Delia Quigley: STORIES
Every woman has a story to tell. Every story holds her wisdom.
In STORIES, host Delia Quigley explores the moments, memories, and experiences that shape who we are as women. From deeply personal reflections to conversations with inspiring voices, each episode invites you to discover the truths within a life’s narrative.
At the heart of these stories is the wisdom of our Five Bodies—physical, energy, mental, wisdom, and divine—because the way we live, feel, think, and sense shapes every chapter of our journey.
Whether you’re navigating change, seeking clarity, or simply curious about the threads that connect us all, these stories will guide you toward greater self-understanding, compassion, and alignment.
Because when we share our stories, we awaken the wisdom within.
Delia Quigley: STORIES
Your Physical Body: Somatic Healing & Finding Yourself
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Pain, tightness, and fatigue often seem like isolated problems, but what if they’re messages from deeper stories your body is holding? We sit down with somatic therapist and former professional dancer Marcia Ward to explore how fascia, breath, and intention can quietly reshape not only how you move, but how you see, choose, and feel. Marcia traces her journey from rigorous ballet technique—where beauty can mask strain—to structural integration, a method that reorganizes connective tissue so the body aligns with gravity and returns to fluid, effortless motion.
Together we unpack the five bodies—physical, energy, mental, wisdom, and divine—and how change in one layer ripples through the rest. Marcia shares vivid examples of clients who release old wrapping, then rediscover creativity, clarity, or the courage to make life shifts. We talk about aging with curiosity, building strength without re-tightening fascia, and replacing ego-driven goals with a listening practice she calls the “Department of the Interior.” You’ll hear practical ways to begin: somatic movement classes, structural integration (Rolfing, Soma), and simple developmental patterns that reset coordination in minutes.
If you’ve pushed through pain in yoga, sports, or daily life, this conversation offers a gentler path. Learn how intention organizes the nervous system, why hydration and fascial health matter, and how breath anchors the subtle bodies. The result isn’t perfection; it’s a grounded ease that feels like coming home. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs a reset, and leave a review telling us one pattern you’re ready to unwrap.
There are any number of stories we can tell about our lives. What fascinates me most is how those stories live in us, not just as memories, but as sensations held in our bodies. We carry them in all five of our bodies: the physical, the energy, the mental, our wisdom, our divine. Each experience is absorbed layer by layer into the depths of our being. These stories, often bound to emotion, go deep and then they go quiet. Until one day, they begin to speak again. Through pain in the physical body, a loss of vitality, mental or emotional anguish, or a sense of disconnection from the heart and the soul. This episode of Stories provides a space where we can all listen to what the body remembers and to the wisdom it holds. This is why I'm here to explore ways we can bring alignment to our whole self. I'm not doing this work alone. I'm gathering the wisdom of women who understand where trauma lives in the body and how the life flow prana can be restored. Today we begin with the physical body and my conversation with Marcia Ward, a somatic therapist, highly respected healer, and someone I've known and trusted with my body for many years. You're listening to stories. I'm your host, Dillie Quigley. Thanks for being here. All right, so I want to welcome Marcia Ward and Marcia. So um you give me the introduction. I mean, I've known you for, I don't know, like 40 some years now, right now. Yeah, easily. And I knew you as a young dancer, and then you went off to fame and stardom in Europe as a dancer. And I and you were on, thank you very much. You were on one of our my podcasts uh talking about I think it was resistance. Resilience. Resilience, thank you, yeah, which is that yin yang of resistance, right? Right, right, right, resilience. Yeah, that was a good story. And um and so you you returned back and and began to study the body, right, right?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, as I as I returned from this professional ballet career that essentially kind of took me down, my body was not able to sustain more of it. Um and I realized that I had to I had to do something different, and I had an opportunity to have this body work done, this structural integration work done. And it was one of those serendipitous things that just sort of it was a gift to me um from the ballet teacher that I was teaching with, Ida. And I started receiving this work and this tight, deep wrapping that had been um developed over time to accomplish this very structured form of movement, this classical ballet that I had such a passion for um when I was really young, but it it became uh a chain around my whole body. And when I started having this release work done, not only did these all these symptoms start to resolve and ease, and I was able to move more comfortably, but what was more powerful for me was that I started to feel and experience sensations differently. I started the world looked different, my perceptions changed. I went from this very tight, strongly wrapped, structured person to suddenly the world looked a little more easeful, a little more playful. Um, I was able, I went out and I bought clothing that was completely different, and I was drawn to colors differently. And when I did dance, the most interesting thing was that I heard the music differently. So my whole musicality changed as my body started to open up. Well, this was just massively, massively fascinating to me. And I I started to under learn about this field of somatics and somatic education, and that it was a very different world. It was it was allowing the body to do what it does naturally, and that is to express itself, communicate right in this non-verbal way, and to experience this reality. And over the years I've come to believe that we are spiritual beings inhabiting a physical reality, and that the opportunity of this reality is in the very physicality of it, the ability to have a body, the ability to have sensations, for me to look out and see the colors of the greens and the trees and all of that ability to connect with everything. Um it's all part of this physical being, this physical structure that um I realized my personal path was to learn to live that, to learn to embody that experience of being of having a physical body and appreciate it for the opportunity that it is, because I do believe that when this limited lifetime ends, whatever comes next, it's not gonna be this, right? It's gonna be something different, but it won't be this opportunity that we have to feel and sense and experience in this way.
