Trusting the Wisdom of the Body: A Conversation with Erin Pace
On self-trust, body wisdom, and creating safety within.
Heartfelt conversations with brilliant women creatives, leaders, and change-makers who are making a difference in the world with their work.
I met Erin Pace during a certification course on Applied Positive Psychology last Winter. Erin's quiet and powerful energy drew me to her whenever she spoke or shared her thoughts. When I discovered she was a somatic practitioner, I knew I had to learn more about her work.
When I asked for an interview, Erin invited me to experience her work firsthand, and I was blown away! Her unique talent for making the body feel safe and supported is remarkable. She has worked with renowned figures like Regena “Mama Gena” Thomashauer and Gabrielle Bernstein. The former called her a woman whisperer, and I couldn’t agree more.
Her work is critical in these anxious times, as it helps women feel comfortable expressing themselves through movement and bodywork. Erin created the Responsive Body Practice to access and integrate the mind, body, energy, and spirit gracefully, promoting healing and sacred wholeness. Experiencing her work is an extraordinary gift and one that should not be missed.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
You can listen to the full audio version here.
Experience Erin’s simple guided meditation here.
You have a wealth of experience in body and energy work. You're also a professional dancer and a teacher at one point in your life, and you are so much into the world of movement. I'm curious how you would trace this love and deep understanding of the body in the earliest part of your life, which is your childhood. Can you share a bit about this journey and how it manifested when you were still a child?
I've been studying bodies in motion and emotional expression and processing in bodies for as long as I can remember. I didn't even know that's what I was basking in. So I started, as you mentioned, as a dancer. I did Irish and Scottish dancing very young and then moved into professional ballet.
I was in the discipline of ballet for a long time, then moved toward dance and went into the theater world, where the continued exploration and studying of human behavior became more practiced and understood. I have also worked in many different areas of service and being of service. I worked literally in the service industry when I was a performer, working in restaurants, but also in events as an event coordinator and a producer and working as a company manager in many management roles throughout my life.
Eventually, I ended up teaching. I taught different types of dance throughout the years to different ages, meaning I taught 20-somethings in college and taught children a little later. About 15 or so years ago, I began teaching adult women sensual dance, and at that point, everything had culminated for me and started to come together in all the bodywork I’ve done through the years.
I realized that my relentless interest in spiritual practices— the art of presence, my interest in energy work, curiosity around trauma, and awareness- all came together. I started working with bodies, initially in the sensual movement space, where I got to work one-on-one with people. I studied how integration happens for the ability of women to move through emotion, harness their energy for source and aliveness, and navigate challenging situations.
The mind work came together with the spiritual practices and the intuitive understanding of the body.
Nowadays, there are so many distractions. It's a lot about being in the mind. There’s a lot of information, and we are constantly stimulated; we tend to forget to move. How do you work with integrating and melding the mind and the body?
I work differently for each body; everybody comes in and presents differently. There are similarities to how an approach might work with a specific way that a body is in the world, like the programming of the mind, understanding the patterns of thought cycling, and its contribution to our life. We can observe what is present or stuck in the body and work with different ways to invite release and permission to some parts of us that need that.
Each person has their way of keeping promises to themselves to build self-trust or move through fear and create safe conditions. Each person has different abilities for regulation. We might work with the nervous system a bit; we might work with a high-anxiety body that might need to learn different ways to temper the noise they're feeling in their physical bodies. They can feel at peace and come down from that autopilot-doing mode they're in. They can listen to the intelligence within them to know how to address whatever challenges them.
It’s about trusting oneself, which can be challenging, especially for women. We go through many emotions, and it's not always easy to navigate through them as they arrive.
So, how does one develop self-trust?
There’s so much truth in how contained so many women's bodies are without them even being aware. I feel a call to answer two different pathways here. There's one that's more general, what women are carrying in their body, how it presents, and how attuned to it they are. I meet a lot of bodies that do a lot of practice during the doing mode. They keep their mind intact by checking in little bits here and there.
However, when they stop and feel they're not allowing themselves to handle the big emotions, they feel depleted often.
Beneath it, there’s a fear of going into those more intense emotions because there may be a breakdown. It could be something they are too afraid to go to or think will be too big or too much if it is released or even visited.
The other pathway of your question is, how do we come to know our body? How are we coming to interpret the right relationship with ourselves? We must take the time to listen, pause what we're doing, and make time, even if it is one minute a day. A lot can be heard in the internal movement of the body, like what is moving within you or not moving within you; there's so much information in that —to pause and breathe into your physical being and notice.
