Three things we dive into in this episode:
The value of your creativity and authenticity.
How you can you lean into joy while also calling yourself out on your own bullshit.
Why giving yourself space for messiness and exploration is so important for bringing your dreams to life.
📘Resources
Release restrictive dieting, break free from body shame, & create habits that help you live fully! Sign up for Caitie’s nutrition coaching program and community, Whole, Full, & Alive, and get a FREE 20 Minute Discovery Call!
Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer
Light Up Your Life 💫 Book a discovery call with Candace to look at the roadblocks and challenges stopping you from creating your dream life!
Join the Dream Life Loading Residency 💫, a six-week connection with Candace where she coaches you to create the unique job, business opportunity, or lifestyle that you want!
When 'Sunday Service' meets mindfulness. Start your Sunday with Candace during this virtual mindfulness retreat & take some time to connect with yourself while resetting for the week!
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📌Episode Highlights
[05:38] I am Candace Taylor
Candace is a multi-talented woman. She is an entrepreneur, a performer, and an artist — a creative soul through and through.
Candace describes her profession as a dream doula: a visionary who believes in the importance of dreaming and creating something out of nothing.
She supports individuals who want their innate creativity to be the center of their lifestyle. She helps them bring this lifestyle into reality.
[10:59] Overcome Challenges
Candace’s time in New York in 2015 was one of the low points of her life.
She suffered physically, mentally, spiritually, and financially because she was stuck fulfilling the expectations of others.
Staying in the bullshit loop brings pain in all aspects of life. You need to stop faking and get real with yourself to get out of this destructive cycle.
Candace chose herself, got out of the funk, and finally started to grow.
[16:39] Being Kind and Fully Alive
Candace resonates with the Wild Unknown tarot deck, specifically with the Wheel of Fortune card.
Be discerning of all the pathways your life can take.
Candace: “One philosophy that I really grounded myself in is life is not designed to be clear-cut. Life is complex, and it’s intricate, and that’s one of the beauties of the human experience. We have the capacity to hold so much at once.” - Click Here To Tweet This
By allowing herself to feel both the positive and negative experiences of life without judgment, Candace lives her life to the fullest.
[20:23] Making Space for Complexity and Creativity
Since she was younger, Candace always honored the creative spirit inside of her when making decisions.
Having the mind of a choreographer that physicalized movement, she wanted her life to reflect the same movement.
Caitie: “You allowed yourself to have the same creative spirit with your life that you’ve always had with your dance and with your art. And if we could be creative with art and with dancing and things like that, why not also be creative with our lives? Because that is what’s going to allow us to experience the full range of aliveness.” - Click Here To Tweet This
We have the rare capacity as humans to be expressive, magical, and creative.
Candace sees it as her duty to help people honor their creative spirit as a dream doula.
[27:02] How to Not Get Overwhelmed with Complicated Emotions
Just like pregnancy and birth, creating something is a radical transformation of your life, body, mind, and heart.
You must expect to go through pain because you are paving a brand new road.
Having a deep connection and awareness of what you have and being intentional about the changes you will make takes the pain out of the experience and transforms it from suffering to an investment.
Having the right perspective makes the pain worthwhile.
[31:32] Ritualizing JOY
For Candace, joy is having contentment and gratitude in your existence.
Her ritual is to be in flow and have an authentic, honest space with herself.
Because she is in a transitional period in her life, Candace reaches out to her built communities and practices. She connects with friends and family, and she also meditates and journals.
[34:07] Pain and Challenges of a New Life
Candace struggled to find a balance in connecting with her creative spirit and in prioritizing what is necessary for her.
Breonna Taylor’s murder shook her to the core and made her re-assess what she wants her life to be.
She trusted her intuition and moved to San Diego. With the help of her partnership with the FP movement and living with a close friend, she was able to uproot her New York home and start living the life she wanted.
Candace had to start from the ground up. She needed to learn how to drive and navigate in this new space.
Candace: “There were a lot of lonely moments, a lot of dark moments. But because I was listening to myself, and I was honoring myself, and I was prioritizing that connection to me, it made every ounce of pain that led me to that space worth it.” - Click Here To Tweet This
[40:44] The World Needs YOUR Gifts
The tiny spaces on your foundation have the potential to grow into something bigger and brighter, but only if you listen to your desires.
