, it is self-talk.” But it’s also something deeper or more primal than self-talk. It is the way we hold ourselves, the way we understand ourselves. And I think we often do quite a job in entrancing ourselves in the past that we don’t even know in our mind. But we know so well, in our body.

Suzi Tucker 47:18

The idea of moving from death sentence to life sentence, and then from life sentence to life sentence, right? Life sentence, that’s really moving out like a trance.

Candice Wu 48:04

Absolutely. And it gives back the dimensions of “self-talk.” It brings back that depth of where it came from, and what it might refer to, and what clues we have from that of who we believe we are, how we’re holding ourselves.

Suzi Tucker 48:24

Yeah, beautiful.

Suzi Tucker 48:27

And it’s the movement, you know, I talked to people sometimes about this idea of moving from dynamic which has to do again, with, you know, the parameters being limitations for us, and simply being parameters for the people who came before us. So, that is moving out of a dynamic, into moving into relationship, right. And dynamic and relationship are two different things. The dynamic is a structure that we keep returning to and relationship is evolving by definition.

Suzi Tucker 49:03

So what you just said, I kind of hadn’t thought of it that before in terms of itself. Now, we are often in a dynamic with ourself, a habit. And moving into that more fluid, more surprising relationship with ourselves is, first and foremost, how we’re going to experience ourselves in the world differently. And the world in us differently.

Candice Wu 49:36

Yeah, that changes completely, the feel of it, and what we’re doing here, and I mean, what we’re doing here in terms of being human.

Suzi Tucker 49:46

Yeah, no. I do.

Candice Wu 49:48

Yeah, I think you got me. Yeah.

Suzi Tucker 49:51

I’ve heard that.

Candice Wu 49:52

Right. Like, what? What? We’re even here. Yeah.

Suzi Tucker 49:57

Right. I know, it’s like people, we talk about the search for meaning. It’s like, I don’t think it’s a search exactly. You know, I think the meaning is implicit. It is the sort of allowance for meaning, the bother to take it seriously.

Candice Wu 50:17

Yeah. Oh, I feel that one, the bother to take it seriously.

Suzi Tucker 50:24

Me too. That’s why it’s such enthusiasm because I know what it takes me to remind myself, I get into such a habit of a lethargic soul, you know.

Candice Wu 50:40

Yeah, well, what about it? I was curious to ask you, you know, what challenges you find for yourself now, as a person or facilitator teacher in any place?

Suzi Tucker 50:55

Well, it’s a little bit like, anything else that has to do, I think, with taking care of our internal and external selves, you know, it’s funny. It’s like, there are moments where I forget to care, and that’s both the inward and outward. And that’s a little bit like, it almost feels like a really young rebellion. And it feels like a very childish power. Well, I could not care.

Candice Wu 51:34

Yeah, because it sounds like the adult words are, “I forget to care.” But the younger part says something else, like, “I don’t want to care.”

Suzi Tucker 51:44

Stomp my feet, and, you know, put my hands across my chest and pretend that something, but I think that is, again, sort of a habit of not, you know, sometimes I say to people, and I say it to myself, most of all, I know very well that the world will go on without me, and it will do just fine. But it doesn’t have to.

Candice Wu 52:14

Beautiful.

Suzi Tucker 52:15

I can make a contribution, and that will give something and in that extending of my hand, I receive something before anything, or anyone even gives back.

Candice Wu 52:35

Yeah, that’s beautiful. That seems to go right back to where we started as well, in pebbles.

Suzi Tucker 52:46

Then, Candice, once I was sitting around, and a bunch of people were talking about enlightenment, and I get very quiet during these conversations, don’t know what the hell enlightenment is, really.

Suzi Tucker 53:01

And, so of course, you know, sometimes silence is very loud.

Suzi Tucker 53:08

So, one of the people at the table, who was the one person I didn’t know, turned to me and said, “You know, well, so what do you think it is, Suzi?”

Suzi Tucker 53:20

And the word that came out of my mouth was creativity. That is my belief system. And it’s my entire belief system, really.

Candice Wu 53:30

Wow. And you were earlier saying to me, creativity, learning is creativity.

Suzi Tucker 53:36

Right.