SPEAKER_00:So okay, could I cut can I jump back to this rapping? Yes, okay, I'd like to stay with that for a moment. Um in you know, words can mean so many things to people. And when you say rapping, to me, I imagine, you know, as a dancer, your musculature, your, you know, the the fascia, the all of these, all these almost a shrinkage of all of these internal parts of the body. Go on. Could you elaborate on this rapping idea?
SPEAKER_01:Well, just using my experience of ballet, but I think we do this in everything that we do. But but the the ballet technique is based on a very structured way of moving. And it is something that is not really natural to the body, involving turnout, not to mention being on the tips of the toes in those pink pickles carrying the weight of the body. All of this unnatural, but very beautiful, aesthetically beautiful, um, movement that is a learned style of moving, and that it is learned by watching other people learn move and trying to move the way they do.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, excuse me. So is there any other uh discipline that you have seen that in?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, sure. Like all sports, you know, um gymnastics, um, ice skating, um, you know, football playing. It's it's all based on this muscular use of the body that where the body has to be trained to move a certain way, right? And in this and in so doing, it requires that the body move differently than its original design, right? Because we're trying to create a certain style of movement.
SPEAKER_00:And so the when you work with people, work on people with the somatics, do they have that same experience, that same type of experience that you had?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, most definitely, because the body knows how to move. And obviously, it has this innate programming from the time that we're born that dictates a pattern of learning of how to move with gravity, of how to move with ease. Because a baby doesn't have any muscle, so it has to shift its weight and learn to work with gravity and find these internal connections that are innate, it's natural, it starts from reflexes and then it's learned over time. That's a whole different way of moving, that's how we're designed to move. And then as adults, we start wrapping these alternative ways of moving, and then we have accidents and injuries where the body has to compensate and it wraps some more. So we end up with these layers of compensatory structure that where the tissue actually changes. It densifies, the fascia gets tighter in the areas to try and splint and support areas that we're trying to we're trying to create a movement that is different from this natural flowing movement that we originally are patterned in or I'm sorry, that we are patterned to do naturally.
SPEAKER_00:So what is that? Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. So what does what's the technique you would use? I mean, what are we saying speaking this, but people are on a table, you're working at like a deep muscular massage. Can you explain it?
SPEAKER_01:Well, the the practice that I use is a based on the 10-session work that Ida Rolfe developed originally. And she was the first person to have this um view of the body from the perspective of the connected tissue, the fascia. And this was years before fascia was discovered as it is now, now that we have the ability to look inside of a moving body and we see how these fascia layers are so fluid. But she had this knowledge of how these structures relate to gravity and then support themselves upward in a suspensory way. And so through her research, she developed this work that allows the process of starting with the foundation, reworking the fascia to let it align the way that it's designed originally to align, and then working up through the body and working superficial to D, so that each session helps the body come back to that original alignment and original sense of ease. And there's a fluidity that shows up with that, um, that people really can experience as they as they move through it.
