Candice Wu 0:00

This episode is all about anger and its importance. How anger gets a bad rap, how to harness your anger for healing, strength, protection, and confidence. What happens when we repress our anger and how to work with your own anger to discharge the energy, use it intentionally and constructively, and the healing experientials to follow.

Candice Wu 0:08

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 0:29

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

Candice Wu 0:44

These episodes are made possible by all the supporters on Patreon that contribute and donate to this work. Thank you so much. I appreciate it immensely. And you have no idea how much it means to me. I’m really excited because there are some lovely offers that are on Patreon. So if you become a supporter, you can have access to different gifts, such as having a quarterly, personalized healing meditation for you that’s designed intuitively based on what you need and desire for your life. And I work with you to create that just with a few thoughts and ideas from you about what you want. And another offer that I just put out there is to join in the Embodied Group healing session that happens monthly. So this is a call with four people in a group where I’ll support you and being at ease in your own body and spirit into tapping into your own wisdom and intuition, and any embodied support or ancestral healing support that you need this month. I can’t wait to begin the first group. If you’d like to check this out, go to my page at CandiceWu.com/patreon.

Candice Wu 1:38

So welcome back everyone. By the time you are listening to this podcast episode, I will be on a flight to Las Vegas, which is the nearest airport to the retreat that I’m holding in October. I’m very excited to take about nine days just to nourish myself, rejuvenate, and to have some off time before I jump into this magical healing retreat called the Soul Body Women’s Retreat. It’s been a really interesting time of expanding in my healing work and in my practice and business. As you noticed in the Patreon offers that had come out, whenever I expand or head into something new, it feels like I have to shift my energy so that it’s larger, so that it’s bigger and can hold more. And that’s exactly what’s been happening, I’ve been onboarding a new team member into the “behind the scenes” work, who I’ll share a bit later. But that’s just created so much inner expansion. And it’s been scary and overwhelming at times. But I’m very excited for the growth that it’ll bring.

Candice Wu 3:17

Also before the retreat, I just get so excited because it is such a meaningful and powerful connection. In the retreat, I always feel like I’m just right in the flow of things. Of course, I’m human. So that might not happen. But I’m really looking forward to this Soul Body Women’s Retreat. By the time you’re listening to this, there will be just like a week and a half before the retreat. But if you’re still interested in coming, there might be a spot or two left. So feel free to reach out and I’ll be happy to keep you posted on how it goes afterward. I know many of you have been listening and tuning into this retreat itself being shared on the podcast. So thank you all for being out there and listening and sharing it with people that it might be interesting too. So now let’s jump into the episode. Let’s get right into anger. That sounds funny, doesn’t it?

Candice Wu 4:16

If you’re tuning in today about this controversial topic, somehow I find it very controversial because everyone has different opinions on anger, and what to do with it. The opinions and thoughts and beliefs that I have here on anger come from my personal experience and from lots of training in both Western and Eastern medicine and science, indigenous practices, as well as practices that come from a basis in the nervous system and why there is a fight and anger energy in us.

Candice Wu 4:52

And if you are listening, I encourage you to listen to the whole podcast, perhaps in bits and pieces as you need, especially if it’s overwhelming. But do take the time to tune into all the different parts. Because I may say something on one part of the podcast that doesn’t quite make sense or isn’t a full complete idea. And I may complete the idea later in the podcast.

Candice Wu 5:18

You may be working with anger in your own way or you may be a practitioner that is either including some new practices or very well developed in this area. I may be offering some different ideas or I may be missing things. So I’m always open to learning. But this is what I’ve learned in myself that has worked.

Candice Wu 5:40

A couple of weeks ago, I published an episode about commitment and conviction. It was a story about working with my horse in training, Sage and my teacher. In this episode, I mentioned how commitment and conviction require the power and the energy of anger behind us. It requires us to harness that energy so that we can feel more powerful. So feel free to check out that episode as a preface to this one — it’s at CandiceWu.com/commitment-and-conviction.

Candice Wu 6:15

In my experience, anger has gotten such a bad rap. Growing up in my life, I was never allowed to share anger without getting more punished, without receiving anger back. So it was terrifying. And I got all sorts of messages being a girl and then a woman that anger wasn’t allowed.

Candice Wu 6:38

You may have a different experience. And I’d encourage you to notice your own experience and sense for yourself. The place that anger has in your life, in your psyche and soul, and how it is a tool to you or not, or is it an enemy?

Candice Wu 6:55

So this episode is all about tuning into and exploring anger, it’s importance, what it does in the nervous system, and why it’s there. What happens when we repress our anger, and how to work with our anger, so that it actually is an empowering tool that we can use and access when we need it.

Candice Wu 7:15

Before we jump into all that I want to share with you a story that just came through last night about anger. And this story is just channeled through without editing. It’s pretty raw and uncut, unpolished. So take it for what it is and see what it sparks up in you. Here we go.

Candice Wu 7:39

Anger was so misunderstood. It turned this way and that way telling its human with its color and sensation and heat exactly what it needed. It wanted to put its foot down. Just hear me. It had to be known. After all, Anger was trying to protect this body from the rough and scary experiences, from things that we’re not okay. It wanted to alert when it got stepped on or when it was made to feel small or abused or pushed just a little too much.

Candice Wu 8:10

It didn’t quite understand because the human did not want to listen. I am trying to make it a better place and a better situation for you, to protect our grounds, to make it okay again. I just want to create and play again. That’s the point. But the human didn’t listen.

Candice Wu 8:30

So it needed to find a new way. It was not going to be ignored. But it took a lot of energy, so much energy to come racing up into the human and all for it to just be pushed back down.

Candice Wu 8:45

This time, Anger shot up into the human’s body to ignite something to move, pushed right into the arms and shoulders all the way to the fingers in hopes that something could shift and hopes that it could move out of the body and something would happen.

Candice Wu 9:03

But the Captain says “No.” That’s your father. You can’t hurt him. You can’t be angry at him. He is your protection and your safety. You’re wrecking things. Go away. Anger says “But he’s not protecting us, he’s hurting us, Captain!”

Candice Wu 9:22

“Yes. Right. This is confusing. But he is your safety in other ways. And until you’re an adult you need him.”

Candice Wu 9:32

Anger says “okay, I guess I will go away for now. I guess I’ll just live in the shoulders and the jaws and the muscles. I’ll take a lot of energy. But can I come back when it’s safe?”

Candice Wu 9:47

“Yes.” Years go by and the Captain continues to say no to Anger.

Candice Wu 9:54

“But we’re adults now.” said the Anger. The Captain didn’t understand, would not hear it one bit.

Candice Wu 10:03

After many years. Anger resigned. Gave up layer upon layer of energy, locked up all in the body, tension, and pain. Anger was defeated, resigned to its quarters. It couldn’t do its job. It was a sad story.

Candice Wu 10:27

It really wanted for the human to play, to come back out. To use its creativity to go for it, to step into life and live, to be powerful. But that wasn’t the way things were anymore. There was only one hope left.

Candice Wu 10:45

One day when the Captain wasn’t looking, didn’t have their guard up, Anger busted out. The human felt shame and fear. It was overwhelming. But finally, some daylight and air, Anger came breaking through. But it was just so much. It just needed help and needed guard rails. This was all too new. It needed to slow down and have support and understanding.

Candice Wu 11:13

Blowing steam little by little, but this was just a burst. But Anger was not going back in. And the human didn’t know what to do. Anger just pushed and pushed. And finally, the human just had it.

Candice Wu 11:29

One day at all of the movement and all of the excitement, Anger met up with the adult human. And the adult human had learned something different. The adult human could understand and could see Anger. The adult human could see me and stand there and support me while the feeling, the big feeling just moved.

Candice Wu 11:55

And the human began to feel strong again, capable and worthy.

Candice Wu 11:59

Anger felt worthy of being seen and expressing. Anger felt a huge release. A big breath of life could happen again. I can live. I can be.

Candice Wu 12:12

Anger moved out and into the Aethers were it dissolved into nothingness. But it left a message with the human. “I’m always around to protect you to remind you of your power. And in my best form, I am understood and I don’t need to become aggressive, violent, rageful to the point of explosion. Unless you’re really in a life-threatening situation. And I’ll come to your rescue. I can be used to understand your boundaries. I can be used so you can know yourself more deeply and to open your mind. I can be useful to shave off the layers of unsafe moments, fearful moments where I was required to be there. And I can make sure that you can play, be free, enjoy, create and desire exactly what you want to just as you are, just as you were designed.”

Candice Wu 13:19

So I hope you got something from that, that can paint a picture in a different way from me just telling you. But this is a story about a young person who is experiencing some emotional or verbal abuse from their father. And they want to fight back. They want to scream or punch or show their father that this isn’t okay. The anger wants to, the anger wants to protect. But another part of this young person comes in and stops them because it wasn’t safe. Because it really wasn’t a good idea to hurt their father. They do love their father. And in fact, they need their father to survive.

Candice Wu 14:06

Now, this got multiple dimensions. And we can talk about the varying degrees of abuse and what’s okay and what’s not all day. But the point really is that there are often situations where we feel angry, where we feel like we need to protect ourselves or stand up for ourselves. Often we’ve had these experiences growing up or throughout our lives, where we could not use that energy, where that energy, that instinctual protective energy did not get to express itself.

Candice Wu 14:42

There’s a whole spectrum of places that this could happen. Maybe it’s like the story wherein young life, if you spoke up, or if you moved your body in the way that it needed to, to show how angry you were, that you would have gotten more punished.

Candice Wu 15:02

Or maybe it was that there was a car accident you were in, and you didn’t really want to scream at the person that hit you, or that you were just too numb and the body was so overwhelmed, that you weren’t really even present. That’s also another protective mechanism.

Candice Wu 15:23

Or maybe it was your boss that really upset you. You got triggered by something, and you didn’t like how something happened at work, but you might lose your job if you spoke up.

Candice Wu 15:39

So let’s back up a little bit. What is anger? Anger is the natural signal in the body that something’s wrong. It’s a red flag, which signals a threat, where it signals a trigger inside of us based on our perceptions. We can have layers upon layers of anger built up and accumulated over the years by all the situations that have enraged us or brought us even a little bit of irritation, if we don’t let that be acknowledged or moved in the proper way.

Candice Wu 16:12

And if you’re anything like me, and where anger was just not allowed, I had to stuff it down. Anger tells us about fairness, about right and wrong, which is all subject to our own beliefs and perceptions and our own idea of morality. And it tells us if we’ve been violated in some way, whether that’s our hearts and our emotions, our body, or the way that we’re being treated in a relationship.

Candice Wu 16:40

It also could be the way that we’re treating ourselves. We could be berating ourselves or bullying ourselves. And also another part of us could be enraged by that or angry by that. Anger also shows us where we’re rigid in our thoughts, ideas or beliefs and where we might need to look at something in ourselves that wants to open up.

Candice Wu 17:02

Physiologically, the energy of anger is the energy that wants to come up and protect us. Some people may or may not call this anger, as sometimes it’s just having firmness and speaking up and standing up for yourself. If we don’t listen to that energy and use it in the proper way in the present moment, then that’s where it builds up. Or that’s where we may have something incomplete. And we could benefit from coming through that and releasing that energy. When that energy gets built up. It stays in the nervous system, it stays in the body and accumulates as tension and locked up energy, which eventually creates depression.

Candice Wu 17:46

The amazing thing about anger, when we work with it, and harness it, empower ourselves with it and use it intentionally and constructively is that we can recover our wild self or ability to feel powerful within us and outside of ourselves, where we can protect ourselves and feel confident that we can navigate life, that we are able to create what we want in life, that we’re worthy of it, we can do it.

Candice Wu 18:13

In observation of animals in the wild that have fought against a predator and protected themselves, or if they’ve run away safely, what they do when they’re safe or when they’re social animals with their peers, then they do something called Pronk. They pronk. They celebrate that they’re alive and they stand proud and are excited and happy. So we need the energy of anger to inform us. And when we repress that anger, it doesn’t get to do its job.

Candice Wu 18:46

At the very deepest core of anger, as the story that I shared with you had suggested, is that anger connects up with our absolute creativity, our divine creativity that is unique and special to who we are individually. So what we want in this life, what we desire, and what we want to create, what we want to do, how we want to relate to ourselves in the world, that’s all connected to anger.

Candice Wu 19:16

Think about it, when you want something, when you’re totally going for it and you’re just running towards what you want, whatever that is, something you’re creating in your life, a person that you want to be with or reaching out towards someone, if this gets stopped, if something runs into your pathway, some part of you could get angry.

Candice Wu 19:39

This is connected directly to the energetic channels in the body, the Meridians, related to Chinese medicine. The liver energy that’s on the inner thigh, from the ankle up and up towards the ribs and all the way to the eyes, is the energy of creativity and desire, so what we want, and our inspiration, our life. And when that gets blocked up, or something stops it, then the gallbladder energy is related to that energy of putting our foot down. It runs on the outer side of our body, outer leg, all the way to our foot and the pinky toe. So you can see how it’s putting our foot down. Our right to exist and feel safety, to feel like ourselves, and have boundaries.

Candice Wu 20:29

So when anger comes, the energy of the gallbladder fires up. And if that anger doesn’t move through, it can get blocked up in the gallbladder channel. And also, therefore, blocking up the liver channel, which is its sibling channel. So these are paired and cycle up and down the body, cycling through the inner and the outer parts of the body. And so as one gets blocked, the other one does, too. And that begins to create depression. Our life force becomes stifled and we numb and we go into overwhelm. It’s where it is unsafe to express the anger or the protection, where we leave it in the body and let it build up as tension as the story suggested earlier. And as I see in my work with my clients, and myself, and what happens in depression, I’ve experienced it myself. And I started to believe that I’m not enough, I’m worthless, it’s hopeless, I’m unlovable, I’m weak, I can’t protect myself, no one can protect me, I can’t do anything. I can’t get what I want.

Candice Wu 21:41

These are the thoughts that go with that collapse of the system, the overwhelm that shuts us down and that sends us into depression, then we get digestive issues and all sorts of illness and disease tension in the body headaches, eye constriction, fear, and this can happen intergenerationally. We do know that if you have a parent or someone else in the line of the ancestry that’s close to you, that has depression, your chances of having depression are much more likely.

Candice Wu 22:13

And it is to say that the energy of overwhelm, and the fight responses being suppressed and lodged in the body incomplete, that energy gets passed down. And the soul of the family is working with an energy of protection, reclaiming power.

Candice Wu 22:33

The good thing about knowing this is that we can reclaim our power. We can feel complete and strong. We can feel capable and also improve our digestion and muscle tone and feel that life come back, feel our desire and craving for life, the zest for life, be possible. When we come back to the instinctual sense of anger and work with it so that it moves through, then we can have that empowerment back. We can feel more creative, sleep better, have more space in our mind, and our mental ability. Because then our prefrontal cortex that does the thinking and higher processing comes back online.