Candice Wu 53:36

One and the same. And that makes even more to the picture for me when you say that.

Suzi Tucker 53:41

That’s cool. You know, that’s funny. Because when you asked before, and I think I glossed over about the idea of, you know, what it takes to teach, and I think I’ve been through some shit, you know?

Candice Wu 53:56

Yeah.

Suzi Tucker 53:57

And I don’t wear this badge. But to say, there is something I know, in other people’s experience, because I’ve been through some stuff. And I will say, I come out the other side. I don’t know that I’ve come out anywhere. But I will say, that I continue to want to create. I continue to feel the revelation in that. And it keeps me happy. It keeps me joyful. It keeps me flexible. And I think when people come into a room where I’m teaching, they may dislike the way I teach, or not understand what the hell I’m talking about. Or, think what I’m saying is tried or not deep enough or too deep or whatever it is basically.

Suzi Tucker 54:55

But I think there is the feeling that somehow, she has been through some stuff, and she has retained joy. I want some of that.

Candice Wu 55:11

Yeah. Thank you. It makes a difference to me as well.

Candice Wu 55:17

And it’s something, what you’re saying now, is something that I really look to you to remember. It’s not always easy for me, I can get lost in some mind stuff, like talking about things that I may not know. Or, when I say no, like no in my body. And what I experience you doing, which feels so embodied is that you speak to what you experience, and you might go into realms beyond your experience and explore, this is just my perception. I don’t experience that you speak to things that you don’t know in your bones somehow, or that if you do, you’re acknowledging that in some way, to me, that feels really grounded.

Candice Wu 56:12

Do you perceive yourself that way? Is that landing somewhere for you?

Suzi Tucker 56:16

Yes. When you said, I recognize it. And I think that, sometimes people use the word humility, you know, there are words that people use, like humility, your intuition or certain words that people use that I’m not sure what’s meant by them in a certain way. But I think that actually, what folks are referring to is exactly that there is a kind of compass that each of us has, right. And I really try to respect my compass, even when I’m not for like, I don’t get ahead of it, I think.

Candice Wu 57:03

Yeah.

Suzi Tucker 57:03

I look to it. And I really try not to get ahead of it. And my body, you know, you talk so much about being Embodied, my body tells me so much, you know, I can feel when I am in a place that I have no business being, because I get immediately nauseous.

Suzi Tucker 57:28

And I don’t power through that. I don’t muscle through it. I stop and I look and I say, why is that? But I say that as I’m withdrawing from that space, and I go back to my compass, because if I don’t do that, and I power through that physical response mechanism in my body, then I’m left with such a narrow vocabulary where I have to blame the client for something, right?

Suzi Tucker 58:01

Or I have to become insecure and shy and somehow withdraw, right?

Suzi Tucker 58:09

But if I can go back to my compass and check-in and say, “Okay, you know, you were in a space you had no business being in.”

Suzi Tucker 58:20

How can you both return and not return in the same way? And it’s often through making contact with the person who actually is in that space, asking a question.

Suzi Tucker 58:34

Being, you know, that idea of “I see you.”

Suzi Tucker 58:38

Well, boy, sometimes, I think facilitators me is the facilitator. We really got to have that sentence, “I see you.” Not just offer it, we got to live it.

Candice Wu 58:52

Yeah. And that it is extremely powerful in itself. And it’s enough sometimes. Well, maybe it’s enough always.

Suzi Tucker 59:04

That’s a big little sentence, right?

Candice Wu 59:09

Right. Yeah. Well, Suzi, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this conversation with you and learn so much. Is there anything else that feels alive now or that you want to share?

Suzi Tucker 59:25

Well, first of all, I learned so much as well. And as a living example of a collaboration, you know, I heard myself say things I’ve never heard myself say. And I love that. It’s like new colors on the palate.

Candice Wu 59:45

Yeah.

Suzi Tucker 59:46

And I really invite people to explore in themselves, this sense of competence and the ability to integrate so that their feet irresistibly want to move down that road toward more.

Candice Wu 1:00:11

Thank you. I’ll receive that for myself as well.

Suzi Tucker 1:00:16

Yeah.