Candace: “When we say no to ourselves, we compound the pain that we experience. And then when we say yes to ourselves, in this instant, we can actually illuminate the world far beyond what we ever imagined, what we ever expect.” - Click Here To Tweet This
As humans, we are all unique. We can imagine and create our reality. This is the root of our innate creativity.
How you respond and create are unique and important. You have the power and the capacity to change people and the spaces around you just by choosing to be authentic.
You can create something new amid a crumbling social structure.
[48:15] Aliveness
You can be alive fully because you can create.
Being alive is constant, and no one can take it away from you because of a shift in society.
Aliveness is having the capacity to make a choice that will ripple beyond you and into endless possibilities.
We need to hold and honor every positive and negative emotion to experience our lives fully.
[53:40] Taking Care of the Soul
Candace enjoys expressing gratitude in a childlike and ridiculous way before starting her day.
Her end-of-day routine involves journaling and pouring her thoughts into paper.
Journaling prompt: Think about what could be different in your life or questions that pull out your desires. Challenging your preconceived notions is a great way to think out of the box.
You can also record your gratitude practice and listen to your voice later. There is something powerful about hearing our own voices express gratitude and our desires.
About Candace
Candace Taylor is a dream doula helping entrepreneurs and passionate individuals create their dream lives into strategy and action. She is a multi-talented artist and performer, and one of her many strengths is her unique creative voice. Her passions include helping bring out the inner creativity in her clients to pursue the reality they want in their lives. Candace is a ball of energy who will help you uncover your own creative voice!
Connect with Candace on Instagram or LinkedIn.
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Transcript
Candace Taylor: I don't think joy is just happiness for happiness’ sake. I think it's contentment knowing that there's a level of gratitude that we ought to have for just existing.
Caitie Corradino:Welcome to Whole, Full, & Alive, a podcast exploring the art and science of falling in love with your life, with your story and with who you truly are underneath your titles, your resume, your relationship status, and your bank account. I'm Caitie Corradino, a registered dietitian nutritionist, certified fitness and yoga instructor, eating disorder recovery coach, Reiki healer, and founder of Full Soul Nutrition.
But underneath my titles and resume, a big fan of kitchen dance breaks, early mornings, all things chocolate truffles, world traveling and serendipity. I'm here to share no bullshit stories and actionable tools to help you feel unshakably worthy. You have everything you need within you to feel whole, full, & alive, right here, right now. Let's get into it.
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Hey, welcome to episode three of Whole, Full, & Alive. I am so excited that you came back. Thanks for being here for episode three, the third episode during launch week. So as I mentioned, the first three episodes of this show. I was aiming to outline why I called the show Whole, Full, & Alive. So in episode one I talked about wholeness. And in episode two, we explored fullness. And now here in episode three, se're going to be talking about aliveness. And I'm going to be doing it with my first guest.
I have my first guest on the show today to explore this theme of aliveness. My guest's name is Candace Taylor, and she is an amazing, multi-passionate, multi-talented human. I'm gonna tell the story in the interview of how Candace and I initially got connected but she is a choreographer, a fitness instructor, an artist, a creative entrepreneur, a dream doula —ell you what that means in a second. And just an overall ball of energy and aliveness when Candace walks into a room, you can feel it. She is so alive, she is so encouraging, and she makes people just feel so so good.
And in her own words, she is a dream doula who empowers creatives and undercover creatives to feel more joyful and fulfilled in their lives. So, in her business connecting creations, Candace serves as a guide and advocate and a cheerleader to support her client partners to feel free of emotional, chronic and mental and physical pain, so that they can not only enjoy their lived experiences, but also inspire and empower others, with their creativity with the things that they birthed into the world.
I'm so excited to dive into this conversation with Candace today. We're going to explore like I said, aliveness, what it means to be fully alive. How can you tolerate the good and the bad and the light and the dark? And hold space for many things to be true at the same time? How can you lean into joy while also calling yourself out on your own bullshit?