Candice Wu 23:21

When we’re in a fight mode, when the anger is not moved all the way through, then we’re actually in the place of activation, where all the energy goes out into our limbs so that we can fight and in other cases, run or do something else to protect. But we’re talking about anger and fight right now. So that energy goes out to the limbs to fight. And if it doesn’t get to use that, if it shuts down, because it’s too overwhelming, or if you push it down, because it’s too overwhelming, or have ideas that it shouldn’t be there, then it gets repressed, it gets stuck into our system. And that’s where the higher thinking shuts down too and the digestion. Because all that energy moves out from the core of the body and out into the limbs. It is quite destructive to let that energy just stay in our bodies. It’s corrosive over time, because we’re only meant to be in fight energy for a couple of minutes at a time.

Candice Wu 24:27

If we look at animals in the wild, as Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing, has done, Somatic Experiencing is very powerful in completing these fight responses. And as part of the study that is in my background, and that I use, and so if we look at animals in the wild that are experiencing a threat, they may choose to fight their predator if they can’t run usually. And that only can last a couple of minutes. Either they make it or they die.

Candice Wu 25:03

So if we’re living with it, if it’s lodged in our body, we might not actually feel much if we are numb. If we are not very present with ourselves, then that is the overwhelm that’s the frozen state that is more activated than the fight energy. And to come out of that, the natural progression is to go into fight mode and to move that energy. So how we work with that anger will be to come in this episode and the healing experiential that will follow this main episode.

Candice Wu 25:41

Let’s also talk about the effect on groups and systems as a whole on our communities, our families and the world and society at large when we don’t work with our anger. When we personally repress our own anger or disavow it, push it down. There is an unconscious effect that I’ve witnessed because we are interdependent and sometimes dependent. When we disavow our feelings, especially of anger, then somewhere that anger has to be picked up. And someone tends to feel it the most vulnerable person perhaps to that anger, for whatever reasons in their particular valence, in their history, their culture, or the perceptions that have been picked up over time of who might feel the anger the most. That person can pick it up and feel more anger then is actually theirs.

Candice Wu 26:43

This is something I witness and experience in group relations work in Tavistock. It’s called the Tavistock model of group processing and awareness building. And it’s also something I witness in a Family Systems approach and Family Systems therapy, as well as the only Constellations, the Embodied Healing work that I do with working with the ancestry dead or alive. It’s working with the energy and when we witness constellation where people are representing people in someone else’s family, just to illuminate what’s going on there.

Candice Wu 27:21

If one person who actually rightfully feels anger, or hasn’t rather work through the anger that is living there, someone else in the room can feel it, someone else is picking up on it, or feeling it instead of that person. And it’s often a younger person, a child. So if you are somebody that holds other people’s feelings, or can feel it in the room when other people are feeling things, this may be a way to understand what’s going on.

Candice Wu 27:54

This is also related to Shadow Work, the tossing out or discarding or not feeling feelings that are there and it goes somewhere in your system as well as out of you.

Candice Wu 28:09

So others are affected, and others have to do their own work with whether or not it’s theirs to take on. And if it is all very unconscious, which it usually is, then it’s hard to tell, it’s hard to sense it sometimes. So we look at the world and why are some places in the world extremely peaceful, while other places are erupting with terrorism, with war and rage and are very unsafe places to be, something is out of balance in the world.

Candice Wu 28:42

There was a time period where I was picking up a lot of anger when I was working with the group relations to have stock work that I would feel enraged in a process grip. And I’d have no idea why I didn’t seem to have any rationale. I didn’t have a specific reason to be angry. But suddenly, I’m just filled with it, and can’t really explain it either because the mental processing is not quite online, either.

Candice Wu 29:13

And when I voiced it, when I was brave enough to or could somehow managed to do that, or if I even just expressed it through my body, or words in some way, if someone else claimed some of that anger, if they said, “Oh, yeah, you know what, I’m really pissed off. Because this, and this happened in this room.” And you’re actually feeling the anger that I’m feeling, then I started to feel better, it decreased the load on me. And it was able to see where it belongs to the context of whose anger it was, and mine became a manageable amount. But what I also realized in that process was how dependent I was on other people taking their anger back. And I think that I was getting even angrier when they weren’t taking it back. And so it was just like, layer upon layer of anger. But my work is to have better boundaries, to not take on the anger, to use my own right of having my own energy, and not taking in other people’s stuff, which requires that same protective Red anger, as my teacher calls it, the Red energy.

Candice Wu 30:22

That’s Maggie Klein, who does SE work, she calls it the Red energy. I have to use my own Red energy, anger protection boundaries, to secure my energetic boundary where it unconsciously happens that I pick up anger. For other people, the work is to claim their anger, and to be able to use that energy and acknowledge when they feel angry, or the times they have felt angry in the past, and to work with it, or to get support around the anger because it feels out of control or unmanageable, or they don’t know what to do with it.

Candice Wu 31:06

So just a little sidebar, I want to talk about the messages that I’ve received about anger. Over the years, the messages I received are that, I’m selfish. If I express anger, or irritation, especially to those I love that anger means I don’t appreciate the person if I’m angry with them. If I’m angry, then I’m a bitch. And that may be gendered as a woman. Anger is scary, and has no resolve. There’s no way to come back or redeem yourself if you lose it or if you become angry with someone, there’s no repair, that it’s childish to be angry, that you’re better than that, that you should take the higher road. And I recognized that this is related to the way you express anger or use it.

Candice Wu 31:53

But what happens, at least what happened to me is it told me not to have the anger at all, to just completely dismiss it. And I think that there is a middle space of being able to use it intentionally and communicate it well without attacking a person unless that attack is needed.

Candice Wu 32:12

Other messages I received are that, I’m immature if I have anger. I won’t be taken seriously. I’m a bad person. And there’s no place for anger here. There’s just a lot of judgment that it is not socially acceptable and a lot of stigma about anger.

Candice Wu 32:31

Other messages that I have heard are that it’s corrosive to your health and to people, it’s destructive, which also is true, but there’s more to the picture, it’s corrosive, because we just let it linger, or we let it go out of hand, or if we use it to attack people.

Candice Wu 32:50

What is essential here is just because you don’t feel something, just because you don’t feel your anger, it doesn’t make it go away. So when people say, “Oh, don’t feel your anger, just distract from it and do these things instead.” That might be a temporary solution to help you out of a situation that could potentially go awry and could be useful at times. But if you’re doing that and constantly coming up against the anger, and doing that, it’s a coping mechanism. It’s avoiding the true roots of what’s going on there and what needs to complete itself. What body wants to happen so that it can feel healthier, powerful, and in control.

Candice Wu 33:31

As I listened to myself with all these messages, I feel that we’ve had such an issue with anger, and it is gendered. Often it’s very gendered, where men sometimes are afraid that if they have anger, that they’ll be seen as vicious and scary, or that they’ll get in trouble. Or if they’ve had an experience in their young life where anger was intertwined with aggression, that they did get in trouble, and were given the message that they were bad, shame.

Candice Wu 34:04

And often I work with women who fear being angry at all, because they’re afraid of hurting someone’s feelings. So even when they’re not in the room with the person they are actually angry with, they have a hard time expressing it to me that they’re angry with them. And that was totally me. Even after a couple of years of therapy, it was really hard for me to tell my therapist that I was angry with her after she no-showed on me for like 45 minutes.

Candice Wu 34:34

And she was like “Candice, it’s okay if you feel angry with me.” And I was like, “No, nope, I don’t.” So you can see how much anger was a threat or at least I perceived it as such a threat to a relationship. And I’ll also talk more about why this was for me.

Candice Wu 34:51

I would like to offer some ideas of why anger seems so threatening to both me and perhaps you or other people in your life. And also how anger has been paired up with different energies and actions that have made it scary.

Candice Wu 35:12

For me, anger has been mixed up in all sorts of childhood experiences that were verbally and emotionally abusive, that were completely unrepairable. At that time the adults in my life didn’t come to me and heal the situation, helped me feel safe again, so I didn’t have the support in regulating and also reconnecting in the relationships that the abuse was happening in.

Candice Wu 35:39

So for you out there, if anger has been mixed up in a young experience, it could be quite scary. It could cause our nervous system to activate in ways that are completely overwhelming. And that’s out of our control, no matter how much we can mentally say, we were okay, as a child. And in our nervous system, we don’t really have control of the perception of threat that causes a reaction inside that causes the energy of anger to come up.

Candice Wu 36:12

If there’s been verbal and emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, then there is likely anger coming from those situations, especially if those situations didn’t go well or didn’t get resolved. And as I said earlier, on, that if their experiences where you wanted to protect yourself or needed to, and didn’t get to, for reasons of various kinds, or if you appease the person, instead of standing up for yourself and making the situation stop, then that energy might be still waiting for you inside.

Candice Wu 36:53

If you received punishment by a caretaker that turned angry, that was aggressive, or it started to feel unsafe for you, then that could also be a reason that angry is quite scary for me.

Candice Wu 37:08

My father slammed cupboards and screamed at me really often, which was very scary for me, the sound mixed with the yelling and the upset was very activating.

Candice Wu 37:22

So fear and anger often come together. And that makes complete sense, because anger comes, the energy that needs to protect comes when there’s a threat. And so the energy of fear is also embedded in that. For many, anger has been coupled and paired with violence or aggression. And it’s not the case that they have to come together. It seems to me that violence, aggression, and being enraged, where physical violence needs to happen, is the results of either anger accumulated, words come too much or were there was a need a true need to just work with the instinctual energy of protection, the physical need, that our body has to push away or to fight to make something that seems threatening our bad to stop.

Candice Wu 38:22

So while we might not always use that anger in social situations, we still need to discharge it from the body because we are instinctual beings. We have a reptilian brain that only looks out for our safety.

Candice Wu 38:38

Another experience and energy that anger can be coupled with is fame. Fame says that you are a bad person, not just that you’ve done something wrong or bad, but that you are bad or that you are unworthy or worthless or that you should be outcast in, that you’re unlovable.

Candice Wu 38:58

When anger happens, sometimes we perceive that someone’s telling us that we are bad or that it is triggered a part of us that feels that way. Or it literally was the case that it came together. And this leads us to anger time together with abandonment or loss of love, that we fear people will leave us emotionally or physically if we’re angry with them, or if they’re angry with us. And so anger can be such a threat and not even looked at at all.

Candice Wu 39:34

And the last piece I want to look at is how anger can be tied into the judgment of it being childish. We often use the word tantrum with children that they’re throwing a tantrum. And I guess we also use that for adults. And in some ways, it can be a way to bring humor into the situation, to lighten it up a bit to bring more safety. But also saying that something is a tantrum is a way to distance ourselves. It’s to distance and disconnect with the thing that is going on. And to just say, it’s a thing that happens, it has a bit of a negative connotation, but it doesn’t have to.

Candice Wu 40:14

But if we’re looking at young children, and they’re just having a tantrum and we dismiss it as just a tantrum, we made us miss the thing that they’re actually upset from. And we may dismiss that they completely need our support. It’s a cry for regulation and help, it’s to say that this is intolerable and I need acknowledgment, I need help with my emotions, I need a present person to be there so I don’t feel so out of control.

Candice Wu 40:41

And as adults, we need that too. It can be extremely overwhelming and intolerable to feel rage or anger. If we abandon ourselves or if we abandon our children when they’re angry, we leave ourselves, we leave our children alone in one of the scariest kinds of inner moments, intolerable moments that doesn’t get them a way to find completion.

Candice Wu 41:07

I’ve watched some videos where people just stay with their children if they’re having an interruption of anger, and eventually, they kick and scream and that anger moves and they start to want to engage again they start to want cuddles or they feel sadness first and then want to connect with their loved ones. And I don’t think that’s far from what we need as adults too.

Candice Wu 41:33

In this way, anger can be constructive and socially engaging. It can tell us what the other person found was upsetting and not okay. And it can bring us closer together.

Candice Wu 41:45

So as we talk about anger, and expressing it and allowing it, I’m not exactly saying to just let it rip with anyone and at any time. Anger can be destructive as we know. It can turn into violence, but it doesn’t have to. And it can be used as an attack even without violence. And that isn’t always helpful, although sometimes it can be. Sometimes it’s very needed. And if you’re in a situation where you need to stand up for yourself, you need to growl a bit so the other person doesn’t do it again, it really depends on who it’s with, and the situation you’re in, and what you feel you want to do.

Candice Wu 42:30

But I’d like to offer ways to understand the anger and use it so that you can feel empowered and feel that you have acted the way you want to in your life and in your relationships, that it feels conscious and intentional, if you want it to, to use anger in a specific way. And that you can reclaim the ability to have anger if it’s necessary to have in a life-threatening situation or a dangerous situation where you need to literally protect yourself or someone else.

Candice Wu 43:05

There are also different ways to use anger. If you’re in a loving relationship versus with an acquaintance versus with a stranger and the degrees of danger that actually is in the moment, you can gauge how much you need to express it in what way.

Candice Wu 43:25

So if it’s a loving relationship, you may want to work with the anger outside from a relationship before you talk to the person about what you felt. Or you may want to just take a couple of breaths and tone it down inside, work with the energy of it later and speak to it in the moment.

Candice Wu 43:46

If it’s with a stranger and they’re attacking you, you may want to do something different. I’m not saying to just go out and be violent. But there are situations where we do need to protect ourselves. And if we don’t have the energy of anger, and the protective energy ability turned on, if we just go straight into a frozen state, or we just cannot move at all, then we really have a hard time protecting ourselves.

Candice Wu 44:13

But if that’s the case for you just know that you can work with that with a trained professional that works in Somatic Experiencing or other Somatic therapies to bring those instinctual and natural abilities back online.

Candice Wu 44:30

So we already talked about the nervous system a bit and in the work of Peter Levine, and Somatic Experiencing that if we don’t use the adrenaline and energy of a fight response, the anger, the Red energy, then it stays in our system until it gets to be released and gets to complete.

Candice Wu 44:49

So what we want with the present situation, and any past situations that have accumulated as trauma or Intergenerational trauma, Soul trauma, we want to complete those five responses.

Candice Wu 45:04

This also connects to the work of Family Constellations. The ancestral healing work that I do and that is out there in the world, Soul work and Shadow work, also touching in on Chinese medicine and Ayurveda as we talked about with the Meridians and in Yoga Non-Resistance, working with the energy and not resisting it, but choosing how you want to respond.

Candice Wu 45:28

The really cool thing about working with past anger is that if you do it in a somatic way, in a body-centered way and energetic way, you don’t have to work on every single situation that you can recall, or everyone you can’t recall even. Because it touches in on that entire channel of times that you needed to speak up or do something or fight when you didn’t. So you can restore all that energy without doing it all.

