Today we’d like to introduce you to Candice Wu.
Candice, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I came into this life with fervor for self-expression, freedom, adventure, feeling, and sensing. Growing up in a Chinese family and lineage where all of those traits seemed to be muted and contrasted with the surrounding American culture in Michigan, I became numb and confused. I later learned that this was my survival and protection, and I learned to integrate and be connected to both my lineage and my self-expression without rejecting one or the other and that these specific painful wounds would be a tremendous treasure chest of self-knowing, love, and resource to me and others on my path.
In my first career as an art teacher, I had many limits and negative beliefs, but I knew something important: that art was the one means that I could express myself and encourage others to. I saw my work as more of facilitating expression and self-knowing for young people. Alongside my students’ explorations, I began a deep internal healing process. I finally became aware of my body falling apart, as my body was screaming and demanding I listen! Headaches all the time, anxiety, aches and pains, tension everywhere.
When I discovered that emotions, experience, and beliefs all lived in my body and that there was a way to heal, I came to life with possibility. I realized there were ways that my body was speaking to me and I began relating to myself with gentleness and love (over many years!), which was the opposite of my previous Plow-Through-Life-Type A-Personality.
I found Western and Eastern experiential and indigenous healing practices that helped me go deep into my roots and transform powerfully. I practiced shedding layers of negative beliefs, healed past wounds, and reclaimed a sense of responsibility and authenticity (and I continue to in subtler ways every day). My family relationships became much more solid, loving, and accepting, as I began to see that I chose this family and this life at a deep celestial level, to bring me more growth in this life. The ancestral healing work through Family Constellations gave me and my family profound and life-altering healing and restoration, supported a deep inner healing, as well as synced up with an essential part of my voice in healing work.
Slowly, as I marinated in the practice of loving myself, integration, health, and self-connection. I stepped into my truest form of being a Healing Facilitator and holding space for the beautiful and unique healing process of each individual that aligns with me. I gain so much joy in letting different international experiences touch and change my heart, as well as put thought to what I bring to other cultures and spaces as I travel and exchange with others. It is through joy, ease, intention, amusement and love that I honor my life, continue to evolve and heal, feel the universal and individual Spirit alive as me, and create what is energetically aligned and integrated to offer to my clients.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not at all! I remember crying and being raw on the ground after earth-shaking therapy/healing sessions, re-enacting past conflicts and dynamics with new relationships, fighting with my family as I spoke up in new ways, battling with myself on the inside to make even simple decisions, drowning in negative beliefs and criticism, and being stuck in bed feeling hopeless and horrible- just some of the many emotional experiences to match the challenges in finding my own true way in this world and in my career.
I turned away from and shut down my own creative ideas repeatedly, in fear that no one would care, that my ideas were too different from “what people do and should/shouldn’t do”, that I would fail miserably, that I wasn’t enough to execute them, and that I was not worthy of them or the beauty they would bring. At times it was easier to hide than to be seen.
I am grateful to have many beautiful teachers, healers, therapists, family (especially my mom) friends, and strangers that have affected me in some joyful or challenging way, to thank for traversing the waters with me and seeing me with love. Now, I feel a deep sense of being myself and that my presence is rich and enough. On a daily basis, I fill myself with love and nurturance, explore who I am and how I’m evolving, connect with loved ones, and leave space for loving (and witnessing how I treat myself with) the fears and harsh beliefs that may bubble up to the surface. I feel interested in what comes up and experience it with far less suffering and more compassion, as I find challenges as opportunities to know myself.
Once, someone told me that Being Human was their beloved teacher’s, a Tibetan Shaman’s, highest level of teaching. I simply believe that! I find it is most challenging and humbling to experience all the emotions and sensations that my human body is capable of- the pleasure and the pain, the wholeness and brokenness, the known and unknown- and to be truly vulnerable, open, accepting, and honest through it.
Candice Wu, Self-Love + Healing – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
What I appreciate my work is that I see my clients on all the levels of their being in an integrated way, which gives way for a deeply transformational experience that touches the individual and collective soul, the energies of their entire ancestral lineage that live through them, and their way of experiencing and being in this human body. It’s an absolute pleasure to support others in their process of self- love, being at home in themselves, knowing and honoring themselves deeply, and developing their innate intuition and wisdom.
I hold space for my clients’ healing processes with an enormous amount of love and light so that one’s own inner lights may turn on and their organic process can emerge and unfold. I believe that each person has the innate capacity to heal and I deeply respect and honor them in their own process.
I enjoy working with clients all over the world remotely and in-person. Currently, I am journeying into traveling the world and following the lead of my heart, while continuing to hold life-changing healing and intuitive coaching sessions online, spiritual retreats and adventures, workshops, coaching intensives, and women’s healing circles.
One thing remains true even though my practice has taken many forms over time: that I always come back to my own healing, evolution, and connection as the power behind my work with others. I live my practice deeply in my bones and in my soul.
A client who is the best fit is someone who desires and is ready for true transformation, and sometimes they are brand new to healing, or they have tried everything. I work with a multitude of client challenges including some of my favorites: stepping into authenticity and wholeness, nourishing relationships with self and others, intergenerational trauma, developmental or relational trauma, exploring the roots of why they are feeling what they are feeling, bridging the mind and bodily experience, purpose in life, spiritual connection, increasing empowerment, pleasure, and love, cross-cultural challenges and identity, body empowerment and image, pre and peri-natal challenges, birth trauma, and releasing negative beliefs.
The blend of all of the modern and ancient practices I offer is a beautiful symphony of visualization + imagery, Family Constellations (embodied ancestral healing work), Somatic Experiencing, acupressure, healing touch (or distance energy work), soul + spiritual healing work, releasing negative beliefs through the whole bodily system, yoga tantra practices and meditations, voice dialogue (exploring the many parts of oneself in an in-body way), Ayurvedic and Integrative Yoga.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
It is hard to say that there is one moment that I have been the proudest. I have been proud of leading an international retreat recently that felt magical and meaningful, and that I’ve paved my own way of being in the healing and therapy world with my specific gifts, However, I find that I’m most proud in the continual and simple moments when I’m truly present with a client, where I sense my heart open and loving, giving way to a profound connection, being, and healing. I am also joyful with myself when I challenge my edge of expansion, level of vulnerability, and authenticity; when I truly show up in the world with my moment-to-moment aliveness.
Pricing:
- 15 Minute Consultation: Free
- Individual Healing, Body Wisdom, or Coaching Session: $250/hour
- Couples Healing or Coaching Session: $275/hour
- Family Constellations Healing Session: $250/hour
- Women’s Heart Circle: Online $199/Month
- Coaching Intensives + Immersions (4-8 Weeks): Coming Soon!
- Group Workshop, Retreat, or Experiential: Varies
Contact Info:
- Website: www.candicewu.com
- Phone: 248-390-5001
- Email: embody@candicewu.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/embodyournature
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/embodyournature
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/embodyournature
Image Credit:
Chad Wu Photo , Amy Hagerstrom
Getting in touch: VoyageChicago is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