I sometimes use the acronym ALIVE. You can use it in two ways. You can use it as an affirmation, “I am Alive” or a reflection question, “Am I Alive?
The A stands for being AWARE. Am I present? Am I looking inward? Am I noticing what's happening within me? Am I aware that I'm conscious of the breath and bringing my consciousness into my physical being, into my whole self, and just checking in to know that I am here to realize where I am and what is happening entirely? It's as simple as that.
The second is LISTEN. Am I Listening? Am I receiving the information that is there? Am I being receptive to myself? It’s responsiveness, which is why I call my practice responsive body practice. It’s how we respond to ourselves first and how we respond to the information that is available to us.
The third is INTENTIONALITY. Am I intentional and inspired? It can be one or the other. Am I making the choices with a high level of consciousness to bring me in the direction of clarity that I might be open to receiving and opening my heart to? Am I doing the work? Am I using the tools to take an inspired action?
Then you have VITALITY. Am I vital and valid? Do I realize I'm in my agency, I'm necessary, and I am understanding and honoring my worth rather than shaming and judging myself, which is unfortunately too familiar? Our programming around shaming is so thick and so deep. So, am I valid? Do I recognize that I am valid and that I belong?
Last is EVOLVE. How am I evolving in this situation? Am I staying curious and staying in that growth mindset? Am I growth-oriented?
What I love about what you said is about going deep into what it means to be listening to the body. You drove it to the point of using the acronym ALIVE. That brings me to what listening is about in that space. If we intentionally create space, it doesn't mean we set aside time for a particular practice or exercise. We talk about how to be fully integrated, not just practicing or moving for the sake of moving but bringing it into whatever you do daily. So maybe even at work, checking in, am I alive? Or do I feel alive today? Having a nine-to-five job, for example. Sometimes, it can take a lot of time; we must remember to check in because it's so busy.
There’s a simple practice where you can set the alarm for a few minutes and ask yourself, am I here? Then ask yourself, how am I being here? Am I being fully present in my day, or am I choosing to dissociate to some extent?
We want to experience life in its fullness, where our whole being, mind, body, spirit, and energy are in collaboration and harmony. However, what we experience as humans is different. It's more about how we navigate our way back to that. How do we keep coming home to ourselves despite the challenges? We must have our practices to understand and identify what we're coming home to. Like a compass, we know our way back and can get there efficiently and effectively.
The most essential practice is returning to yourself from moment to moment. The act of returning to yourself to check in and say hey, how are you and being honest with yourself about what is currently going through you.
Set aside the time to do the things that nourish you in specific ways. There’s the invitation to be with you everywhere you go but be with you in complete reverence. Setting aside time for emotional expression is essential. Some women set aside time for the run, the workout, and the movement but do not look at what's moving inside them.
There was no permission for some women who unfortunately carried these unexpressed emotions because they could not express them. They've been shamed if they were too emotional, or too sensitive, or anything like that going on in their upbringing, and all the different things deeply carried within us as women.
Setting aside time to experience flow and feel safe can be epic for integration because it clears the body of what's being held. The body can unbrace itself, start to loosen, and become available to receive.
Women are also conditioned not to believe they deserve attention and care. How can we start within ourselves to nurture and nourish and bring ourselves wholly to each experience and recognize when emotion needs to be processed? It will serve the women who are holding a lot in their bodies.
You talked about safety and giving ourselves that permission. How do women create this kind of a safe space within ourselves, even if sometimes we don’t feel safe internally and externally?
When we think of safety, it's usually associated in some way with fear. There are well-known practices-- different breathing practices and other types of meditation. There's bilateral tapping, a butterfly hug with gentle, even taps with the hands on either side of your arms. There's containment, the art of holding you in different places as you exhale.
Feeling the substance of your body in the present moment allows you to feel and not be in fight or flight mode. It's incredible how many people do not connect with themselves in any version of holding or touch for years. Because at some young age, there was some shaming around their bodies.
Containment can be a great practice, bringing you into the present moment. You can set yourself up by imagining a peaceful or safe place to access it immediately. You can feel the energy of water if you're calmed by water. You can install that imagery, including all the sensations and what you have that is readily available as a place you can go to in your mind's eye, but you feel it in your body. You come home to yourself.
You can also do a vagal nerve massage to calibrate the nervous system. Gently stroke with two fingertips from the inside of the eyebrows above the brow up and over to the ear above and around the back of the ear, and then follow it down towards the heart. You can do tapping, where you tap different parts of your body to help you calm the nervous system.