Candice Wu 45:58

As I mentioned earlier, working with anger is best with a trained professional if they’re somatically informed, their trauma-informed, and nervous system informed is the best that I found. Because we don’t always notice when our nervous system is going into a frozen or tonic and mobility state, it’s shutting down or completely overwhelmed. And, if that’s the case, we may be re-traumatizing ourselves which isn’t the worst thing in the world. But it might accumulate another layer of energy in the body. It might just get more stuck inside and feel a little more stressful, might feel more activating.

Candice Wu 46:40

If you have the support of someone or you if you’ve trained in it, and you feel like you can support yourself through working with anger, I think that’s fantastic. And some of the healing experiences that I will put out this week will support you even further or just support you along where you’re at.

Candice Wu 47:00

I find it also really important to have a trained professional that is attuned to Developmental Dynamics.

Candice Wu 47:07

So what I mean is the development of us as children all the way to adulthood. Because when certain things have happened in our childhood, at different ages, we needed different things. And we don’t always know those things as adults, what we needed back then, but someone who’s trained and sensitive in that can support that with a lot more ease than you doing it yourself or someone who doesn’t know anything about that. You find a lot of therapists and Somatic Experiencing people as well as Constellations, Family Constellations facilitators may be attuned to those dynamics.

Candice Wu 47:12

The biggest thing to know about working with anger is that it can get overwhelming. And that’s where your nervous system can shut down. And the more you support yourself by taking breaks or working with a professional, the easier it is to move through all that energy. It can be a lot.

Candice Wu 48:06

Anger has a unique way and it wants what it wants, and it’s different for each individual. It’s very primitive, and instinctual, the aspects of anger that we’re talking about. So it’s not as evolved as our spiritual selves, or other parts of our cognitive mind. So that the energy may have the impulse of screaming or biting, kicking, punching, slapping, hitting, pinching, climbing, and growling. Or also mechanical things that give a release, like an explosion or something being shot, a crash of some sort.

Candice Wu 48:45

So when we’re working well, with all this, we can remind ourselves that we’re using this anger with the intentions of healing, and reclaiming our right to feel worthy and protected and check in with what feels right to you.

Candice Wu 49:00

Some people worried that if they think these things like if they’re angry with their friend, and they want to use their imagination, to work through that anger, that they’ll actually be sending that energy to their friend. I don’t believe that exactly.

Candice Wu 49:17

I think that if you’re having the intention of healing, and the anger is there, you can imagine something and let yourself receive the healing from it. Because we usually land in a different place at the end, we usually land in some sort of compassion, or stepping away at a healthy distance. So it’s actually more corrosive to yourself if you leave that anger inside of you.

Candice Wu 49:45

Let’s get into what do you do with anger, when you have it! How can you develop your capacity to feel anger? So that it’s not so threatening if you find it so. And what are ways to release it so that you’re not living with it? And letting it build up inside of you over years, and years, and into your family generational line as well.

Candice Wu 50:07

So personally, the way I like to work with anger is with my healing coach, or a therapist or with myself, and sometimes friends, away from the situation that it is required in, unless it’s really needed in a situation in that very moment.

Candice Wu 50:26

My goal for myself is to have the right amount of that energy come up when it’s warranted, and not loaded up from the past, so if something really threatening happens to me that I can respond accordingly. But if someone in my life that I love does something that just triggers me that it also responds lovingly, but work with any energy of anger that came up in me, aside from that, and a lot of that work with myself then, is in my imagination, and with my body, and what I sense in my body, the sensations and emotions and the impulses that want to come through.

Candice Wu 51:08

So just some basic tips, what can we do with anger, stay present. And notice it. If we let it build up, then at some point, it becomes an explosion. It’s like shaking up a pop bottle. And if we let a little out at a time, then bottle doesn’t explode. But if we just let like, build it up over a lifetime, and open the cap, all the way just blows, just like the story at the beginning.

Candice Wu 51:36

So staying present, noticing it becoming better at noticing where in your body do you feel anger, when it does arise, work with the anger with a trained professional, as I said, or work with yourself to release some of that charge before you take action in a relationship. That is if you can. Because sometimes the protective energy has to happen immediately and in present time. So it’s about acting and not reacting.

Candice Wu 52:05

You might decide that you want it differently for yourself, and you’re okay with a reaction or that’s okay in different situations, that’s entirely up to you and your responsibility with anger. Working with it with yourself, as I mentioned, and not taking it up with anyone might be helpful especially if you recognize it’s a trigger or something incomplete in the past. Use the safety of your imagination to support you in the release of the energy rather than using it in the situation, especially if it’s a loving one. And also, solve your part of the problem, take responsibility for what you need to change to support yourself, or to take responsibility in a situation. And if you have hurt someone with anger, then take responsibility for that or address it and repair it.

Candice Wu 52:57

So let’s jump into a few more tangible ways to work with anger.

Candice Wu 53:01

One is notice where you feel angry in your body. And when you feel it, notice if it feels tolerable or not. If it feels manageable, then stay with it. If it doesn’t, then take a break, sense into something pleasant or look outside at the trees around yourself so the energy isn’t too intense. And if you want to come back to it, and pendulate, you can find a resource on Pendulation, that is sensing back and forth into a pleasant and unpleasant experience on the episode about emotions at CandiceWu.com/emotions. And there, you can also find a podcast on resourcing, that you can resource safety and come back to safety if something feels so intense. And what I found is that we can power through the intensity we can feel through really tough feelings if we’re practiced at them, or if we push ourselves. But that’s not always helpful or useful. And if you resource yourself with strength, and take breaks, even when you don’t feel overwhelmed, it can make all of the anger move a lot easier. All of that energy of a fight situation, the sympathetic nervous system can just fake that tension easier.

Candice Wu 54:30

So as you notice the anger, you can notice the sensations in your body and be free. Let yourself feel if there’s any heat, any movement, an impulse that you have, or a picture in your mind, even color. If you notice in your vision a color, or color comes over you. And if you have the impulse to move, follow what wants to happen, but do so slowly.

Candice Wu 55:00

You might notice in your arms or legs, that there’s tension. Yes, let that tension happen even more. So you’re letting yourself know it’s safe to be here with that tension and unsafe to feel angry, safe to follow that movement. And of course, take a break.

Candice Wu 55:17

Other things you can do with your anger are, you can punch a pillow very slowly, or your couch and just feel the sensation of what that’s like, you can push against the wall and feel your palms, feel the power and strength in your arms. You can do push-ups and push into the ground. But while you’re doing it, feel the energy, feel the heat or feel any sensation that the body has about your anger.

Candice Wu 55:46

You can draw up whatever you’re angry about and picture what your instinct wants to do with it and embody it in whatever way you can just very consciously, stay with yourself, stay with your body.

Candice Wu 56:02

So I’m very generally speaking on how to let the energy of anger do its thing, and find its way to completion, how to notice it. And if this is helpful to you follow along in the healing experiential that I’ll put out later this week, so that you can get more support and feel through it in a deeper way, in a more guided way.

Candice Wu 56:26

Another thing you can do with anger is notice where the anger is in your body and picture it, as a figure, object or color. And see if you can invite it forward, look at it and ask it what it wants you to know. And what it wants you to express. You can imagine how it wants to express it. If it wants to fight or scream or blow something up. Just imagine and let yourself feel through the energy of what happens.

Candice Wu 56:56

You can rip paper just to get the arms moving and to express that energy of anger. You can stomp your feet or imagine a scream. Let the body do as much as you feel is manageable. But slowly, titrate it so that it’s not going too fast. Because that way the body has a chance to integrate it. That way the body syncs up with what your mind already knows. Your mind knows you’re safe but your body needs to get there too. Because when it’s in the energy of fight, it doesn’t really feel safe.

Candice Wu 57:32

My partner shared with me that there are rage rooms. There’s a company and maybe many companies out there that have rooms where you can go in and break things. So you can have 15 minutes on the clock. And a lot of people that experienced it say that it leads them to feel happy and exhausted, but that they are relieved of some of that anger and tension inside of them.

Candice Wu 58:02

Some people also said that this is controversial because it leads to other behaviors. And that may be a fear of yours as you move through some of the anger with movement, or with pushing or with the desire to punch. And if you do that slowly, with a pillow, you’re not really hurting somebody. But if you’re worried about that, causing you to become more aggressive later, I would talk to a trained professional and work with someone to see what’s going on there or to support you in that.

Candice Wu 58:34

But what I found in my work with people and myself is that I end up feeling great and calm. And it’s not something I want to do because that makes sense to me. Because the energy of the anger completes itself. It’s not that it stays there. But if it does, it’s likely that we weren’t very embodied when we were going through it.

Candice Wu 58:57

So as you sense into what your body needs to support the anger to move through, see if you can take off the social appropriateness lens, and you’re not going to do these things in real life. You’re not going to blow up a building, at least please don’t. I hope you do not. But know that these are things you’re not going to be doing in your outer world. But you’re doing in the safety of being with your therapist or healer or coach that knows trauma work, that knows Somatic work, or that you’re doing it with yourself, and you feel like you can help yourself navigate it.

Candice Wu 58:57

So if you’re going to a rage room, and you’re using an axe, to crush everything, everything in the room, and you love it, great! But make sure you stay embodied. That means, to feel your feet in your arms and notice what you’re swinging at. And see the results, seeing the result of what you picture in your mind or the real result happening can support the discharge of the fight response so that it’s over. And that’s the point.

Candice Wu 1:00:11

The point of it is to let the energy discharge and to help your body feel safer, healthier, more powerful. It’s not to train yourself to do this in your outer world, in your relationships, or in your job. It’s not that at all.

Candice Wu 1:00:26

So that’s where you can remind yourself that it’s okay to express anger, whatever way that your imagination wants to. Whatever way that the impulse wants it to happen. Because you’re not really going to do it in the actual real life.

Candice Wu 1:00:43

So if you’re experiencing anger, and it’s challenging, or you’re numb, and you need support with this, feel free to reach out to me. I love working with people on reclaiming their anger, reclaiming their voice, their ability to feel powerful in themselves. And it’s quite fun. Because when you do it with someone else, you can discharge the energy in a playful way. It can be like playing like we’re wild animals and tigers and growling at each other. Or we can do a role play and experience speaking up and shouting the way you want it to or saying words in a stern way to create your boundaries. And that can be incredibly empowering. You may never use those ways of communicating more expressing in real life. But to be able to is another story. It’s just like going to a karate class and being able to learn how to fight, to use your body and let your muscles know how to do that. But then walk into the world and be incredibly peaceful with your life or know how to protect yourself if you need to, but maybe you never need to. And it’s not something you’re just going to use out in the world to hurt people.

Candice Wu 1:01:56

You can also reach out to me and share with me how you are doing on this journey, what you’re experiencing? And check out the healing experiential this week that will relate to working with your anger. We’re going to do some Lion’s breath, which is a Yoga technique combined with some Somatic Experiencing work of letting anger release out the mouth and picturing a scream.

Candice Wu 1:02:20

We’re going to work with a person, a relationship that you feel anger in and what to do with that and will work with sensing into your anger in your body and asking it what it needs. Letting it have what it needs, in your imagination, and in your own space of safety, where you can completely embody it slowly in a way that allows it to complete.

Candice Wu 1:02:47

Thank you so much for listening in today and engaging with this material. If you have questions or comments, again reach out to me. If you’re not sure if you need support, I would encourage you to take up a free consultation of 20 minutes from me. And we can talk about what you might need, what you want for yourself and if it might be a right fit to work together. And I have plenty of awesome practitioners out there that I refer to. So if I’m not the right fit, I will likely have an idea for you.

Candice Wu 1:03:21

As we close the podcast today about anger. I want to remind you of the story that I shared in the beginning and wish you all the sense of power, play, and creative joy that you were designed to feel and that anger was designed to support you in protecting. I am just hoping that you find your own life, aliveness, and brilliance and know that anger, allowing yourself to use anger as a tool is one of the most powerful ways to step into your true self and be yourself and totally love yourself.

Candice Wu 1:04:03

So wishing all of you can find that true love for yourself and look forward to tuning in with you on the healing experiential. You can find them all at CandiceWu.com/anger.

Candice Wu 1:04:17

And if you would like to tune into more podcasts you can find the whole collection of healing experiential topics and interviews at CandiceWu.com/podcast and also join into my Embody Community on Facebook and my bi-monthly newsletter at CandiceWu.com/embody.

Candice Wu 1:04:38

Sending you my love and I’ll see you next time on the Embody Podcast.

Candice Wu 0:00
Hello, thanks for joining me today. This is a special healing experiential, working with anger or working with energy in the body that you want to release. You can listen to the full podcast about anger, as well as check out the other healing experientials that are offered within this podcast at CandiceWu.com/anger.

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

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

We've been talking about anger and how to reclaim the ability to use anger in our lives, where it's appropriate, and where we can reclaim the ability to use that, then we also reclaim power, trust, confidence, and the ability to assert what we want and need in our lives. As I mentioned in the full podcast about anger, that it's best to work with a trained professional who's trauma informed, but these are a few practices that you can do on your own, and just a reminder to stay gentle with yourself and to take a break and pendulate or resource yourself when you need that.

If you're unsure of what I'm talking about, I have recorded audio experiences that you can use to practice this. You can access those healing experientials at CandiceWu.com/emotions. There's a resourcing safety and pendulation. The thing about using both of those tools is that the anger or the intense energy can just move so much easier. If you don't mind really intense experiences, that's okay, you can try to power through, but I don't recommend it because we can move these emotions and energies through with much more ease.

Today, we're going to work with lions breath, which is on old yogic technique, but it also aligns with working with screaming and releasing the energy of a scream or energy of the need to protect ourselves that can come with anger, but that can come with overwhelm or the need to assert your boundaries. The thing about working with just one technique is that you might not be feeling the anger or this might not be the appropriate technique for you, for your anger to be expressed, it might want something completely different. So, you can also check out the other two healing experience that are following this episode, which is working with anger when you are angry with a person, anger in relationship, working with that anger so that it's a little less intense before you actually approach a relationship if you do, and the third healing experience of working with the anger and seeing what it wants, in all the ways that anger might express itself or the protective energy might want to be used through the body. So, that may be one where you can tune in and sense what your body specifically needs.

But today, we will work with lions breath, which I think is really fun. So, let's jump in. I invite you to begin by sensing and word. Notice your breath just as it is, any emotions you feel what's happening inside your body right now, and before we jump into what might be intense or unpleasant sense into something that feels good, whether that's looking around, and looking at something that feels pleasurable to look at or imagining a person, place or a thing that makes you feel safe.

Let that wash over your body as if you're feeling it right now, tuning into that connection with a pleasurable thing or the thing that makes you feel safe, and this will be a resource for today.

When you're ready, recall an experience where you felt angry, irritated, violated or were you needed to protect yourself. I would recommend choosing something that's light to medium, depending on your own experience with working with your own anger. If you feel more experienced and more embodied, choose what's right for you, and you may go for something deeper, but if this is new to try something that's mildly irritating. This could be a situation where you wanted to speak up but didn't or you wanted to say no to someone or tell them what you felt or make them stop doing something that you didn't like or any situation that you just got triggered, and felt upset and angry.