Candice Wu 1:00:17

Yeah, me too.

Suzi Tucker 1:00:21

Thank you so much. And whoever listens, thank you so much for listening. And yeah, let’s toss the pebble, okay?

Candice Wu 1:00:29

Yes. Thank you so much, Suzi.

Suzi Tucker 1:00:33

You’re welcome.

Candice Wu 1:00:34

Thank you. It’s been fabulous. And for all of the people listening, Suzi is going to be offering a guided experience. It’ll be a surprise, right? We’ll see.

Suzi Tucker 1:00:47

Me too.

Candice Wu 1:00:49

It’s only truly alive that way.

Suzi Tucker 1:00:52

Yes.

Candice Wu 1:00:52

Yes. So thank you so much. And you can look out for that if you’re listening in and until next time, Suzi

Suzi Tucker 1:01:01

Looking forward.

Candice Wu 1:01:04

Thank you all for tuning into our conversation today. And thank you, Suzi, so much for being on the show. It’s a huge honor and I feel just so invigorated and excited about moving into my life differently. Even by just the words that we brought to light today.

Candice Wu 1:01:22

If you found her resonance or words exciting to you interesting or intriguing, I’d encourage you to check out her work at suzitucker.com. She also is the writer of her book, Gather Enough Fireflies, which is available on Amazon.

Candice Wu 1:01:45

I appreciate her book very much because it’s small in size, but jam-packed with seeds of insight from her very personal experience.

Candice Wu 1:01:55

Suzi is also co-editor and contributing author to Messengers of Healing and the contributing author to For Couples: Ten Commandments for Every Aspect of Your Relationship Journey.

Candice Wu 1:02:07

Also, stay tuned this week because she will be offering a lovely guided experience around competency. If you don’t want to miss this, make sure to subscribe to the podcast. So you get the download straight to your device. And consider subscribing to my newsletter, which will give you all the information as well as other healing experiences and self-love tips. You can find all that at CandiceWu.com/embody.

Candice Wu 1:02:34

Thank you all again, and as we go, I want to send you off with some of Suzi’s thoughts, which I don’t know if I’ll get exactly right. But it goes something like this, “Well, the world would carry on without you. It is enriched by your presence.”

Candice Wu 1:02:50

Thank you all so much for being out there and listening in and for your existence. And with that, see you next time on The Embody Podcast.

Candice Wu 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the podcast this week, you are listening to a special offering from Suzi Tucker, who was the guest this week, you can listen to her full episode at CandiceWu.com/suzi.

If you listen to the full episode, you might be coming in thinking that this episode is about competence. Well, you will be a little bit surprised but this just shows just how it is to be present to what is now. So sit back and enjoy this lovely reading by Suzi.

Suzi Tucker 0:35

Hello everyone, this is Suzi Tucker. Several weeks ago, I had the great good fortune to be interviewed by Candice Wu for the Embody Podcast and in our conversation, we spoke of many things, of our personal work and our work in the larger community, and it was so easy and lovely and wide-ranging.

And Candice further made an offer to me to create an independent piece and we were thinking perhaps a meditation or a guided imagery session. And when I thought about it, I thought, you know, when I was a kid, I loved it when people read to me. And even now, one of my favorite things in the world is to listen to the New Yorker short stories as I go to sleep. I often have to listen to the same one, several nights in a row because I don’t get through to the end or I don’t remember.

At any rate, I thought, you know what I’m going to read to you. So I invite you to sit back or sit up or lie down, keep your eyes open or closed, find the position that is comfortable for you.

I’m going to read to you from Gather Enough Fireflies, which is the book I wrote, well, way back in 2014. Amazing how time passes. And I opened randomly and then it seemed to connect with the conversation that Candice and I had about capacity. So I’m going to read to you Brevities #9. And I hope you find something in it that’s intriguing or inspiring, or relaxing.

Brevities #9: Living in the confusion between past and present. Everyday decisions sometimes feel overwhelming and we think we’re crazy and being overwhelmed by the common questions, which then adds to the discontinuity between what we desire and what we feel capable of. But in constellations, we open to a larger landscape and sometimes we see that the systemic dynamics that affect us were initiated further back than even our parents.