Our conversation was a lot of fun and went a lot of different places I wasn't exactly expecting to. By the end of it, I just felt so lit up and inspired and excited. I hope you feel that way, listening to it too. So let's get into it. Exploring aliveness today with my very first guest, Candice Taylor.
Hey, everybody, welcome back. I am so so so excited and grateful to be here with the first guest on my podcast, Candace Taylor, I am going to dive right into conversation with Candace. But first, I would like for you to introduce yourself, Candace, tell everybody who you are. And of course, I want to hear about everything you do. I want to hear about the Tony Awards. I want to hear about fitness instruction. I want to hear about being a doula. And I also want to know who are you underneath all of that? Tell us?
Candace: First of all, I'm stunned. I can't believe I'm the first guest on your podcast. I'm so honored. That struck me to my soul. So thank you so much for having me here. My name is Candace Taylor. I hail from the inner city of Boston. And I love this question. I've been thinking a lot more about how I want to answer this question as I get asked it.
What's coming to me right now is “I am.” I want to let like the abundance of that statement just like ring true in this moment. To give a little bit more, I guess, color to that statement. I am a multi-passionate entrepreneur. I am a performer, a performing artist, I am a creative through and through. I am a love0 — I love humans so much. I'm fascinated by humanity. And I'm a dream doula. That's the professional title I've given myself.
That means that I am a visionary that sees the importance of dreaming, sees the importance of creating and using our creative power to make things out of nothing and bring them into the world. And so I support individuals who want to have creativity be a fixture of their lives, and to design a lifestyle that supports physical, mental, emotional wellness at all times, and really honors the creative spirit that all of us innately have.
Caitie: Wow. Okay, so where do we even go from there. So many places, I actually want to share the story about the first time I encountered you because it was actually at a really pivotal moment in my life. So I was going through a horrendous breakup and I found 305 fitness. When I found 305, my soul like came back to life, I realized that dancing was like the essential piece of my soul that I had lost touch with, for way too long. My friend, Maria Maxey was like, “Oh, we're looking for flex instructors, you should audition to teach at the studio.” And I was like, “Okay, sounds good.”
I fell in love with this place that helped my soul come back to life, like, let me audition and I walked into the audition room. I was so nervous, because I actually really freaking wanted this so badly. And your energy, you were the person that was watching me audition, the only person who was watching me audition, your energy was the most warm and inviting and wonderful thing. And I had never been to a job interview or an audition process that was like that before I did my little flex yoga performance thing for you.
You were like, “Hey, I really see how much you love 305. And I can really see how much you love teaching.” And I was like, “What nice feedback you were like, your energy is just so palpable, like this is great. I'm so excited about you.” And there was no feedback about like, “Oh, your form was great. And your cues were awesome; your directions for great” It was just not technical. It was just so spiritual. I remember that moment so much because it was just the kind of feedback that I needed.
I really wanted that my first guest on this podcast to be someone who I get that feeling from, who I get that warm, inviting energy from, who inspires me and who reminds me that I'm more than my job title. And I'm more than what I do. I am who I am, and I am what I radiate. And you reminded me of that from the first time I met you. So I just really want to share that.
Candace: It's so funny. I was like, I hope it's the moment that I'm remembering. And I remember that moment very vividly — that dimly light room, and it was palpable. Glad you remember that story, because that is my legacy. That's what I'm desiring — to just paint the world with these moments where I just show people what I see with my eyes. Hopefully it's the depths of what they're trying to share with the world.
I think you were trying to share your passion and you were trying to showcase your deep desire, to share the skill sets and the talents that you have, but also share yourself and your humanity with other people. So I love that moment. It was really special and it was actually such a relief, because I feel like some of the other auditions that I was watching that day, I had to peel back the layers of performance. \Hey, we're just humans in a room together. It was so refreshing to be in that space with you. So thank you. I'm honored. And I'm so glad we have that memory together.
Caitie: Well, thank you. Thank you. And so yeah, how did you get there? How did you find that? That was the legacy you wanted to leave? What is a challenge that you've overcome in your life that led you to that personal mission, that personal desire?
Candace