As you imagine that situation, notice that you're here in the present moment in your space, listening to my voice, and that you can stop and take a break anytime and sense into your resources. Now, when you're ready, take a deep breath in and fill up your lungs as if you're going to scream, and when you exhale, release the breath really loud or as loud as you can in your space right now, long and stick your tongue out at the same timeaas far out as it goes, it'll sound something like this, haahhhhhh.

And let your tongue stick out for as long and as far out as it can go as that energy of anger or irritation or expression comes out. As my teacher called it, the red energy. Feel the muscles in the face working and feel the breath moving through your body, and repeat this as many times as you want to. And the next time you do it, add in your hands. If you bring your palms face up as if they're forward from your body, like, you're saying, “Oh, not me or stop.” The next time you breathe out with the lions breath, use your fingers by tensing them up and bringing them to as if they look like claws like lions claws, and feel the muscles in the arms and fingers work and activate. Notice anything sensation that comes up or through the arms.

Some people feel tingling, heat, tension move. Some people feel tears or a huge release, some people want more. And while you're doing this, you can imagine the situation that you brought up, and you can imagine the kind of scream or release that might feel completely satisfying in that situation. If you're in a space, you can't make much noise, that's okay, because you can imagine in your mind the volume or the kind of roar or growl that would be needed for your body to feel satisfied in this situation that you're recalling, in this moment right now, the impulse of your body, and this anger. You can even imagine you're a tiger or a lion or some animal that's growing and showing its teeth or that you're a person and you're screaming your head off, but imagine the impact that you have on the situation as you've screamed or as you've growled, and given the energy, sent the energy out of back off. I mean it.

Feel everything that's happening in your face, in your throat, your jaws, your teeth, your eyes, your fingers, and your arms, and allow whatever you're feeling to move, evolve and be felt, and whenever you need a break, release your hands, come back to normal breath, open your eyes if they're closed, sense the spacer and then come back to your resource, the thing that felt safe, person, place or thing or just looking at something in your space that feels pleasant to look at, and let yourself take that break.

And if you choose to go back and see if there's more tune into the thing that you felt angry about that irritated you, and just check to see the intensity level of this emotion now, is it the same? Has it changed? And if you want to if there's a desire from the body from the inside, to do more, you can play with it. Repeat this as many times as you'd like to, and check in with yourself often to see if you're feeling overwhelmed, and if you are, take a break, and if you sense this, the moment before you're overwhelmed, it's a great idea to take a break there. Just to let this energy move through with more ease with more lightness, and remember to keep a level of playfulness with this. Imagine you're just playing with being an animal and reclaiming your wild self, but at the same time using as much ferocity and protective energy as you desire, and practice that you might use a mirror to see what your face looks like and to see if you can actually scare yourself, and when you feel complete with this, go ahead and go back to your resource. Sense what brings you safety or look at something pleasant and feel that all over again in your body.

I'll give a little bit of silence here as usual in the healing experiential so that you can work with it a little more if you want or feel free to click on the show notes where the healing experience begins, with the directions begin and do the process over again. You'll know when this experiential ends when you hear the concluding music of the podcast, and as you move through more with yourself, if you choose to, feel free to sense my presence with you in the room, sence my support and me cheering you on and being there with you.

Candice Wu 0:00
I'm so glad you're joining me today. Today's healing experience is working with anger when you have anger in a relationship or you feel angry with someone. This is part of a series around anger and reclaiming the ability to use the energy of anger, to feel empowered. The full episode is at CandiceWu.com/anger.

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

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

This is the second healing experience that's connected with this episode. The first one is screaming and using the lion's breath or growling using your voice, and the third one that will be coming out after this is sensing what your anger specifically needs to be expressed and to release. Just like the first healing experience where I recommended that you use the resourcing and pendulation exercises, before this, I would recommend that now. You can find the guided resourcing and pendulation audios at CandiceWu.com/emotions. Now, let's jump into it.

When we feel anger in a relationship, it's typically that something got triggered in us, something in us doesn't feel okay, maybe we feel violated or our feelings are hurt or that we have boundaries and they were crossed. Sometimes, that something that really happened in the relationship and it went too far, and sometimes its internal where this situation resembles a past experience or an experience that someone in our lineage has experienced where viscerally we feel upset, where we feel angry, irritated or like, heat is rushing up to our heads and arms, and our fists are tight or shoulders become tensed. That's the red energy as my Somatic Experiencing teacher would call it, Maggie Klein. And whatever you call it, if it's related to anger, if it's a fear, whatever it is, we can work with it before we step into our relationship or before we approach the person that is our loved one or an acquaintance or a friend, if we choose to.

I recommend working with this anger or protective energy with yourself, with a therapist or a healing coach, somebody who is trauma informed or can work with the body sensations around anger. If your practiced with yourself, you can also work with yourself or follow along in this guided healing experience, and of course, I still recommend working with someone even if you're using this audio. At anytime that you feel overwhelmed, like always, I recommend taking a break, looking around your space so that you can orient yourself to here and now. Also, feel your feet or touch your body so that your body feels its container. And speaking of the container, let's start with that, just take a moment and touch your body from head to toe. Feel the sensation of your hands on your body, just feel that you're here, that you have all of your body here with you.

And when you are ready to, just release your hands and notice how you're feeling inside. Feel free to close your eyes if you'd like to or look down or keep them open. It's up to you.

Now, when you're ready, invite yourself to picture a relationship where you feel anger. This could be isolated to a moment where you felt angry or irritated with someone or irritated in an interaction or it could be a situation you feel angry almost all the time or more frequently. If this is your first time working with anger in this way, I recommend just choosing a moment that's more mild or momentary in a relationship that's somewhat safe.

To ask you, picture this person and the situation that got you angry or feeling violated or protective. Notice the person and place them as far away as you need to so that you feel safety, that may be across the room in your mind or maybe five blocks away, a mile away out and outer space. Just see what you need right now.

When you're ready, invite that person in your mind to come a little bit closer, so you just feel a bit of the sensation of irritation or anger or whatever comes up now.

Notice we're in your body you feel any anger, irritation, heat, tension, all of that's the protective energy of the body. You might notice tension in your jaw or teeth, and your eyebrows, constriction in your eyes or tension in your fists, like your hands clenched up. Check in with your shoulders and your arms, and also your legs and hips where a lot of that fight energy is stored. Notice your ankles and your feet, and any impulse of the body. And also, notice your voice. There's any desire to say something or to scream or express anything.

If you're feeling numb, or nothing's happening, even though you know you are angry with this person, then I would recommend taking a break, doing some self-touch again and sensing into your space, orienting. If you're tuned into your anger, notice what your anger wants to do. Follow any movement or the tension that exists, so, if you feel tension in your arms, let it tense up more. Is it exaggerated by many degrees, what would it do? And this doesn't have to be rational or appropriate, but just see what your body would want to do to express this anger. Luckily, this is not real life, and I do not recommend you doing this in real life with this person, but that you get to do this and the safety of your private space, and tuned in with me right now. No one else has to know what came up for you, what you truly want to say or do, but really, it's what your body and your instincts and the animal body in you want do, because your higher wisdom and higher self might want to do something different.

But for right now, we're making way for the instinctual part of us that wants to have a fight or wants to yell at the person or tell them what we feel, and if you are in this private space where you can do that, I invite you to let your body follow through with a movement that wants to have, maybe it's clawing a pillow, maybe it's pushing against a wall or shaking a pillow, to imagine shaking the person into waking up or hearing you. If your body wants to scream something or say something to them, you can imagine that in your mind while saying the words out loud.

So, take some time to sense what your body wants here, and don't worry, because if this is new to you, this might not be that easy, might take some time before it opens up or the next movement happens or for you even to notice, “Hh, there's a little tension in my shoulder.” And if I tense that up more or let it happen, what happens now? Still allow whatever's happening to happen, and give voice to whatever anger is there. You might say out loud: I feel angry with you. I feel angry with you because or don't do that again or you can't treat me that way. However, your anger wants to express itself or be known, allow that to happen now, nd feel my presence here in support of you with whatever wants to come through, it doesn't matter what it is without any filter, because you're not going to say this out loud to this person in this particular way, so, you can be free to express it how you want to now.

And take a break, anytime you need to. Notice your surroundings and feel your body with some self-touch, feeling your feet, your legs and noticing any sensation that might be moving through any emotion.

And for today, just taking a little check to notice this person again that you feel some anger or irritation with and check to see where you are now. Is your level of irritation or anger different? Is that the same? What's left over or what amount? Feel free to continue to work with it if you'd like to or just stay with sensing into your body now, resting, taking this break so that your body can integrate what already happened.

It's really good to let your body have the time to absorb and to feel into safety, to feel that your present here and now, and you can even shift your mind to something that makes you feel good or like yourself, an activity or an object in the room just to give a little boost to the pleasure in your body, and take a moment to honor yourself. Thank yourself for doing this practice, and in some cases, having the courage to go there, and in some cases, having the courage to not go too far and just stay in the pleasure or safety by just dipping in and coming out of it like we have today.

I'll stay on a little longer with some silence as you sense into the present moment and the space that you're sitting in, feeling into any pleasure, noticing the difference and changes in your body, if any. And at the end of the silence, you'll hear the music that concludes this healing experiential.

Thanks so much for joining me, and I'll leave you with sensing in and allowing yourself to feel my presence with you.

Candice Wu 0:00
Hello and welcome back. This is the third healing experiential connected with the episode about anger and how to embrace and reclaim your anger, for confidence, power boosting and being in your alignment with yourself, being in your full power. You can find the full podcast at CandiceWu.com/anger.

Hello and welcome. You're listening to the Embody Podcast, a show about remembering and embodying your true nature, inner wisdom, Embodied Healing, and self-love. My name is Candice Wu and I'm a holistic healing facilitator, intuitive coach, and artist sharing my personal journey of vulnerability, offering meditations and guided healing support, and having cocreative conversations with healers and wellness practitioners from all over the world.

Just like with the other two experientials in this series, I encourage you to have worked with inner resourcing and pendulation. You can find those healing experientials in a guided format just like this experience on the podcast series about emotions, and that's at CandiceWu.com/emotions. If you go to that site and scroll down, you'll see the three healing experiences that connect with it and one of them is Resourcing Your Inner Strength and Safety and the other is about pendulation, about moving from pleasant to unpleasant experience.

I recommend having that ability so that when you're moving through anger, or the emotions and sensations that come up around anger, that you can resource yourself with safety, so help your body through it, and come back to a feeling of safety so that the anger can move through with more ease, that it's not as an intense experience as it needs to be.

If you like the intensity of it, no problem, that's just fine. It's just that it's not always as easy for the nervous system to integrate, if you do it that way. So I recommend taking breaks by pendulating, when you feel overwhelmed, or before you even feel that way, just take a break, take a pause, look around or do that in a resourcing technique that you have built for yourself.

So now let's jump into this experience.

This is working with any anger that you have inside. So with whatever situation that draws up anger, irritation, rage, or an intensity of a protective feeling, you can work with that here. In this experience we'll be using the tools of visualization, and embodiment and letting the body move, the sensations and emotions through, as well as talking with the anger that's in you and see what it wants to express. So this sort of talking with this part of you might require some practice, it may not come very easily at first and it's also not a thinking process. It's more like, you ask and you sense, you sense into that feeling and allow it to show you what it needs. So let's jump in.

Make sure you have ample time, I would suggest at least 20 minutes so that you have some time to integrate whatever happens in this experience and to also come down from any intensity, if there is that, and to let yourself have some rest before moving on to the next thing.

Let's start with a little grounding. So just take a few moments to notice your breathing just as it is right now. Allow yourself to release the stress of the day, release any work, anything that's weighing on your heart. Let go of any plans or future thoughts and feel in your body where your breath reaches and where it may feel blocked. And as you feel inside, sense any emotions that you're having. Notice your body's temperature. Sense and visualize where there's any tension or holding, as well as any other sensations or desire to move. You might notice tingly sensations, aching, a warmth. Noticing anything that's there.

Now I invite you to call up one piece of anger that's living inside of you, one experience or situation or relationship that you're in that brings up a feeling of anger. It also might be irritation, frustration, rage. As you sense into this feeling, you might have an image come to your mind of a situation you're involved with or the thing that brought this feeling on. And allow yourself to just picture it if there is one, without thinking too much about it and if there isn't an image, that's okay. Whatever you're sensing now, feel downward into your body, feel into your heart, your gut, your hips, your legs, ankles, feel into your shoulders, and arms, as well as your hands, neck and jaw, your face and eyes and just sense where there's any tension, any holding or tightness. And whatever's happening if you feel muscles tightening, allow them to tighten. If you feel heat or tingliness allow that to happen.

Notice where in your body, there's any sensation or emotion, where's the energy located? And if there's a place that the anger resides in a larger way, sense that space. Sense any colors or textures that come with it. And as you breathe, let your breath honor it with a gentle compassion and witness.

And now I invite you to draw the energy of this anger or irritation, frustration or rage draw that energy forward as if you're inviting it in front of you to look at. And as you look at it, notice what it looks like. Be open to any image that you sense if it's an object, person, color, a part of your younger self, whatever it looks like. And with lots of love and awareness, ask it: “What would you like me to know?” And listen to whatever it tells you or shows you without any judgment or filtering. Pay close attention to the little whispers of anything it says, or if it's screaming at you.

What do you want me to know? And with whatever it's sharing with you acknowledge it, take it in, and honor it. Just listen.

And if there's more, just pause this recording and stay with it or take a break anytime. And if you're ready to go on, ask it: “What do you need to release?” How would you like to express your anger and let it show you or share with you however it wants to express itself, in whatever ways it needs to show you the amount of anger it feels.

And as you see, however it expresses itself through screaming, throwing things, or even in silly ways like stabbing forks into pillows, or whatever it wants, stay with it and feel in your body any movement or sensation that's happening. Just let your body follow any movement that it has, any movement that it wants. If it's following along with that anger, stay with yourself and feel what's happening inside of you as you continue to picture how this anger wants to express itself. And see for this anger, exactly the kind of outcome it wants to have.

See the results of the expression of this anger, irritation, frustration or rage without any need to be socially appropriate, just whatever wants to come through in your imagination, in your feeling sense. The beauty of it is that even though it's not real, it's in your visualization, in your imagination, your psyche doesn't really know the difference in terms of how it feels to the nervous system and the soul, and so it can release all of what comes with it, little at a time.

So when you need to take just a pause or a break, notice your breath. Just release that for a moment and come out and look into your space and just notice anything that looks pleasant around you. Notice your feet and give your toes a little wiggle. Feel any shift in the body as you just take a moment's break.

And you can take as long as you want here to take a break. Just feel free to pause the recording if you'd like. But when you are ready, feel free to come back to this anger, irritation, rage or frustration. And just check back in and ask it: “What else do you need?” Just listen and let it tell you or show you.