SPEAKER_00:So you know that I work with the the five bodies that you know, the awareness that we have, we are like this onion, these layers, right? One within the other. Okay. And I was thinking about this the other day, and and that's literally a term used to, you know, to kind of describe the bodies as like an onion, the layers of an onion. The other one is the the uh Russian dolls, one within the other, right? But when we I came upon that idea of the the layer of the onion, that's also a metaphor used for healing. That you you start with this healing process and then you go to another layer of healing, and you go to another layer of healing, right? And I thought, well, let's look at that in terms of the five bodies. Is those are those layers of healing really coordinated with the healing of each body in the process? Do you find that that you know that kind of um that happens in this unwrapping of a person's body?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely, absolutely, and what's so fascinating to me is that it is the layers and the sequence with which they unwrap in those five bodies, okay, and everybody tends tends to be unique with each person, so you know my goal is to try and meet the person where they are and to have a sense of you know what part of that of that whole being, because you know, all of these five bodies are this there's a simultaneous right union of expression, right? Right, and so we can break them apart to talk about them, but they're all happening simultaneously, right? On and each layer is influencing all the other layers, so that's the part for me that is the most magical and the most um engaging because it really does require that I be present with the person that's with me in this space, and so with my work, it's not so much about trying to achieve a specific outcome, but all my my goal is to create more balance and more ease within that physical structure, and then it's it's um what shows up most often is rather than a specific result, is that the person becomes more of who they really are underneath those those structural blockages. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it does yes, I think it's fascinating. And and I want to say that the five bodies, so we're talking the physical body, the energy body, mental body, intellectual body, or wisdom body, and then what I call the divine body, but it's also referred to as the bliss body or your soul, that's also there's you know different names for all these. So so people are understanding what we're talking about, and so in the unwrapping and opening, people can literally emerge as if they've been held in this shell, and you just release them.
SPEAKER_01:And and what I hear most consistently is that people say, I feel more like who I am, I feel more like myself, and and and then how that shows up is so different. You know, some people make these radical changes in their lives, they leave relationships, they change jobs, they you know, do all this physical stuff, and then other people have this like creative spurt where it's like they just go with this other level that they knew was there, but they couldn't, you know, it had been subsumed by life, you know. Um and so and then oftentimes there is this connection with whatever their spiritual essence feels like to them, and and I hear this articulated in very different ways, um, but it seems to be that the body what keeps showing up is that the body is like an inroad to these other bodies because the body is the dense matter, it's the densest of all those bodies, right? Yes, and so by by like and I've experienced this they're the container, it's the body is the container, the container, yes, and so in my own life I've really experienced this that if I can and if I go back to the breath, if I go back to these physical sensations of being within my own physical home, then I have it's like the these other areas are so much more accessible.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, right. It came to me actually, because I've been really pondering this a lot lately. I'm gonna be teaching this course soon, and and what arose for me was this idea that the intellectual body is the the witness of the first three, physical, energy, and mental, which are more fragile. Yes, right, they're more fragile and and they're more susceptible to being tarnished by the outer world. So it constantly projecting outwards, and we're affected by the food and the environment and the thoughts and everything. And so there's the intellectual body that's kind of like, okay, let's bring this under control, right? But unless until you hear it, until you listen to it, until you're aware of it, it has no, it has well, maybe we're talking we can call it intuition, but even people don't listen to that. Would you say that? Is that makes sense to you?
SPEAKER_01:That I would definitely say that that makes sense, and that the physical body particularly is vulnerable to these outer influences. But again, in my perception, it seems like because we are in this physical expression, it's it's almost like my imagery is that the body is kind of in the center and that everything is emerging from there and influencing that. It's sort of like the baseline for all of this expression. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, okay. So, how does that show up for you? Now, I mean, after all this time, and you've had work done on you probably repeatedly, right? So, where are you today at this age? Um, and with this knowledge and experience, where are you in this in your physical body?
