Candice Wu 0:00

Hello, this is Candice Wu on the Embody Podcast and today is a very special episode. I’m recording from Kowloon, Hong Kong where my family grew up and where I’m visiting for a couple of weeks. Today’s episode is about my story of trusting my inner guidance and sharing of my transitions in 2017. It’s about living my dream, purposelessness, truly trusting my soul, making leaps, connecting more with Chinese culture, my travels to Chiang Mai, Thailand and looking at colonialism, and how I interact with new spaces and people when I travel.

Candice Wu 0:42

So, welcome, I want to give you a bit of an idea, a mental picture of what I’m looking at as I’m sitting here in Hong Kong. I’m in a park that is the one that my grandma goes to every single day and around me there are banyan trees, beautiful, leafy green. You can hear the birds chirping behind me, some bonsai trees, people exercising and doing Tai Chi, there’s like an adult playground nearby, kids walking to school. This is a little sanctuary set in the midst of city life, where there are cars and traffic around, and now there’s a plane flying overhead and I’m looking over at some of the buildings nearby that have bamboo scaffolding with fabric covering them and they’re just — these beautiful, almost sculpture-like buildings.

Candice Wu 1:44

So I’d like to begin by sharing that for the first time in my life, I feel like I am caught up with myself. I’ve always had these dreams that were ahead of me in the future, ideas of what I want to do especially ideas about traveling and living independent of location, which I’m doing now, that I never thought were possible. And here it is, I’m living that life and I absolutely love it and feel very present with myself. So not only is that life here and now but it’s also that I feel very much in the moment. This isn’t always how it was.

Candice Wu 2:24

About a year ago, I was transitioning from being in a group practice at Centered Therapy Chicago, in the north side of Chicago. And there, I spent two and a half years practicing as a holistic psychotherapist and I was already developing my voice and who I was as a healer. At that time, it felt really natural and right to step out into my own practice that had already been established, my own Embodied Healing with Family Constellations and Somatic Experiencing, and other more ancient and Eastern practices such as Yoga, Ayurveda, and Chinese medicine.

Candice Wu 3:02

And at that time, it was pretty scary. I felt like I was taking a leap and wondered if I’d make it out on my own. But I was very excited when many clients transitioned with me, the ones that were right to transition at that time and were excited about it too.

Candice Wu 3:19

So, I invited them to my home office space in Chicago and I created this lovely space where many people shared with me that even sitting in the space felt like it was truly healing them, being in a space that seemed more minimalist that brought them pleasure, that smelled nice and just had a lightness and clean feel to it, and the energy that I brought into it of healing gave them that feeling of safety and the ability to transform and integrate that. And at that time, I was so excited to do women’s circles and dream groups and continue seeing my individual and couples clients.

Candice Wu 4:05

All the while I was having these dreams at night of being in Thailand, that suddenly I’m running around and playing in Thailand, that I see rice paddies and the river and this is the only time in my life that I have dreamed of a place and I knew exactly what place it was. It was a particular place, it was Thailand. And these dreams kept coming to me and I started to feel that it was time. It was time to declutter, release my belongings, and lighten up my load emotionally and physically and it was time to transition to following my soul, following my inner guidance that told me where to go next and not knowing where to go next, like months ahead.

Candice Wu 4:55

Well, this first transition, I did know months ahead, because this was probably about March or April when I thought, maybe Thailand is the place to go. I had been to Chiang Mai, Thailand before and thought it was just so charming and sweet so I thought, that was the place to go. So I spent a summer preparing, releasing my belongings, reading the Magic Art of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, and just letting that completely transform me and my space, and what things that carried with me. I spoke with my clients and shared with them what I would be doing. And at that time, I didn’t know if I’d be spending just a couple of months there or I would be there for a year, or for good. Who knew?

Candice Wu 5:43

And I was so grateful that many of my clients were interested in shifting to an online platform so that we could continue our deep and powerful work together. And what we found was that it was very intuitive, very powerful and some people felt like working online was just as good as working in person, except for when we couldn’t use touch, for example. But, I learned that I was able to turn on other parts of me that could sense and feel into the situation, and what my clients were experiencing using my own body, my clairsentience and checking in with them about that.