You're just being the anger whisperer and giving it some love so that you can be with yourself and that you can let this feeling move through. See anything else that it needs and whatever it tells you, see if you can give that to this part of you, in your imagination or in your body and see how it's feeling and notice how you're feeling in your body.

You may feel like taking another break or going in for another round and just seeing what else it needs. But if you're ready now to step away and close, think this part of you, think the anger, rage or frustration. Notice where it's at now and what's left over, or what it wants now. And honor it for exactly where it is at the moment.

Now come back to yourself and take your hands and just do a little bit of self-touch, giving yourself a hug or placing your hands on your heart or touching your legs and giving them a squeeze. Whatever feels good to your body at the moment. And as you become aware of the space you're in and what's around you, attune yourself to something that smells or looks pleasant.

Come back to here and now and allow whatever's happening in your body to continue to happen.

And now I invite you to give your body some quiet time to rest. Integrate what's happened without any thinking but just being, and after this quiet time you'll hear the music at the end to let you know that this recording is over.

And I look forward to seeing you next time and as always, if you need support, please reach out to your healer or therapist or feel free to reach out to me, and now I'll leave you with that quiet time.

This episode is about what to do when you’re depressed, shut down, dissociated and numb, and why this is happening. It’s a compassionate look at the body and how it’s trying to protect us, and adapt. So, in this episode, we explore noticing signs of nervous system overwhelm, the polyvagal theory, how to heal trauma, and 12 ways that you can support yourself when you’re feeling nervous system overwhelm or dissociation, and how this can all bring more understanding and humanity to our interactions, in relationships of all kinds.

Candice Wu 0:41

Hello, and welcome. You’re listening to the Embody Podcast, a show about remembering and embodying your true nature, inner wisdom, embodied healing, and self-love. My name is Candice Wu, and I’m a holistic healing facilitator, intuitive coach, and artist, sharing my personal journey of vulnerability, offering meditations and guided healing support, and having co-creative conversations with healers and wellness practitioners from all over the world.

Candice Wu 1:12

I want to make a quick announcement that also is in support of the podcast, that I’ve recently been supporting people by holding one-on-one emergence with them. This is completely collaborative and designed specifically by you or you can hand over the details to me to handle but it is a wonderful opportunity to get one-on-one time with me in an immersive setting where we can work exactly with what you are wanting, desiring, challenge within your life, from all these different ways of embodied healing — family constellations, Somatic Experiencing, spiritual practices, voice dialogue as well as be in a space that you and I select together that can hold your experience. This can be with or without a horse, where we have experiences to be with a horse and journey into connection and wisdom that the horse can bring. The horses are extremely intuitive and can sense what you’re feeling and what you’re not feeling, and mirror that to you as a way to bring you more information on the next path of your life.

Candice Wu 2:38

I love doing this work with people because it gives me the chance to hold that space in a longer period of time, that we can really go deep and get to the root of things as well as support you in feeling the peace and pleasure that you want to feel. You can find more about that at CandiceWu.com and also by reaching out to me via email or through the website at embody@candicewu.com. This offering, as well as other offerings that I have, are all in support of the podcast. Some of the proceeds go towards producing this podcast and bringing new guests on, and I’ve been talking about this for a couple of weeks now but there is a database of all healing experientials and meditations that are on the podcast by me as well as guests, and you can search on that for things that you’re looking for. The page is at CandiceWu.com/meditations.

Candice Wu 3:36

The podcast also has its own search at CandiceWu.com/podcast. On top of that, each of the podcasts are being transcribed, the experiential and meditations are, too. So, in case you prefer to digest the material through the written word and your visual acuity, then you can go on to each podcast link and right below where it says that you can click to listen, there’s a transcription. The experiential meditations are being completed in a backward order. So, starting from the newest and most recent working its way backward, and we’ve got about three-quarters of them done, which is really exciting. Now, let’s jump into this episode.

Candice Wu 4:23

So, a while back, I talked about anger, and anger is part of our experience of a fight response in the nervous system. And what that conversation brought for many people was this understanding of why anger is important, and what it can bring us and how it can support us in our lives, and bringing this compassion to this emotion that’s been villainized anger. There are so many places where we think, “Oh, we shouldn’t be angry.” And we get mad at ourselves being angry, and yet anger is this before vital life force energy that protects us and keeps us alive. We have this instinctual body that first and foremost wants us to survive. So, that’s where it comes from but it can also inform our understanding of what we want, need and are doing in the world besides the survival mode part.

Candice Wu 5:23

So, that episode is that CandiceWu.com/anger, and it comes with three experientials around working with anger and engaging with it in a different way, relating with it, as well as healing, using anger. And that connects to this episode because, in this episode, we’re talking about Nervous System Overwhelm. The nervous system has several states of being, and three of the primary ones are fight, which we just talked about, flight and freeze, and some people add a fourth one, which is appease, which I think, in my opinion, connects with freeze. It’s an active freeze that submits to something when it feels safer to do so.

Candice Wu 6:17

So, today, we’re talking about the freeze response of the nervous system, and to be more exact, polyvagal theory, which explains what’s happening to the nervous system when we have this phrase or shut down response, and I’ll talk all about the signs of this and noticing if you’re experiencing this. The freeze response is called tonic immobility because it comes from how our animal body will protect itself if we get to that state of overwhelm, of feeling threatened, of a lack of safety. You might be already wondering, “Well, I don’t really have real threats going on, and how come I’m feeling x y&z? How come I’m feeling dissociated or numb or all of these symptoms?” And we’ll go through those.

Candice Wu 7:14

It doesn’t take much for our nervous system to get activated, and if we are getting activated, it is a sign perhaps that you have some previous trauma that wants to be worked through and renegotiated. Of course, a present a situation can bring us to tonic immobility or freeze state, if we need it, and so it’s really important to understand that when our nervous system believes that we’re that unsafe, then it’s going to turn on this function of numbing, of separating, and dissociating from this experience, to preserve yourself, to preserve your body, and your being.

Candice Wu 8:03

So, let’s back it all up here. One morning, recently, I woke up with dizziness, and it was so interesting, I haven’t had this experience in a long time, and there was a particular reason that I was experiencing it, and I was aware of that. I was in a group setting where we were specifically working with Nervous System Overwhelm, and I hadn’t quite navigated what my role was yet. And in a situation where there’s a bit of uncertainty, and the group’s feeling overwhelmed, I can have a tendency to take on that energy of overwhelm. I’m very emotionally empathic and responsive to those energies, but I specifically have a weaker boundary around that because when I was in my young life, my family was extremely overwhelmed and shut down, and those emotions that they’re not digesting, went somewhere, and they flooded my system. So, I get triggered and overwhelmed in this experience in the present day.

Candice Wu 9:14

So, I woke up the next morning, with that dizziness, as I will go to the bathroom, and like slammed my arm against the door in passing or I would feel like woozy and just unable to see straight. So, I sat down with myself, and luckily, I was aware that this was likely related to my nervous system feeling activated rather than in the past, I would have wondered what was wrong with me, I would have wondered if I needed to go to a doctor or I would get scared, and that probably would add to it, and maybe that would be true that I would need to go to a doctor at some point, but all these tools in my tool belt, all these wonderful tools from Somatic Experiencing as well as family constellations, but primarily from Somatic Experiencing, that can be used before you need to take the next step, and especially I knew I was pretty healthy.

Candice Wu 10:23

I wonder, “Well, did I eat something that was a little off,” but I wanted to just try a couple of things to see what would happen, and I sat down with myself and first just felt what I felt and noticed the dizziness, and asked my body, like, “What do you want to do now? What is the organic movement or impulse that wants to come through?” And nothing really showed up except for just like kind of wanting to curl up, which is one of the signs of nervous system overwhelm, but I knew that if I helped my body find safety, then this would probably pass, and I could deal with the emotions that would come. So, I chose to use one of the tools, which I’ll explain further in this episode of running around my space or jogging in place is what you can do, too, but running around my space, and then doing it in super slow motion so my body could integrate it, and register that I took action and used the energy of a flight response, running, flight and imagined myself run to a safe person and a place.

Candice Wu 11:56

And so, I just did it for as long as I felt like I needed an imagined myself going there, and when I arrived, I let my body rest there and receive the experience of safety that this safe place and that person would bring me in my imagination, and allowed my body to feel it. Remember that the body doesn’t truly know if it happened or not, and if it gets to go through the motions with awareness and witness, then it feels that it has happened. So, my body got to experience that it got to safety and got to receive the love and support that I really needed, and then I had some tears, and I felt my body come down. I felt my breath deepen naturally, so without having to force it. I felt my vision get clear. I felt that presence, in my imagination, of course, of the safe person that could give me the love and the support that I needed, that I sensed I needed, that I could touch into the emotions that it was revealing in me and those could move.

Candice Wu 13:19

And so, here I’m not numb anymore, I’m not dizzy anymore, the emotions can come down. The energy that went up, that was too overwhelming to digest, going downward and out word had a way to move now. And after that, I felt great. I actually felt way better than the day before, and all that moved, I wasn’t dizzy anymore, and I was ready to go with the day.

Candice Wu 13:47

So, for me, that’s years and years of practice, and working with different practitioners, healers, and therapists to develop that tool and myself but I want to share some of those tools in this episode today. Many of them coming from Peter Levine’s study and practice of Somatic Experiencing, all of which derive from how animals in the wild release trauma are they complete, the movement that needs to be completed and the energy that comes through the instinctual body. They don’t typically experience trauma, in the same way, that we do, at least. Of course, there are discussions of different kinds of animals, and also ones that are more domesticated that are experiencing trauma, but typically the ones in the wild that make it, they have this natural way of completing what needs to happen, and then they’re feeling safe and in the world again, with all their possibilities of experiencing.

Candice Wu 15:01

So, what I’d like to do now is invite you to come into this question: How much of me is here right now? So, as you’re listening to me, as you’re here with yourself, wherever you are, where if you’re in passing in transit or you’re sitting down or you’re doing errands, just how much of you is here with yourself, here in the world and present? Notice how much of you is not here, and this is not to be judgmental or critical or as a test. It’s just gauge and sense to be aware of where you’re up, you’re at. You might sense that 50% of you is here, and some amount of you is left behind in an experience that was upsetting or at work. How much of you is here? Where is your awareness and what is the quality of your awareness? How are you feeling in your body right now?

Candice Wu 16:26

If you’re someone that’s so used to toughing it out or plowing through or going into the hard stuff of your healing or pushing through at work, you might be overriding a lot of signals of your nervous system that tell you, “This is a little too much.” And that cycle is something the body can get used to. It’s like auto override and autopilot. So, that’s one major reason to understand the polyvagal theory and how the body can go into nervous system freeze is to notice where you’re being unkind to yourself and pushing beyond what your body wants to do. I get that at the end of the day, there are things that you need to do, and what times and ways in which you need to push through, but if we could push through a little less and not ignore our bodies, we might experience a lot more, and we might experience a lot more pleasure and joy in our lives as we’re going through the things we know we want and need to do.

Candice Wu 17:37

So, to simply feel better, it’s a real thing, that we want to feel better in ourselves, and to feel a deeper understanding of who you are and to ally with your body, to navigate your full experience. These are all really good reasons to understand the freeze response, and it gives a way to understand each other, to understand yourself in trauma or what parts of you have been traumatized, what that means, and to understand how other people might be experiencing this, and how in relationships, there can be a dance of withdrawal and attack going back and forth. And there can be also a feeling of abandonment when someone withdraws and has a physiological trauma response such as shut down.

Candice Wu 18:41

Stonewalling is also sometimes mixed with using that as a weapon, like shutting down in order to hurt the other person or to get a reaction out of the person, but it can be diffused by understanding what is going on behind the scenes. And also, if you understand the polyvagal theory, you can understand how extreme stress can lead to the shutdown experience, and how to read your own body as well as where other people are at so you know where they’re coming from or have a little more compassion.

Candice Wu 19:19

So, as we jump into noticing where our nervous system is overwhelmed and in a freeze response, we need to talk about polyvagal theory, which I’ve dropped in a few times here, and I also talk a bit about in the anger podcast. This is a theory by Stephen Porges. The polyvagal theory reflects the primal need for us to survive and stay alive, and how important that is to our body. It covers three states of our nervous system, one which is connection of ventral vagal response, fight or flight, which is a sympathetic response either one of those because it compels action or shut down, which is dorsal vagal. There’s an easy image in which to picture this, and it’ll link that I’ll put onto the show notes, Dr. David Puder describes a lioness and a gazelle, and how you can see this in nature, and I’ll briefly describe it here.

Candice Wu 20:28

So, picture a lion finding a gazelle, and the gazelle sees the lion or senses something, notices danger, it starts to perk up, and its ears go up, neck stiffens up, and at some point realizes they have to run. So, get the sounds running and that’s a sympathetic flight response, and let’s say the lion captures gazelle. The gazelles’ nervous system then will kick into a shutdown response, playing dead, so to say. And in that place, the gazelle is conserving energy in order to make their grand escape if they can, but also to enact a dead state so that perhaps they’re not going to be as desirable to that lion, and maybe that lion will get distracted. And that can create the opportunity for the gazelle to run away.

Candice Wu 21:31

So, let’s say that happens, and the lion gets distracted, bringing this gazelle back to their cubs, and the gazelle sees this moment and ceases it and runs, sprints, coming back to life, back into a sympathetic nervous system response from where they were in the tonic immobility, and they run to safety. And in that place, I want to mention pranking because they end up celebrating and having a victory dance of “I’m alive. I’m strong, I’m, I’m okay” and humans reflect that, too.

Candice Wu 22:16

So, polyvagal theory touches on three states of the nervous system, reaction or response, a state of connection and social engagement, which is a ventral bagel response, a fight or flight, which is a parasympathetic response, or shutdown, which is tonic immobility, which is dorsal vehicle response. So, the reason we have that response, the reason that the nervous system just turns the switch for us is that it feels like what we’re experiencing is too much or too dangerous or too risky, and it’s better to wait it out.

Candice Wu 23:01

So, the interesting thing is, whenever we’ve had an experience of this in the past, where something was too risky to do, like, we wouldn’t scream back at our bosses or at our fathers when we were five years old, if something happened, where we felt threatened or hurt or scared, maybe we wouldn’t punch them, but our animal body would want to because we want to protect ourselves in a situation of abuse or some other scary situation, and in those moments where we didn’t do that, and we chose to freeze up instead or become paralyzed, our body does this to protect ourselves from further danger, and we just hope that it will end and go away, but the thing about that is that anytime we’ve had that experience, that shutdown mode lives in our body, and our body still can be in that shutdown mode from years and decades ago, and in fact, even through the ancestry, the shutdown response from someone else in your lineage can get passed down into your nervous system, into your DNA.