When we think about what prevents us from quitting, or following through, or initiating or anything else that might logically make life better, sometimes the feeling in the body is what we can really locate. The words that describe that feeling, the thoughts in our head, are already second hand, something we superimpose, a feeling of breathlessness or trembling, or paralysis. What is that feeling where you feel in the face of decision? What is on the other side of it? Perhaps it’s something really farfetched. I’ll disappear. I’ll be killed. I cannot bear being alone. Perhaps you can take a moment right now. Allow the problem or decision that’s right before you, let it enter your mind. I can’t stand my job. My marriage is horrible. I want to stop drinking. Why am I always so insecure? Whatever it is named, let it in then feel the words in your body. What comes up? How would you describe the feeling? I can’t breathe. My head hurts. Everything goes blank. It clusters behind my eyes and presses against my temples. It gathers in my chest and pushes me down. A little time travel.

These dramatic feelings around everyday problems make us feel crazy, or peculiar, or lazy or stupid or any of a number of other things. The drama queen, the crybaby, the raging bitch, the little mouse, the mean names we call ourselves and sometimes are called by others. But when we go back a generation, or two or three, we may find exactly where the feelings make absolute sense. Our right-sized responses, as opposed to insane reactions.

Let’s imagine. Where in your history was the price of speaking up too high, even death? Where was the complaint or condition received without compassion? Where did success, intelligent talent and knack for something, actually endanger life? Where are there perpetrators who could not face their own guilt or despair? Where are their victims who could not face their own anger or sense of defeat? Where did it benefit happen on the backs of others? Where did some abandoned others in order to go on? For whom do we get home, fight, punish the men, the women, the children, put aside our dreams, destroy our reality, belittle possibility, stay behind.

What has not ended in our hearts, in our deep and visceral life, the life that teams with hidden energy not sanctioned or even seen by our own awareness, events to which we connect concern life and death? Actions that caused the family system to lose its traction, perhaps for a long time, or even just momentarily and then head in another direction. Or, for example, changes the course of thousands of systems, victims, and perpetrators so that new survival, vocabularies evolve, and with them, new depths of grief, anger, distrust. More personally, a young boy loses his father when he’s three years old, his course is in execrable shifted.

In either case, the next generations will be navigating life and death, even as they are moving across the simpler plane of daily living. The original belonging to our family of origin is where we receive the information that has the greatest impact of any other information we ever receive. We don’t have the ability to resist those deep messages. Some of the messages have been carried through many generations, landing in us inadvertently. Events of the past can fragment the family leaving people to clamor for balance, visibility, justice, peace. The events that happened so long ago, even beyond our memory can affect us powerfully. Free-floating anxiety, or endless grief, or misunderstood terror may travel down to us and we take it on without deliberation, without the were withall or time to deliberate.

Now the feelings are without context, or they appear to be inconsistent with context with the one that is visible. And yet to our great frustration or worse, our hearts are captured and we seem bound and gagged when it comes to the present. Uncovering in events such as this can have positive repercussions. It may take just a split second to connect to that crazy reaction and understand it within the context of a certain life movement. Once we see it, we can bring it to light.

We can gather moreover data though the long, obscured information that comes through the body, through dreams, through the multigenerational sub-panel, can be reflected back to its original owners. Oh, I see. I share this with you. I don’t need to carry it all. Certainly, none of our ancestors close or far, prisoner or guard, will be brought back or brought peace through our suffering.

If anything, our doing well, is the bomb for those who stand behind us. They paid a price and still through us, life goes on. Perhaps it will be in a good way. We cannot relieve them of the burden of their suffering. But we can relieve them of the burden of ours.

We have received difficult messages from the past. We can send beautiful messages back. The message is in our joy, our fulfillment, our greater ease with the present and with finding pleasure in creating greater continuity between what we reach for and the felt permission to actually take it into our hands and hold it as our own.

Our forebears’ sacrifices gain greater meaning as we take life in and feel able and welcomed to contribute something more to it. Our contribution will, by definition, include something of them, of our parents, grandparents, great grandparents, ancestors as far back as time itself.

In this way, with this expanding image, we can honor the past rather than join with it.

Thank you so much for listening.