Candice Wu 6:30

At that time, I began to completely be in charge of my own time and be intentional about designing my life the way I wanted it, which was truly exciting for me, stepping into my power this way and trusting that things would be okay, trusting that I would be supported and that I would be financially ready. This asked of me to truly trust that this was the right path and that all abundance would be provided for me and that I would attract that in my life. So, I spent some time in my home base in Michigan where I grew up with family and recharged, refueled, gathered myself, and selected just the items I wanted to bring for the next whoever, however long that I was going to be away, which I didn’t know.

Candice Wu 7:26

In September, I facilitated and organized my first international healing and spiritual retreat in Emerald Lake in British Columbia, Canada in the Rocky Mountains, which was beautiful nourishing, and I could not ask for more, and the women who came felt that it was an incredibly profound and sacred experience and they felt so much sisterhood. I was really excited that this was successful and that it was the kickoff to a lot of my travels.

Candice Wu 7:59

My next step after that was to step in California for some more Somatic Experiencing training and then I flew straight to Hong Kong to visit my family here, which was a nice transition. I’m comfortable with Hong Kong. I’ve been here at least five times and it’s always good for me to visit my grandma because each year I don’t actually know if she’ll be here, and so I try to come here as much as possible. It also helped me to be adjusting to an Asian country and having this home base over here on the side of the world helps me to transition to Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Candice Wu 8:40

When I got to Chiang Mai, the first thing I wanted to do was eat Pad Thai. I love Thai food. But to eat it every day was just so exciting, for the first, you know, two months. For a while all I wanted to do was rest, sleep, cook my own food, eat locally, do my own laundry by hand with bar soap and truly let my body restore. I spent many days getting Thai massages at the nearby Massage Therapy Center and that really helped my body release and sink in but not without anxiety and fear.

Candice Wu 9:26

Some of the thoughts I had at that time were: How can I really rest? Is this okay? What happens if I don’t have enough clients or I lose clients, or what happens if I just don’t have enough money to make it?

Candice Wu 9:41

And at that time, I felt like it was really important for me to face those fears and to be able to rest for rest’s sake, to have purposelessness, the ability to lie in bed and not have any purpose but to just rest. It was so hard, because I’ve been used to being purposeful and being driven and everything being towards some greater goal, even resting, I would use the excuses of: Yes, it’s okay to rest because ultimately it will help you restore so that you can continue to create and build more. But it always was a means to an end and I could tell that even was an underlying baseline of fear.

Candice Wu 10:32

For me, it was fear of not having enough and not being enough, and that I had to constantly work in order to be enough and to receive and that was essential to sustaining myself. But I knew a deeper truth, which was, this was sustaining myself, restoring my body, restoring my soul was what I deeply needed and that my body and soul and spirit were my tools, this was my abundance.

Candice Wu 11:06

At that time, I was relying on the Abundance book, which I will link below in the show notes. And just reading those meditations every single day about how I am abundance, how I am the universe expressed and that nothing, no money, person, place or thing has power over me that I am the power, the power is within and that the universe expresses itself through me and that I am the reality of the universe. This was incredibly powerful for me, I wanted to completely integrate into that and realize the truth of who I was in this way. So Thailand truly offered that for me, where I was able to rest and take in the healing energies that were around me, in Thai they say, “Sabai” and it means that you can take it easy, it’s all good.

Candice Wu 12:07

And people there actually do, a lot of people do. I noticed that many people took it slower, would enjoy the day and walk around, granted their lives are much different and the communities were more supportive in different ways of family living, community living, supporting one another, providing for one another. But I noticed that there was a slowness, there weren’t people necessarily walking with their cell phones and face down. They were looking up and looking around interacting with each other and I realized that this was just a taste of the culture from my perspective, but I did allow myself to take in that feel.

Candice Wu 12:57

The result was that I felt more present with myself self. I felt more embodied in my whole being and that I could let all the parts of me be present without running around with my head cut off. I wanted to allow my truth to come forward and the ways that I know that my soul wanted to live, be, play and create, I could do so.

Candice Wu 13:25

However, this didn’t go well for my ballet studies because, in Chiang Mai, it’s such a relaxed and easygoing culture that the ballet classes were about two times as long but maybe one-third of what we would do in an hour-long class in Chicago with the rigor and the stamina, and so I practice a lot on my own but I was still grateful for the healing and centeredness that Thailand brought me.