Candice Wu 24:23

So, time doesn’t much matter here. The nervous system is responding to safety or lack of safety and danger. So, it will freeze until it realizes its safety, and even though our mind knows that we’re safe right here, now, our body has to know it, too, and it has to go through the process of completing what it needs to in order to feel that it is safe, and to the primitive body that’s typically some action that protects us self by running, fighting, pushing, moving, yelling, biting, all of those very basic ways of protecting ourselves come into play. So, when you’re feeling certain symptoms of this dorsal vehicle response, it’s a chance to notice, “Oh, my body is feeling really unsafe, and needs to find safety.” And perhaps there’s something showing itself in terms of previous trauma or something I’m going through right now, that makes my body feel like it isn’t safe.

Candice Wu 25:39

So, what are the signs of dorsal vagal or tonic immobility in our body, the frozen state? As I mentioned, this state is about self-preservation. So, the body might freeze or become immobile or paralyzed like you can’t really quite take the next step. The body feels very heavy, like heavy in a way that can’t move very well or rigidity starts to happen in the body, tension, and constriction. You might notice yourself feel dissociated, separate from your body or not quite here, a numbness, a feeling of disconnection or overwhelm.

Candice Wu 26:28

You might feel dizzy or spacey, a loss of words, inability to comprehend or taking information, your digestive and reproductive systems may go offline and shut down, so you may feel lack of sexual desire, feel indigestion, bloatedness, you may feel nauseated, want to throw up or spontaneously urinate or defecate, the heart rate, blood pressure, facial expressions, and immune system responses may decrease. So, that’s the conservation mode, and at the same time, you may feel extremely exhausted and fatigued, a difficulty moving or doing anything, an apathy, perhaps hopelessness, shame, a sense of feeling trapped, disconnected from the world are withdrawing, and in the state our brain has decreased metabolism so that causes challenges in comprehension and thinking, making decisions, our body awareness decreases, and it may take a lot of pressure or impact for our body to feel anything or feel much, and we have a decreased ability to create narrative memories.

Candice Wu 28:09

We might feel a little or no pain, our lungs might constrict and we breathe slower, the vision may feel blurry or not clear, fuzzy, blank, fixed or spaced out, and sleep may be disrupted as well as the body posture, our body may want to curl up and collapse in a ball. On the other hand, have the inability to think critically or process in our minds, our mind also may get stuck on certain thoughts. So, in a panic state of flight response, our body gets flooded with the energy to mobilize us to move, and if we get to move and complete that ability to protect ourselves, we feel okay, we feel good, but if it doesn’t, then that energy can go up, and we might start to rationalize and think about things, and we might take a meaning about ourselves and the world. That, if it gets left there, it may feel like a permanent fixture of who we are, and we move about the world believing this and our actions reflect that.

Candice Wu 29:29

And so, those thoughts may run itself or linger in the state of freeze. So, if we get into this state, and this can happen when you’re in a therapy session that your body just starts going into that place where you have no emotions separate from the experience, numb, that may mean that your body is in a free state, and in a way, in a big way, that is retraumatizing to them nervous system because it can just get stuck again. But in another way, if it feels okay to navigate it and you have the tools or support, it’s a great place for your nervous system to learn a new way and not get stuck again, so it can bring healing. So, the idea is to support the nervous system in shifting out of dorsal vagal navigating dorsal vagal and shifting out into ventral vagal, which is our survival.

Candice Wu 30:33

Social engagement is vital to our survival, and it gives us a sense of safety and calming when that engagement is safe, when that engagement has compassion and an observing witness. So, when we’re in this state just to name the opposite of dorsal vagal and freeze, this ventral vagal state is where our immune system is healthy, and we are able to feel in our bodies, we can feel a normal kind of happiness or openness, peace, contentment, and even curiosity about life, we feel possibilities, we feel flexible and movable, we’re sleeping wow and eating normally, and we can relate to others, connect to our emotions, be empathic to others, and listen, we feel grounded.

Candice Wu 31:32

So, neither of these are fixed states, we are constantly in flux, navigating our bodies and our experience through how our nervous system is responding, and responding to our environment and our internal container of trauma experiences that have accumulated and what we perceive personally as triggering, activating or threatening. So, your system can move in and out of these states, and ideally, we have the flexibility and capacity to move through each of these states and navigate all of those states so that we can feel okay in ourselves. And to be clear, if we have unresolved trauma in our past, which most people do, even little things and when I say trauma, it means something incomplete, where nervous system and body wanted to do something to protect ourselves but we didn’t or couldn’t. And if we have unresolved trauma in our lineage, then we may be living in some version of fight or flight perpetually or in a numbness or shut down or as deep as depression.

Candice Wu 32:53

So, the dorsal vagal freeze response in the nervous system, if it gets stuck, can turn into depression. In Chinese medicine, the liver channel connects with our desire and what we want, and the movement towards what we want and giving life to ourselves, and if that gets disrupted, liver and gallbladder relate to each other, gallbladder making decisions and taking action. If that gets disrupted, then we have depression, and that relates exactly to this system from Somatic Experiencing where if there was something we instinctively wanted to do or wanted and didn’t receive it or couldn’t do it, then our system gets disrupted, too. And if we don’t resolve that, then it stays, it lingers, and it becomes our state of being of depression or sometimes we’ve even called that our personality, and yet, these are just various nervous system responses getting stuck.

Candice Wu 34:04

So, I want to shift gears into supporting yourself when you have this overwhelm in your nervous system or shut down, and how to support yourself to move out of it, to navigate it, and to even heal at a deeper level. So, before we go to the 12 different tools I have for you today, I want to talk about what happens when you come out of freeze state. If you freeze water, and you let it fall out, it melts, and it comes back to the state that it was in before it froze.

Candice Wu 34:45

So, just like that, whatever state we were in, whatever happened or feeling state, and sensations stay in our body we had before our nervous system felt it was too much. Then when we saw out, when we come back in our bodies, when we come back to safety, the nervous system will touch back into what it was before you went into freeze, to begin with. Sometimes, that’s a big emotion and sensation in the body, and sometimes it’s not. There’s an easy way to move through this if you pendulate, which I’ll talk about later, easing in and out of that experience, safety into challenge, but if you think about it, if you can’t fight or run, then you play dead. And so, when you come out of playing dead, just like the gazelle it’s going to fight or run, it’s going to want to do that because that’s the energy loaded up into the system, and where it stored that energy up to be used later and couldn’t be used at that moment, then later it will come online, and that energy will be present to be used to move the body.

Candice Wu 36:11

So, in the simplest way, your body might experience anger or anxiety or other emotions that overloaded the system right before going into a free state. So, be prepared for that and I don’t mean to scare anyone, but just know and understand that emotions will come and see what ways you can support yourself with that. And what we’re also doing is activating body memory so your body holds implicit memory. That’s information that you may or may not be conscious of. Usually, we’re unconscious of it, and when we touch into the body and the experience, and the emotional state, we are activating that body memory, and that can be timeless. So, it might not have been the thing that just happened literally in this five minutes before you got into another state but it could be what happened in your childhood or as I mentioned, what happened in the lineage getting touched on, and if you believe in a past life, it can touch on what happened in a past life.

Candice Wu 37:30

I talked about a couple of past life experiences of mine in the podcast at CandiceWu.com/past-life-trauma as well as CandiceWu.com/deepmystery and CandiceWu.com/deepmystery2. So, those are three different podcasts, and you can see where implicit memory was being drawn up in my body where I didn’t know about what it was, but my body was showing it and the emotions were there, and it revealed itself. So, the storyline might not be there, but it’s held in the cells of your being, of your body. And if your body doesn’t know safety in this moment and feel it, that memory, that information will live there until safety is found. What we’re also doing when we’re helping the body to find its way out of a frozen state is we’re helping the body expand the capacity of experiencing, and to not override through it and keep tripping that system that throws you into numbness or overwhelm.

Candice Wu 38:40

So, a key principle here is to provide yourself and your body with what it didn’t have before, when a traumatic experience happened. You may not know what those things are, but we can probably make guesses because it’s often that someone wasn’t there, time wasn’t there, there was something that we didn’t get, or there was a certain kind of safety that wasn’t there.

Candice Wu 39:12

So, let’s jump into the 12 things that we can do when our body feels this level of overwhelm. Number 1 is — “You can orient.” You can just take a moment and notice your surroundings, and look especially at things that feel pleasurable to look at. We naturally do this when we are in a ventral vagal state where we actually feel safe, we’re able to look around and take in what’s around us, we might be looking for a mate or food or possibility, but we can see pleasurable things around us, and we’re also alert to what might be dangerous if danger comes. Animals do that, too. So, it’s like a cat or dog coming to a space and checking it out, sniffing it out, and making sure it’s safe here.

Candice Wu 40:18

If you’d like a guided experience on orienting which is a Somatic Experiencing technique or tool, I have a guided audio on that, in the podcast conversations with the body. You can find that at CandiceWu.com/conversationswiththebody or ep82, and just scroll down to the experiences and you’ll find the one on orienting. That’ll also be linked in the show notes here today.

Candice Wu 40:49

Number 2, the second thing you can do to come down from a freeze state is — “Touch your body.” Touch your body from head to toe slowly to feel your touch, feel your body and feel what kind of touch would be soothing. It might be light and gentle touch or with pressure, but taking your awareness to how it feels that you can touch your body here and remind your body of its container of your safety. There’s also a guided experience that takes you deeper into that on the episode at CandiceWu.com/alignment or /ep47. It’s the experiential called Grounding Touch and Listening to Next Steps.

Candice Wu 41:43

A third thing you can do is — “Recognize that you are alive and safe right now, and tune in and touch into those very basic things that tell you you are alive.” And that might be noticing that you are safe and in a safe place at the current moment, and that is if you are, it might be noticing that you have food. If you do have food, it might be noticing if you have a place to sleep, and this will be one of the experiential this week. So, tune in later this week for a guided experience on this.

Candice Wu 42:28

Number 4, the fourth thing you can do is — “Connect in your mind with a safe person.” If you open to a person who brings you a feeling of safety, love, peace or groundedness, someone who’s been there for you before, and you can separate any times that this relationship has felt conflictual, but try to find one that is the least conflictual you can. That can be with a person, an animal, a spiritual figure, nature or a symbol. So, we’re resourcing anything that could feel safe for you. I have two healing experientials that you can tune into if you’d like support with that, and the first is at CandiceWu.com/emotions, the meditation on resourcing emotional safety and healing trauma, and the second one is loving kindness, and that one is episode 65d, so d is the fourth experiential in Untangling Love part two, that’s at CandiceWu.com/ep65. And again, all of these will be listed on the show notes, so you can just go to the webpage at CandiceWu.com/overwhelm, and you can find all those there.

Candice Wu 44:06

The fifth thing you can do is — “Be with a safe person or animal or be in a safe place in real life.” But while you’re being with that person, notice how it is to experience their support, what it is that supports you and let your body receive that feeling, and slow down so that it can register to your awareness and into your body, and that leads to tool number six, which is — “Slowing down.” In Somatic Experiencing, they call it titrating, so, allow yourself to slow down your experience of whatever it is you’re doing or wherever you’re at, and just notice what’s happening.

Candice Wu 44:55

The seventh tool is called — “Pendulation” that’s also from SE, Somatic Experiencing, and that is to go back and forth between safety and the challenging experience that you’re having or even the numbness or whatever freeze state experience you have. So, pendulation is to sense into a breath or two or 30 seconds, whatever amount of time of a safe person or something that helps you feel pleasure, as we talked about earlier, and the other tools, and then to pause and go into challenging emotion or the state that you’re feeling already right now, and back and forth, back and forth. And just to notice and track what happens as you go back and forth, and allow your nervous system to dip into safety and feel more embodied each time. You can find a guided experience on that at episode 24, CandiceWu.com/ep24, which is the episode on emotions and how to navigate your emotions.

Candice Wu 46:17

Tool number eight is — “Using movement to support you.” Some people like to use shaking, just literally stand up, shake your whole body for a couple of minutes. Let the body move. It’s like shaking up stuck energy so that it starts to flow. You can also ask your body if there’s a place that could move. where would it begin? Which part of my body can move? If it’s your eyes or a pinky finger or your hair, if you imagine your hair moving, your knees, which part of your body can move? And as you let that movement happen, slowly and let the body feel that and integrate that, and see what that allows for or what you start to feel as that happens. You can also tune into organic body movement farther than that by just imagining if my body could move, what would it do? How would it want to move and just imagining that, see what your body feels, what sensations or emotions, and if you let it move, then what happens?

Candice Wu 47:42

Tool number nine is one that I did when I felt dizzy that day, is — “Letting your body run.” And you can drag in place or you can run across a room or a field, any place that feels safe for you, but as you run, slow it down so slow, that you can feel every little part of your body move, even your arms, your toes, your calves. And as you run, visualize running towards safety, whatever that means for you, whether that’s a safe place, person, thing or situation. And when you get there, imagine receiving exactly what you need, whether or not you know exactly what you need. Imagine receiving whatever it is that you need to feel safe when you arrive there or connect with the safe person, place or thing that’s there. This will also be one of the experiential this week. So, tune in later this week for a longer guide of that.

Candice Wu 49:04

And tool number 10 is — “To reveal or allow anger.” Eventually, you can practice more Somatic Experiencing techniques and being in the body or even self-defense or martial arts, and you can tune into the anger episode for some ideas about moving through that, and that’s at CandiceWu.com/anger. Tool number 10 is practicing assertiveness. So, feel into your ability to choose and move, right when you are feeling that numbness, do the opposite. Do something assertive, do something doable, manageable, and let yourself be in the witness of your experience as you do it.

Candice Wu 49:57

And the 12th tool I have for you today is also going to be an experiential later this week, and it’s — “Tuning into a moment in the last couple of days or day that you felt like yourself or where you felt okay or where you felt like you were alive.” And backtracking if you can’t find anything in the last couple of days, look into the last couple of weeks or the last month or two or even as far as couple of years if you’ve been in this state of stuckness for a while, touching in and making contact with the last time you felt okay or like yourself or pleasure touching into that allow your body to experience what it’s like right now to remember that, and sometimes, there’s a spontaneous breath or a little bit of ease that begins to happen or as I said earlier, other emotions might come through because your body starts to feel safe again.

Candice Wu 51:13

In this experiential that I’ll guide later this week, I’ll guide you to feel into a couple of different points where you felt okay or like yourself, and then a time that you experienced a challenge but got through it, which can help your nervous system be reminded of your strength and ability to get through life and that you did get through it, and noticing our current challenge. These are also tools from Somatic Experiencing.

Candice Wu 51:47

So, those are the 12 different tools I wanted to offer you today, to support yourself in your nervous system coming out of freeze state, and also feeling safety, even before your body becomes overwhelmed if you start to notice little signs of it or that you’re getting to that threshold, it’s a great thing to do to support your body and feeling that safety before you get there, and to come down from that event. And as I mentioned earlier, be prepared for any emotions or body sensation or experience that comes out of, comes through with coming back to a little bit of safety, because when your body finds that safety again and understands it, integrates it, the emotions that didn’t get to be felt or the sensation and impulse that didn’t get to be had, will want to be had, maybe at work or in the middle of something and you don’t really have time to go through all of your nervous system responses that want completion, but recognize you may be feeling those as you come back into your body and come back online.

