About Abby Wen Wu
Somatic Healing, Spiritual Awakening, and Elemental Animism
Abby Wen Wu is a somatic psychotherapist (pre-licensure) and somatic movement teacher dedicated to helping individuals return to ease, aliveness, and a felt interconnection with the world.
She supports people through somatic healing, inner-child work (IFS-informed), and energetic embodiment practices that integrate the emotional, physical, and spiritual.
Abby blends body-based modalities such as Focusing, Sensorimotor Therapy, and Core Transformations, and Continuum to meet trauma stored in the body-psyche. Her work invites the unwinding of unconscious conditioning and the release of burdens held in the nervous system and energy field.
In her movement offering, Abby guides explorations into body-awareness, intuitive movement, and elemental animism. She sees awareness-based movement as a doorway into sacred stillness, to awakening beyond the conditioned self, allowing life-force energy to move through. As bodily perception shifts, the sensory gates deepen, opening access to awareness beyond the isolated sense of self.
Professional Training: Somatic Psychotherapy, Embodied Healing, and Conscious Movement
There are many stages in personal transformation: hurting, healing, and helping. A practitioner’s presence is shaped by the paths they’ve walked. My work is rooted in the places I’ve most deeply healed—through somatic therapy, a personal Kundalini awakening, Focusing, Continuum movement, nondual meditation, and energy-based healing. These practices have become part of my being, and I now offer them in service to others navigating their path of embodiment and awakening.
Trainings:
2023–Present — Psychotherapist (in training)
William & Mary, M.Ed. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling
Focus on trauma and transpersonal approaches2024–Present — Effortless Mindfulness with Loch Kelly
Training in glimpse practices, awake awareness, and nondual realization through small shifts in identity and perception.2022–2024 — Energy Work with Lynda Caesara
Training in energy principles and practices, indigenous ceremonies and archetypal fields2021–Present — Continuum with Susan Harper
Somatic movement, breath, and perceptual inquiry rooted in fluid presence
2019–2023 — Body Intelligence & more with the Hendricks Institute
Embodied presence, communications, and transformational play2017–2023 — Focusing with Lynn Preston
Trained in relational Focusing and experiential psychology
Guiding Inquiries
awakening through the sense gates and perceptual shifts
intuitive movement from stillness and the felt-sense
mapping psyche to nature processes
rituals and ceremonies to deepen reciprocity in all relations, seen and unseen
embodying and resourcing through elemental animism
My Story
Initial Openings
My path of seeking began unknowingly at age six with a near-death experience. After accidentally ingesting chemicals, I floated out of my body while lying in a hospital bed. This opened me to the world of the unseen. Then the portal closed, and “normal life” took over. I hurried along like everyone else, until age 21, when that door cracked open again.
Pain as a Teacher
Three months of relentless sciatica pain left me bedridden, begging for deliverance. As I laid there with tears and poems pouring out, I sensed life was calling me home. That moment of surrender kick-started a deeper journey of spiritual seeking. I left my first job cold turkey and attended a Vipassana retreat. It was my first taste of silence and stillness, and my back pain significantly reduced. Around the same time, I serendipitously met my teacher, Lynn Preston, who generously opened the door to Focusing, a body-centered therapy rooted in the felt sense. This shifted me from the outer mental realm to the language of the body — metaphors, images, feelings, and process — initiating an inner revolution towards deep knowing. I began to see our bodies hold truths that the mind can’t always access.
Energetic Unraveling
At age 27, my entire world shattered from a psychedelic-induced energetic awakening. Numb parts awakened to be released in energetic form, and a flood of unconscious material surfaced, asking to be met.
This began a six-and-a-half-year period of dissolution and cocooning. Life stripped away all external ground to center the inner unfolding. Old identities dissolved. Relationships shifted or fell away. I was pinned to the ground to meet the dark, making space for something new.
Awakening Through the Body
With each cycle of release, new sensitivity came online, and also a porousness in my being. I was akin to a newborn or a snail without a shell, exposed and delicate in a world of harsh energies. My main solace was to resource deeply with nature and elemental energies.
With each layer of darkness shed, my perception shifted, revealing beauty, wonder, awe, and appreciation. The clearer my system became, the more I sensed interconnection - the aliveness and animacy of all things and the larger web of living.
Shifting into living from not-knowing, into deeper trusting and surrender. The animal creature fears - of needing to be safe, to know, to belong, and to control - continued to surface to be met. I wondered where I was going and what was becoming of me, and continue to allow those parts to be met.
Lineage and Teachers
Throughout this path, gifted healers and teachers held and shaped me.
My teacher Lynn always told me: wait and see what comes. In that way, I was serendipitously led to the womb-space of Continuum Movement with Susan Harper, which became a refuge and anchor, guiding me from a socio-cultural map to a soul map. Susan’s work opened me deeper to the imaginal and ritual animism, opening to perceptual shifts and elemental intelligences. I also studied with Lynda Caesara, who imparted universal energetic principles and scaffoldings of how to be in right relations. Both of these teachers offered ritualized containers, holding depth and expansiveness.
Ongoing Unfolding
This passage continues to reorient, from the mind to the heart, from a materialistic view to an expanded and subtle view, from object to process, from meaninglessness to sacredness and magic, from grasping to surrender, and from a small self to Soul. This is what my deeper urge was calling forth all along… and the journey continues to unfold.
I am forever grateful for this journey, and it continues to shape the work I offer. If parts of this story resonate, you’re invited to explore this work together.