Candice Wu 13:57

The most important spiritual step for me while I was in Thailand was to completely trust my inner wisdom and my inner guidance for the next step, knowing that I had to be there in Thailand, but not knowing why was step one but then continuing to trust that day today and asking myself what now, even when it came down to where I would live, I waited until I got there, and had a few days to find a place. But I trusted that something would come along and it did, you can read my blog post on that, on how when I trusted myself, the answers were already showing themselves to me if only I looked around. And then while I was going deeper with myself, I began reading about colonialism and how Westerners can bring their colonialistic ways on their travels and I had no idea what that meant.

Candice Wu 14:56

And as I read, there’s a couple of articles by Bani Amor, I think that’s how you say her name, she calls herself, a queer traveler, writer, photographer, and activist. She wrote about what does it mean to decolonize travel and what it means to bring your colonialism with you is that we, as Westerners can come to a place and change it so that it’s better suited for what we’re used to, what we’re accustomed to, and what we desire, for example, conveniences or having things just the way that we have them in our country, asking that of others or changing the space so that it just is completely tailored to us and not learning the culture there, not integrating, not learning language, or being aware of what’s going on in that space, and interacting with it the way that the people there want to be interacted with, the way that the space wants to be interacted with.

Candice Wu 16:03

And as I looked at that and ask myself, do I do that? How is it that I do that? Of course, I do, but how? It was pretty scary, and what I found was, that in ways I was just plopping myself into a culture and bringing my life with me, I wasn’t necessarily expecting others to change around me or accommodate me completely but there were ways that I just brought myself into the culture and isolated myself so that I could rest. So there was a reason but at the same time, I wanted to make sure that I was being respectful to the culture and the people around me.

Candice Wu 16:48

When I looked deeper, I felt that had a relationship, this way of being had a relationship to how I have treated my family in my culture, at times where there are certain ways of Chinese culture that I didn’t agree with and that I just would isolate myself from and speak out against, some of those ways were, or are expecting younger people to just obey and be grateful and appreciate by not expressing your feelings and keeping those to yourself when you’re speaking with elders because it’s seen as disrespectful or selfish. And even though I, you can see how that totally rubs against me the wrong way because I’d like to express my feelings, I like to connect with people, and also let people know how I’m doing and hear from them and so that just brought a rift in my family. I felt that, in ways, my family was raising rejection through my being different.

Candice Wu 18:05

I started to realize that even though that way of interacting with my family wasn’t working for me, that my way wasn’t working for them and they experienced that as a rejection and that I was rejecting their culture, which on one level, I wasn’t, but also on some level I was, that they experienced it that way. And it was me turning away from them with some anger, which brought that feeling of disrespect.

Candice Wu 18:37

And so while I’m here in Thailand, that’s not exactly what happened but as I dug further and deeper with myself, with why I came there and how I’m interacting in that space, it dawned on me that there might be a very subtle level of not completely embracing the culture around me, because in my first culture, my first ecosystem, I couldn’t really embrace that and so that released a level of separation when I looked at that and brought me even closer to the Thai family that I was living with, in the guest house that I was staying.

Candice Wu 19:20

At that time too, it was the year anniversary of the late king’s passing and everyone was wearing black, to respect the mourning, the year of mourning that was happening and the cremation ceremony that was going to occur while I was there. So for me, this felt like one important way that I was respecting and honoring the culture, and the people and what they were experiencing, and not just in a novelty sort of way, but to be with that and to be respectful of that.

Candice Wu 19:58

This experience also begged me to look at how I was facilitating retreats and what my desire was around that. I wanted to continue to do international retreats in different locations but as I looked further into how I might do that, it didn’t feel good any longer to just throw myself and a group of people into a culture without learning about the space, without really interacting with it in a way that was meaningful and in a way that the space wanted to be interacted with. So it considered just another level of the experience that didn’t seem so emphasized before, shifting away from a more consumerist way to a more ethically human and interactive way, where there’s a shared experience.

Candice Wu 20:59

While I was in Chiang Mai, I also met someone who is now my life partner that I’m traveling with and working with growing with and feel so happy with. This is someone who’s interested in transformation and growth in the way that I am and that seems hard to find. He’s now a driving force behind the Embody Your Nature company, which is my practice. And we even did an interactive intimacy workshop together in Chiang Mai, which was beautiful.