Candice Wu 53:10

You might start to notice gurgling or burping or a different kind of breath come through. All of these are signs of healing, and signs that your body’s coming back online, that the ventral vagal response is coming back online and your body’s feeling a little safer, and it’s a good time to use any of these tools to continue that safety. I wrote a blog post about how the body tells you that healing is happening, and it’s a list of several ways that your body shows you the signs that healing is going on in your body, is moving towards coming back online or healing even though it might not feel like it. You can find that in the show notes, and also, at CandiceWu.com/tinyhealingsteps.

Candice Wu 54:09

So, this was a lot of information today, and sometimes when people hear this information, their body starts to go numb, and they feel a little fuzzy, and that state of freeze starts to take over because we’re even talking about it, and if that is you, tune into the experientials that are later this week. Rewind to a couple of the tools that were mentioned here today that sounded like they might help you, and just try them. Be curious and open, and see what touching your body might do, even if you think it’s one of the most basic things and it is, and that is touching into the basic needs of our primal body, our animal body.

Candice Wu 54:58

With these tools, I have felt so much more embodiments and grounding, and feeling empowered even because the state of freeze does bring that same physiology as shame. It’s this collapse, it’s like I can’t do it, and it comes with lots of thoughts. It’s something that I didn’t talk too much about in the list of signs of overwhelm, but that is a major one where if you start to think a lot and think these really negative thoughts about yourself or the world, and you even might know that these aren’t really true, but they just can’t leave your mind, that is where the energy of the fight and flight response goes upward instead of out the lens we have, because that energy doesn’t have much other place to go, it goes upward into the mind, and so the gut in the polyvagal system informing the mind and feeding these thoughts, but the thoughts relate to the meanings we’ve taken on and the filter through which we see, we particularly see the world and ourselves, and so, it can bring on the worst of the worst there, because, in the states where we thought we weren’t going to survive or that we needed to shut down to survive, there was something going on that made us feel so threatened, and those thoughts can stay with us, the meanings that we took about ourselves can stay with us from there.

Candice Wu 56:35

That is also a sign that something in our experience wants completion and wants renegotiation, because we have thoughts that are negative about ourself or the world, and other sign includes thoughts that are negative about yourself and overthinking everything and thinking about things so much that you’re not quite in your experience in your body, in yourself. So, I encourage you to use this information to have more compassion for yourself, mainly to notice and understand that if you’re in this experience of feeling paralyzed or feeling numb or experiences of shame or worthlessness that may be a part of a freeze state, and there are ways to support yourself in moving through that. And if you notice other people withdrawing or shutting down, there may be a place to build connection and understand what they’re going through when they have that experience.

Candice Wu 57:44

I’m really looking forward to sharing these experientials with you, and so there are three, as I mentioned earlier, out of these 12 tools, there are three that’ll be experientials, and the first one’s going to be on tuning into the basic safety, feeling that your body is alive, and letting that thing get. The second one will be times you feel like yourself or feel okay, and a time you got through a challenge and letting that be a resource to you, letting the body experience and remember how it is to feel this way. And that third one is the running, visualizing what’s needed, and finding safety, and that is skipping into, straight into having that flight experience but letting yourself arrive into a safe place. So, one day when we talk about anxiety, the flight response, this one will connect with that.

Candice Wu 58:45

I hope you find some of these tools just as helpful as they have been for me, and I will say there have been times in my life where I felt I was doing so much healing and certain things were coming up to the surface, so, in such a big way, like if you’ve been listening to the podcast, when I had the existential crisis experience, spiritual crisis or even other times where something came up, and I just felt overwhelmed with emotion, these tools have helped me so much to feel grounded again. I will not underestimate the power of our ability to imagine and to move, and to use these very basic simple things to support us, but it also will say, I didn’t know how to do this on my own. I learned this completely with support, and I have no idea what it would be like, really, to try practicing that on my own and seeing if it made a difference, and in fact, I might not have enough ability at that time when I was learning these things, to be able to support myself because a big part of our healing comes from connection with other people and our ability to let our nervous system co-regulate with other people, with people that feel safe in their bodies.

Candice Wu 1:00:12

So, if you’re trying this at home by yourself and it’s not working, so to say, give it a little more time, see if you do it again or a couple of times in a week. Try it every day with or without the audio, and also, connect with someone about it. Connect with a professional that’s informed about trauma healing and the nervous system, from the scientific perspective. Connect with someone who can hold the space for this in an informed way. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or want the support in a healing experience, and wishing you and your bodies so much compassion and love and support.

Candice Wu 1:01:03

Thank you so much for tuning in today, and I want to end with something light, gosh, what what what? Okay, I’ve got it. It is from an email I received from LifeWorks Psychotherapy Center. I love the people at LifeWorks, and I’m connected with them there in Chicago. So, shout out to all of you at LifeWorks, and this is a selection of a poem from Anna McDonald, it’s called AfroPunk by Cameron Awkward-Rich, and he is a trans person of color who has published two poetry collections, and here is the poem.

Candice Wu 1:01:44

“A mosh pit is not the same as dancing It’s more like a cat thrown into an ocean of sweat and elbows And any choreography that follows is just an animal trying to stay alive. In middle school even the cool kids wear their bodies like clothes that don’t quite fit But me, I’ve never been cool as I was in eighth grade Never wore my skin so well as that year I discovered white boys and black eyeliner and that violence they called a dance. But when punk be black, when it be a girl throwing herself into a riot of white It’s not cause she needs a lesson in survival, there’s the whole world for that But goddamn, if the bullet has to leave one chamber to fill another If the girl has to be split and split And the boy riddled with stars And if the world must go on If our blood must kiss the concrete, let the first time be an act of love Let it be a wedding song and not a funeral And if pain be unavoidable, let it first be a pain we choose Let us learn how far our bodies can ride it, before the music cuts out.” ~ “Afropunk” by Cameron Awkward Rich

Candice Wu 1:03:01

And with that, I’ll leave you with a little music. This would actually be number 13 of the tools of coming out of numbness, for me at least is listening to music that really brings me alive. So, here’s just a little bit of music for you, as we close today.

Candice Wu 1:03:19

Thanks so much for joining me on the Embody Podcast, and if you’d like to stay in touch, read self-love notes, connect with other healing experientials and guests on the podcast. Find me on my newsletter at CandiceWu.com/embody.

Introduction

This experiential offers a very basic tool to support your body and nervous system in feeling more safety in releasing overwhelm, depression, trauma or dissociation or when you feel stuck and anxious. It can also help to build your capacity and your resilience for whatever it is you’re doing in life.

For a long time, I did not even know that I was overriding and pushing my body beyond the limits of it, beyond the signs of my body saying, “You’re overwhelmed, we’re overwhelmed, we are stressed.”

And we just call stress, stress, and without naming it more specifically what’s going on. We can just dismiss it in a way or we can apply some very generalized way of trying to relieve the stress.

Through Somatic Experiencing from Peter Levine, I learned that if we’re addressing the very specific ways that our body is stressed, especially when it’s saying, “I don’t feel safe,” then we can really heal at the root of that and begin to develop a new baseline in ourselves that feels calmer, more alert, and more available for the daily stuff of our lives and the things we want to do.

Sometimes, I had no idea I was pushing an overriding the signals of my body until I would do things like this exercise or do a little bit of yoga or something else that brought me down to a new level of relaxation — until I realized that new level I didn’t, I had no idea I was even feeling that stress, that overwhelms.

Nervous System Understanding

If you want to learn more about what happens to the nervous system, and how it affects our bodies when we’re feeling overwhelmed, paralyzed, shut down, dissociated or depressed, and what happens in the healing process, the process of shifting that, check out the introductory episode to this experiential where I talk about the many signs of nervous system overwhelm, 12 things that you can do to support and heal overwhelm, trauma and depression, and a bit of Polyvagal theory and Somatic Experiencing to help us understand and be more compassionate to how our body is responding, and being in the world.

You can find that episode at CandiceWu.com/overwhelm.

So, now, let’s jump into this experiential, which is one of three experientials.

The other two involve tuning into resource and strength, and in the main episode, the introductory episode, I also list several other healing experientials that I’ve offered in the past that you can tune into, plug into, and you can also search all those on my website at CandiceWu.com/meditations.

This particular experiential is something that truly helps me even though it felt so basic, over time, I began to sink deeper and deeper into it, and my body felt new levels of feeling safe.

I was able to feel more in connection with the very essentials of life, and the core of what I’m doing here in the world, and how I’m being in the world and it gave me a lot of pleasure to just do the very basic things.

Why Noticing Being Alive Helps, if it Isn’t Obvious!

So, this experiential is about tuning into very basics of how you know you’re alive, and how important that is to our bodies to register that we are alive, we are breathing, and we have a plethora of things in our lives that support that.

And for you, it may be different from me or from the next person, but I’d like you to notice those things in this experience.

So, if there are things that I say, in terms of what we’re tuning into that don’t make sense for you, please feel free to change it and just leave behind respectfully what doesn’t fit for you.

Let’s Practice Together

Feel free to find a comfortable way to be, whether that’s sitting, standing or lying down.

Even if you’re in transit, this is something you can do, and I would not particularly recommend it if you’re driving, but if you’re on a public transit that is taking you without your effort, that’s okay.

So, as you’re right here with me today, begin to notice your breathing and let it be just the way it is as if your body is breathing you.

Begin to notice where your mind is, and allow yourself to disconnect from the things that your mind may be thinking or from where you’ve been placing your attention, releasing your connection, and your attention on all those things of the past, and anywhere that your mind is placed in the future or to-do-lists or worries.

For now, just let go of your attention on these things.

You can begin wherever you are, however you are.

You don’t have to clear your mind, but just releasing the grip on thinking about these things as much as you can, and feeling your breathing right here and now

Breathing

As you’re feeling your breath, you might say to yourself or notice that I have breath. I can breathe.

Sometimes, it’s uncomfortable to notice your breath or to notice your body.

Just take note if that’s happening for you

I Am Alive

When you’re ready, shift to the awareness that, “I am alive. I am here and I’m alive.”

You might notice in what ways can you tell you’re alive.

What evidence do you have that your body is alive?

That may be your breath, it may be that you can feel your heart or your blood moving, maybe that you can feel the weight of your body, that you can hear things around you or inside.

It may be that you can see, see things around you, see your body or that you can smell or touch, and feel free to do any of those things that support you in deepening in that awareness that, “I am alive.”

Notice what it’s like to be in your body as you acknowledge that you’re alive.

Slow things down a little and track what’s going on on the inside.

Notice the parts of you that feel more connected with safety, calm or peace, and be aware that as you connect in this way, other feelings that are uncomfortable or challenging might also come up.

As you’re feeling safer, the nervous system recognizes that it’s safe to feel, safer to feel and I show you some of the feelings that have been waiting for you to notice inside, and feel free to take a break anytime.

Are You Safe Right Now?

Notice if it is true right now for you: I am safe.

Perhaps that means that nobody’s hurting you right now or that you’re not in danger.

Sometimes, we may not feel safe on the inside, but to acknowledge the very physical and concrete things that let us know we’re safe can support our nervous system in feeling safer.

So, if that rings true for you, notice the words and the feeling that come with: I am safe.

Other Basics

Now, notice if any of these are true for you: I have food.

Notice what that feels like to acknowledge in yourself, that very basic need: I have shelter. That is if you do have it.

Perhaps you might notice:

I have freedom

or I have loved ones

or I have myself.

Only focus on the ones that you truly do have that you can acknowledge and feel some gratitude for.

Perhaps, honoring that you have some of these basic needs that support you in being alive, and take a moment to acknowledge any other things that you feel are included in that very basic need of being alive and being safe that support you now in acknowledging.

And if any one of these, that we’ve named or you’ve named, really touch you right now or support you in that connection with safety, feel free to focus on that, now.

Let your body deepen into sinking up with that knowing with that awareness.

Notice the sensations inside, your emotions, how your breath might change over time, any movements in your body that are happening, and also any images that come up in your mind.

Here, take as long as you need.

Closing

Feel free to come back into your space, into the world around you whenever you feel ready, giving your body any sort of movement or touch that it would like.

If your eyes were closed at all, take your time to open them when it feels right, feeling your presence here.

Notice your surroundings and feel any shift in yourself, whether that’s an opening towards calm and relaxation, and safety in terms of a peaceful feeling or in terms of an uncomfortable feeling that’s coming up because your body and nervous system may feel a little safer.

And here, I’ll leave you with a little music as you transition to support your body in feeling here and feeling safe, as much as possible in this moment.

Thanks for joining me on the Embody Podcast, and be sure to tune in to the other two experientials at CandiceWu.com/overwhelm.

Introduction

This healing experiential is to support you feeling like yourself, to support the release of overwhelm, depression, anxiety, to support grounding, and your nervous system capacity as well as to tune you into your resource, resilience, and strength.

We will be tuning into times where you felt like yourself, a time that you got through a challenge, and noticing a current challenge. All of this to support the nervous system in remembering how it is to feel like yourself and to bring safety.

This healing experiential is brought to you by Somatic Experiencing practices and one that I learned from my teachers, particularly from Bianka Hardin, one of my supervisors who has learned from many other teachers in the Somatic Experiencing world.

This experiential is one that I have found incredibly helpful, and it is something that you can just take a few minutes and do.

We will take a little longer in this experience together, in this guided way, but you can do this on your own by just taking one minute to tune in to one of these aspects that will bring up today and feeling them in your body.

It’s incredible how many much we can support ourselves in whatever we’re doing in life, in feeling more at ease and safe by just doing something simple like this.

This is one of three healing experientials that connect with the episode around Nervous System Overwhelm: Polyvagal Theory, Noticing the Signs of Overwhelm and 12 Tools Towards Healing Trauma, Depression, Shut Down and Overwhelm.

You can find the full episode at CandiceWu.com/overwhelm, and all of the experiences that go with it.

Taking A Moment Can Make A Difference

I know there are times for me where I felt like I’m so busy that I came and take a moment to feel my body or to feel okay or to support myself, and I’m really grateful that those times are generally over in my life because doing this kind of experience that I’ll lead you through here, doing these kinds of experiences over and over, and supporting my nervous system in downshifting, and feeling at ease and calm has greatly shifted my entire life.

And so, taking a moment to support myself has brought me closer to how I want to be in the world, and how I want to treat myself and how I can love myself. So with that, I hope this experiential gives you support in whatever it is that you need to feel grounded, okay, and safe.

Practice and Prep

I would recommend doing this healing experience when you’re not operating any heavy machinery or driving.

If you’re in public transit, that might be okay, but if you’re in a private space, in the comfort of your own home or a space that feels good to you, that would be the best.