Importantly, to nurture safety in the body, you want to keep practicing your own experience of self-trust. When I work with the body, I give it some structure, some specific kind of motion or movement to explore. Once they feel the nature of that in their body and feel it is safe, I invite them to feel how they might access more pleasure in experiencing the movement. This way, they can begin to feel the internal sensations and follow the energetic flow moving in the body in a way that's true for them.
Bringing yourself back into the connection of your physical body can be intensely emotional and relieving because suddenly, you can breathe more deeply, feel more deeply, and begin to trust yourself.
What is the responsive body practice?
It's a practice of deep listening, explorative movement, and other techniques that inform responding in life from a place of pure love. I mean pure love, which is the core of all of us.
We all want to be seen, heard and felt in some capacity, and the way to bring that into the world is through sacred embodiment. To get some context, embodiment is how you are with yourself. How are you with you? How do you speak to you? How do you pay attention to you? How do you honor yourself?
Being with you is one thing; how can you then bring it into a relationship with others directly? How are you in relationships with friends, family, loved ones, and strangers on the street? Then expanding it into the collective. There's a lot of disparity and separateness in the world; how can we be bringers of love in an actionable way? How can we serve the collective for the better?
If we can hone the skill of becoming consciously responsive rather than subconsciously reactive, that's the work. What we have been through then becomes, how can we serve others? Making small gestures of kindness has ripple effects on the collective.
We touched a bit on emotions, but there's one form of emotion you’ve experienced several times in your life. I’m talking about grief and loss. We’re shifting to a tender part of your life— your eight-year journey into becoming a mother. In the process of doing that, you also lost your mother. And then there was a time when you lost your sister as well. Can you share your experience with grief and how you navigated through it?
Grief is alive within all of us to some extent. I lost my sister to suicide. You can imagine how traumatic that was for our family. At the time, movement had always been my medicine and prayer. So, I allowed the waves of grief to move through my body. I permitted myself to fall into a puddle on the ground and wail the pain out of my body.
Within that loss, I understood there are phases, as people speak too often about grief. You go through different stages, and everyone navigates them differently. I found that significant loss stays with us, and we don't necessarily say goodbye to it, and it doesn't leave us for good.
There's something about how the soul connection existed; you hold that with tenderness if you can access that after going through the grief process. I honor my sister by lighting a candle on the anniversary of her death every year. Each time, I feel her presence. I honor her by feeling into the light of her being and remembering what she brought to me, my family, and the people she touched when she was alive.
In the grief of my eight-year journey with infertility, I carried that through as well. At that point, I was in the space of central movement. So, I had a safe container to dance it through my body. By dance, I mean express because dancing to me was a disciplined art. In the sensual movement space, we would guide bodies into that self-trust and allow the movement to be organic. Emotional expression was permitted in that space.
I nurtured, carried, and extracted grief through that movement through my body. I grieved every embryo and, in a sense, many potential soul beings that could have been here. However, you want to see that. But that was a very long journey for my husband and me, and we had to go through many acceptance processes. I needed a long period between each failed attempt to process it completely.
With any emotion that feels big, the more you can be with it, befriend it, and allow yourself the time to say, hey, I know you're here and have it visit you and not have it anchor you or weigh you down that you can't get out of its grip.
You can move emotion through the body and have it in a safe place with the help of a grief guide or through grief practice.
A shamanic mentor of mine taught me a very simple grief altar you can set up where you can use one candle to light at a time of the day you choose. You can put pictures or things the person used and shared with you.
You can visit whenever you need to be with the grief and open yourself up consciously with prayer or whatever version of opening into a space you like to use and sit with the grief and permit it to be felt.
It might be you sitting there and remembering things or allowing deep emotional flow, inviting that person's presence, whatever it may be for yourself. You can close it with gratitude and love and leave it where it is. Then, you can continue your day so the grief doesn't overwhelm you.
Thank you for sharing that simple practice. Grief, for me, is a reminder of how much we've loved. While it can be challenging to navigate through, we want to remember and honor the connection we had with the person we lost.
Before we end, what message would you like to leave us with?
Allow yourself more of you. Being open to that reveals the truth about yourself, not as other people have told you who you are or who they've told you to be. Through self-exploration and discovery, you can experience everything you want; you can open up space and permit yourself to receive.
I’m curious to know…
What resonated with you in the interview?
Did you notice anything in your body when Erin shared her story and how she navigated with grief?
Is the ALIVE practice something you can apply in your daily life?
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or hit the heart below.