Candice Wu 21:29

During the time that I was in Thailand, I also challenged myself to begin writing more consistently, writing more blog posts and content to share out to the world and to put my voice out in the Embody Podcast, which has been a fun challenge.

Candice Wu 21:45

So after my travel to Chiang Mai, I made another step in Hong Kong and then went straight to Chicago and Michigan, where we connected with colleagues and friends and participated on staff at the group relations conference, the Tavistock conference, which is a group processing conference that looks at in the here and now, how difference in diversity affects authority and power in society, in small groups, between each other and it’s like a psychological gymnastics of looking at group as a whole and society at large that lives through us in the people in the room. So I loved that and it was fantastic to reconnect.

Candice Wu 22:32

I held a few more workshops in Chicago at Bloom Yoga Studio and at a therapy practice in Chicago, doing ancestral healing and constellations workshops, which I am just stepping into loving so much.

Candice Wu 22:47

I was also grateful to do a workshop, a constellations workshop in a new space in Rochester, Michigan, it’s called Soul Space. And here, I practice again, being in my inner guidance, moment to moment, even in little moments than day today. But every single moment, every single choice, I checked in with my gut. I checked in with my body and what information it told me to make decisions about the process of the ancestral healing workshop.

Candice Wu 23:22

And now, I’m thrilled to be planning another retreat in Zion National Park, Utah. It’s a women’s retreat called Soul Body, where we truly connect the soul and body and support each other and living from our entire essence and being.

Candice Wu 23:40

Now I am back in Hong Kong, as you know, and waiting for this lovely celebration with my family. And as I arrived in Hong Kong, this time, I stepped into crazy chaos, that is my family. There’s a four-bedroom flat that is now housing about 10 people, and it’s not a big space and there are three people to a bedroom, as well as some people in the living space, in the living room and it reminds me of the stories that my mom would tell me where she had 10 people, 11 people living in one tiny, little, maybe 500 square foot apartment altogether, and where the kitchen was on the balcony, shared between three different flats.

Candice Wu 24:32

And so I’m experiencing the closeness and also how flexible my family is that they can just adapt to that and be completely happy and alive. And now I feel that I’m at a very important transition as this trip comes to a conclusion in Hong Kong, in about a week and a half, I’ll be shifting over to spending time in Bali, Indonesia and I’ll meet my partner there, and he and I will begin several months of travel all the way to possibly Germany and even Hawaii, Greece maybe, and then back to the states for the retreat in October 2018.

Candice Wu 25:20

This feels like I am truly living my dream and being very full and expressive in myself, exploring all these different parts of me and each time I get to a new place, I feel that it brings out different aspects of me that I can bring into my power and bring into my fullness.

Candice Wu 25:46

So just as we do that, together, we are both trusting in our inner guidance and letting one step at a time unfold to the next step, to the next step. So even while we have an idea of where we might go, we don’t really have a flight scheduled beyond Bali and we’re just waiting to see what happens next, and where we feel drawn, where we feel excited and inspired to be and what comes to us as well.

Candice Wu 26:16

So I want to thank you all for joining me today and listening in to my story of trusting my soul, trusting my inner guidance and I hope that it inspires you in some way to step, even a baby step into yourself.

Candice Wu 26:31

I am really looking forward to what my life brings me, how I might connect with all of you and the new people along the way, as well as the new spaces that I’m in, and I hope to continue to bring you all sorts of ideas, energies, and practices from different parts of the world as I continue.

Candice Wu 26:52

One of my inspirations is to connect you all up with different healing practices from all sorts of practitioners, shamans, creators, collaborators in the world that I meet up with. So I hope you’ll stay connected with me on this podcast and thank you again for listening. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or feedback or comments for me.

Candice Wu 27:17

Before you leave, I’d like to invite you to subscribe to the weekly Embody Podcast at CandiceWu.com/podcast and we just got on Stitcher and Apple Podcasts as well as Spotify, so you can find me on all of those platforms and if you’d like to learn more about me or get free resources on embodiment, healing, meditations and more, you can go to CandiceWu.com/embody. Thanks so much for listening and see you next time on the Embody Podcast.