So, allow yourself to be in your body in a way that feels good, whether that’s sitting, standing or lying down or in any body position that’s right for you. You can keep your eyes open or close them, whatever feels the safest for you.

Sometimes, when we tune into resource or good moments like we will hear today, your body might feel a level of safety that brings up uncomfortable emotions because it feels safe.

So, if that happens for you, feel free to stay with it as much as it feels okay, and when it does feel overwhelming, we’re nearing too much, nearing overwhelm, take a break, just pause the podcast or stop or just listen to the sound of my voice or look around you and look at something that’s comforting. Touch your body. We are talking about overwhelm here.

So, we don’t want to use the healing process that also pushes you into overwhelm by pushing it a little too far.

Even if you know you can handle that emotion, sometimes it’s not the most healing thing to plow through it, in terms of what your nervous system might really need to feel safer.

So, as you find a comfortable position and you deepen into yourself, into your body, just take a few breaths to let yourself fully arrive here, and take a pulse check or inventory of what’s going on inside, any emotions, sensations, where your mind is, your thoughts, how your body feels, what it’s like to be in your body right now.

Five Touchpoints

And now, we’ll touch into five different aspects of memory and time, and then we’ll spend a little more time at the end with one of them of your choice.

First: Last Few Days So, let’s begin by tuning into in the last few days, the last time you felt like yourself.

So, just opening your awareness without any pressure, without expectation, just curiosity: when was the last time I felt like myself in the last few days? This can be a very simple or small moment or it can be a bigger one.

A small moment might be like when you had a cup of tea or you’re brushing your teeth or waking up with your head on your pillow or something else like checking a text from a loved one, connecting with a friend or putting on your PJs, eating something, looking at the window, doing an activity like, anything where you felt like yourself or even okay or you might have felt safe or loved or at ease.

So, notice that moment and if you haven’t found it yet, feel free to just pause the experience and take more time, and if you have found just one moment, dip into that moment, making contact to experience what it was like and what it’s like right now in your body to notice that moment.

Second: The Last Week

And now, we’ll shift into the second one and we can come back to this one if you’d like to at the end.

Now, shifting to open up time a little bit more to the last week: when was a time in the last week you felt like yourself, okay, at peace, safe or loved or even neutral?

And when you have that moment, touch into it and feel the visceral quality of what happens in your body as you recall this memory.

Notice your breathing, the sensations inside, emotions or movement. See yourself in that moment where you were, what it is you’re doing.

Third: The Last Two Weeks or Longer

Now, let’s touch into a third moment, opening up to the last two weeks to a month or even longer of a time in the last two weeks to a month or longer where you felt like yourself or you felt safe, peaceful, neutral or okay, where you felt pleasure.

Be curious about what comes up in your memory bank and what comes to you.

When you have that one moment, then picture that moment and make contact with the feeling sense that happens in this moment as you touch in.

Fourth: Notice A Challenge You Got Through

And in the next few breaths, we’ll shift gears to noticing a time in your entire life, anytime in your life where you had a challenge, and you got through it, where there may have been a very difficult situation or an uncomfortable situation, big or small and you got through it.

Notice that situation or memory of this time, and the moment that you recognize that you get through it.

And with this, also tune into where you were, what time of your life it was, perhaps even what season it was and how the weather was.

Who was around you? How did you feel when you got through it?

And how do you feel now in your body as you are aware of this difficult situation that you got through?

Notice any tiny little thing that your body does differently like a deeper breath and emotion that shifts or breaks open, release intention, a movement that feels more fluid, any feeling of spaciousness or peace or an uncomfortable emotion that moves and wants to be seen.

Fifth: Notice a Challenge in the Present

And with the next few breaths, let’s shift gears into the fifth moment.

The fifth moment is noticing a current challenge that you’re in, something that’s presently unresolved, incomplete or difficult for you, stressful or where you’re not sure of how the outcome is going to be, and that gives you discomfort.

Take a little taste of experiencing this difficult challenge at the moment, whether it’s seeing it from a distance or dipping a little deeper in, closer in, to the feeling sense as you bring it closer to you.

Take note of what it feels like in your body, what emotions come up, what your body wants to do, what you desire.

And as you’re ready, release your attention on that experience, noticing a few more breaths to clear the palate, so to say, of your attention.

Choose One To Deepen Into

And now, we come to the part of the experience where you’re free to choose one of these five moments that we touched into, and don’t worry if you didn’t have one for any of these.

Use what you have, and also, notice the experience of this, the process of this for you. And out of the five things that we touched into, choose one of those to connect with a little more time here.

Again, those five things were the last time you felt like yourself, pleasure, peaceful or okay in the last couple of days, in the last week, in the last two to four weeks or longer, a time that you got through a challenge, and a current challenge.

So, as you select which one of these five that you want to spend a little more time with, let yourself go right into that moment that you’re choosing.

Notice the setting of the experience, what’s around you, who’s there or involved, the whole image of this memory or if it’s the current challenge.

Notice the image that comes to you about it and deepen into the felt sense of whichever one of these you’ve chosen. Felt sense including the warmth or coolness of your body, in different places, tension or release, different sensations inside the body, emotions, movement, the energy of how you feel right now in this body, in this moment, as you call up this experience.

Notice your breathing and what changes as you stay with it.

Notice what happens next.

Take your time here to deepen even further.

Notice your whole body.

Let yourself move if there’s movement, and if it’s overwhelming it anytime, again, take a little break, and feel free to pause here if you’d like more time.

Release it All

And now, if you’re ready to just let go of whichever moment you chose, come back to your body in this moment, your breath.

If your eyes were closed, slowly open them just to look down at the ground or down wherever down is for you.

Start to notice your surroundings.

Feel free to touch your body in any way or notice how it already might be doing so, and stretch if you need it.

Take a moment to place your hand on your heart, if you’d like to, and thank yourself for connecting with these moments, to deepen into feeling like yourself, to expand your strength and resilience, to let your nervous system have this touching, to know its safety, trusting that this can support you in deepening your capacity over time.

Practice it Again

I encourage you to come back and do this perhaps, as I said, in a moment, like couple minutes, a day or while you’re at work or in the middle of something, you just take a break and touch into one of these moments, seeing how that shifts things for you or what you end up feeling as you do that or to come back to this whole experience and practice this over time.

Even practicing it every day for a week or two weeks or a month can be an extremely powerful exercise to support you in feeling those moments that truly allow you to feel yourself.

What began to happen for me is that I started to feel more present in the moments that were pleasurable to me as they were happening.

So, as we end and close today, I’ll leave you with a little bit of sound with the singing bowl that I got from Thailand. The first time I went about, I don’t know, seven years ago.

And we’ll close today, feel free to check out the other two experiences that go with this podcast, an episode on overwhelm and noticing overwhelm in the nervous system at CandiceWu.com/overwhelm.

Great to have you today and take care!

Introduction

This healing experiential is to support you in coming out of a nervous system overwhelmed state or where you feel depressed, where you have trauma or anxiety or you may be feeling dissociated, and to support you and feeling safer in your body and here.

This healing experience is something that I put together through my learnings of Somatic Experiencing, and it is not to replace having a Somatic Experiencing practitioner or another practitioner that supports trauma-sensitive healing or therapy but is to supplement your own experience to provide you with one option of how you might be able to feel safer in your body.

Doing this can bring up uncomfortable feelings that you may or may not feel prepared for.

If you're concerned about that, you can learn more about that process of the nervous system coming out of a frozen state or tonic and immobility state into fight or flight and coming down to a calmed, relaxed state in the episode that goes with this experiential called Nervous System Overwhelm: Noticing the Signs the Polyvagal Theory Basics, and 12 Tools Towards Healing Trauma, Depression, Shut Down and Overwhelm. That episode is at CandiceWu.com/overwhelm.

The Flight Response

So, in this healing experiential, we'll be working with supporting the body and feeling a level of safety that can bridge you into the next healing movement or to bring you a bit of sense of a grounding, calmness or support, and supporting the nervous system from coming out of a frozen state into feeling and being in the body.

In this experience, I will invite you to tune into the body's sense of needing to run towards safety, just like an animal would do if it were in fear and threat.

We don't always run in situations but our nervous system and the animal body inside of us may want to.

And so, if we give it to that, through imagining and through body movement, then the nervous system can feel like it completes that run towards safety, towards a place that feels safe for a person or a thing that feels safe, and therefore, it is safe or feels safer.

This healing experience is derived from the experience that many people have when they're in an anxious state or when they are coming out of their body being “shut down”, playing dead because it's overwhelmed or dissociated or paralyzed.

When it's coming out of that, it needs to complete a run, typically or a fight or something that can protect us when we're in a threat situation.

Oftentimes, if we let this happen organically through the process of working with the body and the nervous system and the felt sense, and the movements, the body might start to push on the toes or heels or move the feet naturally or tap.

If we follow that, in times where I've followed that or worked with clients to do that, sometimes the body really does want to run away, but when we have the experience of dissociation or frozen, numbness, any of the things I've listed, we can use a run to stimulate that process and to help the body come into a different level of safety. So, as I said, there's more on that in the intro podcast, but let's jump in here to this experience.

Support Your Body With A Break

Like all of the experiential that I offer, if you are starting to feel a little overwhelmed or towards overwhelm, pause the experience.

Take a break, release your attention on what we were doing and just touch your body or look around you, and look at something pleasant.

Do something that you know is comforting to your body.

There's no point in plowing through just to do the experience because the nervous system may find itself overwhelmed again, and perhaps feel in the same kind of trauma that it already was.

And when I speak to trauma, I mean something that's overwhelming to the nervous system that becomes stuck or undigested or incomplete.

Let’s Begin

So, here, I recommend sitting or standing, and at any time, you can sit or stand, change your position as you need to.

I don't recommend lying down because I want your body to be upright, and please don't do this experience if you're driving or operating any heavy machinery.

This is meant best for the privacy of your own home with a friend or healer or therapist that also understands trauma or is a personal practice.

As we begin, I'd like to invite you to imagine and be curious about what comes up for you.

Let’s Bring Safety to the Nervous System First : A Place to Run To

If you imagine a safe person, animal, place or thing, something that gives you the feeling that you're safe or at peace or loved or cared for or something that comforts you, and if none of those are working on for you, just something that feels okay or neutral.

If this is a challenge for you here, that's okay. Be open for yourself that something could reveal to you.

It could be a person who is dead or alive or someone you met just one or an animal that you imagine a place that you made up or a real place that you know an object that feels good to you, just allow the process of discovering what might be safe for you, be one that is unpressured and non-judgmental.

So, if you need to spend more time exploring that, feel free to pause and do so now, and if you have something and you're ready to move forward, let's continue.

Notice Your Feelings

So, tune into your body and feel if there's any part of you feeling anxious, heavy, overwhelmed, numb, depressed, paralyzed, like you can't move, or even sadness or any other difficult feelings.

If you're not feeling any of these and you're feeling just fine and safe, you can explore what doing this experience adds to your feeling, and if you are feeling any of those things, you can track what's happening here over the time and course of our experience together.

So, take this moment to feel your feet, feel what part of your body can touch the floor.

If you don't have feet or you have one or one leg, feel what you do have and or imagine more body parts that you might need in order to move.

So, feel what parts of your body do touch the floor.

If your feet are on the floor, toes, feel your ankles, feel the muscles that activate in order to create movement, and let the feeling register to your awareness, to your body, not just your mind but to your physical being.

Begin Moving Your Feet

Now, allow your feet to move like you are walking or like you're running, and you can do this sitting or standing.

If you're standing, you can jog in place or run around the room or walk around the room.

You can go at whatever pace feels right for you, and whatever pace you want to explore.

I would encourage you to explore going faster and feeling your muscles, your arms, your whole torso, your legs, feeling the movement, and if you're sitting or if you can't move in that way, imagine what it would be like to run and move.

Imagine that you're doing it, and let your feet tap or move in any way that they can, that your body can register that this could be happening.

If you're running quickly, now slow it down a lot to the point of like molasses, slow motion, and if you're sitting and doing this movement, do the same, nice and slow and easy.

In your mind, imagine how fast you might want to run right now, maybe jaguar speed or gazelle or any other speed that feels right based on how it is that you feel.

Imagine yourself running towards that safe person, animal, place or thing that you imagined in the beginning. Feel the journey towards the safe thing.

Feel the sensations in your body, in your arms and your legs, your feet, the pressure downwards.

Feel your breath.

See yourself get closer and closer to the safe person, animal place or thing, and let yourself arrive at your pace, and when you get there, you can stop running and rest. See the safe person, place, animal or situation or whatever you chose.

Imagine what it would feel like to be there with them or in this place receiving exactly what it is that you need to feel okay, to feel safe or to feel loved.

You get to make it up and design it yourself, receiving exactly what you need and what would be just right for you, and see what part of your body, your energy, your breath can receive that safety or care.

Feeling More Can Mean Your Body Feels Safer

Here, you aware, as I said earlier, that different emotions might come up When your body begins to feel safer, it can feel calm and peaceful but sometimes, tears may come, anger may come, sadness or other emotions may come.

That's a sign that your body is feeling a little safer. If you begin to feel like it's a little too much to tolerate, this is where you can take a break, doing so at any time.

Whatever is happening if you are staying with it, notice that and witness it without judgment, letting the sensation move through your body just the way it is, and imagining exactly what you need and desire in the safe place with this person or animal or situation.

Let your imagination support you in the very thing that would feel just right.

Now, notice any place in your body that is feeling, a deepening of safety, a reminder of safety or any place that feels okay or neutral, and it could be just a little spot or it might be a larger area.

It might show up in your breath or your emotions or the loosening of your body.

If you start to feel angry, and you're able to move through that yourself, feel free or if it's sadness, grief, loss or other emotions, feel free to stay with them as you can. If they are uncomfortable, beginning to be a little too uncomfortable, take that break.

You can also tune into the full episode of the podcast for other resources on how to come out of that overwhelm and to support more safety as well as the podcast on how to work with anger — if you'd like some suggestions.

And as you tune in to any place that feels okay, safe or neutral or good, let that deepen and expand.

Coming Back To NOW

As you begin to look around, if your eyes were closed at all, let them slowly open and see your present surroundings. Notice your vision and what that's like to see around you now.

Feel free to give a little touch to your body.

Notice any shifts or any difference in yourself, and also, notice what might be the same as when you began.

Stretch or move as you need as we come to a close of this experience today and if this was very challenging for you or you need more support, don't hesitate to reach out.

More Support

I'm happy to offer referrals or to work with you, myself or to answer any questions that may come up.

Feel free to use this experience anytime you are feeling the kind of numbness or overwhelm or not in your body, maybe depression, anxiety.

Be sure to also tune into the other experientials that go with this episode at CandiceWu.com/overwhelm, and the 12 tools that I have for you in that main episode that can support the process of moving through overwhelm, some very basic tools to support you in grounding and feeling safer.

Thanks so much for joining me today, and I leave you with a little music to transition, and see you next time on the Embody Podcast.