SPEAKER_01:I am in transition. Yes, because being turning 70, 71, and then 72, um, I am definitely experiencing these, you know, these these changes that are taking place. And I'm um surprised because you know how we all think that, well, I've worked on this for so long that this isn't going to affect me somehow. You know, we have we don't really say that out loud, but we kind of hope that that's the case. Same thing with the wrinkles and all that kind of stuff, right? But um, so I am in an another exploration state. And how how I stay open to that is um to try and stay curious and to be willing to change what has been my some of my patterns. So I notice that I am spending more time on the floor, being with my own body and moving. And I am spending more time um with practices that are bringing me back in. I feel like I'm at the return cycle, you know, uh not so much going out into the world, but coming back in. And so I'm I'm uh engaging in more um uh uh meditative types of practices, but I'm also recognizing that I'm actually needing to become more physical and put more attention to that. So um I mean more like weight lifting and more doing these things that my my body is communicating with me. And so how to do that without rapping, you know, yes, exactly, exactly. And and the I think the thing that I have needed to develop in my life, and I something else that I try and work with with my clients is this notion that the body is always communicating with us, and we stop listening. And those communications, I call it messages from the Department of the Interior, and those communications are happening at all times, and if I can develop that a relationship with that communication, then I'm I know how to shift and change and respond rather than trying to control, you know, I need to control my weight, I need to control my my sleep patterns, I need to, you know, this type of thing. So um for me it's a lot about flexibility and fluidity in terms of what I do as well as how I think as how my energy is expressed, you know, all of those five bodies, it's really important for me to experience that consistency of flow as I get older. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00:It does, and and and it's coming from someone who knows, you know, or has that has a practice that can experience that and listen. But what about people who are listening, you know, to speak that don't have that experience or haven't had any the bod, or you know, what would you suggest for them?
SPEAKER_01:Well, you know, there are wonderful classes, and there's more information coming out about um how less is more, you know, all this heavy-duty exercising stuff is starting to be questioned as more is discovered about the fossil system. We're we're starting to appreciate that, and we know this the body is 70% water, right? It's we're we are we are aquatic at our deepest nature, our deepest parts are aquatic in nature. Our spinal cord swims in cerebrospinal fluids, you know. We we are this hydrating ocean that's taking in and giving out. And so there are there are somatic movement classes and more and more meditative types of training that can help people bring the mindset to this more fluid way of being in the world. Um, that's one piece. Another piece is to experience these different forms of body work that um that allow for the person to experience the body differently, right?
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so would that be uh called soma or rolfing or what particularly?
SPEAKER_01:Well, structural integration is is the umbrella term that refers to rolfing to soma, to loamy loamy, to these various practices that focus on somatic repatterning, structural integration, you know, helping the body come back to what its natural original design. And can someone do that at any age? Absolutely. Absolutely. I've worked with newborns all the way up to, I think my oldest client was 90. No, yeah, 92. So the body can all always benefit from this. And of course, there's some contraindications, but you know, yes, it's definitely appropriate for any age.
SPEAKER_00:So I, you know, I've been in a yoga practitioner for many years, and I know how uh badly yoga can be taught and how badly it can be done. And resulting in much like a dancer, that this rapping begins to occur. Have you have you encountered a number of yogis who um oh yeah, I've had quite a few on my table. Right? You know, and you found that they were suffering from improper training or going too far.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it it tended to be this mindset of having to achieve something and pushing the body and too much repetition, right? Where it's it's even though the organism starts giving cues with pain, right, to say, but we keep pushing through because we have this mental or this idealized uh image of what we should be able to do, what we want to achieve, you know, it's that sort of goal setting thing that gets people in trouble.
SPEAKER_00:But again, that comes back to sports or so many other things. Yeah, anything, and that's the ego trying to achieve and saying I can do it's all about me, right? Right, showing off.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Well, and it's also just a different experience of the body. One, I mean, when I was a dancer, I loved the the level of control. Control is a big thing that I had over the body to be able to on command to do, you know, a triple pirouette or blast through four acts of Swan Lake, or you know, do all of these ridiculous things. But but that's all about that, what you're saying. The ego, the identity is wrapped around that, you know, it's it's who I am and what I can achieve versus this relationship between my mind and my body and my energy, and and the body being able to express that and to be able to move from that um relational way of being within my own self. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, and and do you feel um do you ever feel that moment where you're like I am aligned, I'm in tune with all my bodies, and maybe not thinking, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely, absolutely momentarily, let's see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because there's always somebody that's you know always something, yeah. But even if it's not a total alignment, which I mean that's rare, but but just the um the intention, the intention for moving away from this need to control and to present and to appear, right? And into the state of being with just that change in intent changes everything because the whole organism responds to our intention, right? Our desire. As infants, you know, the baby sees the toy and it wants that toy, and it's just that desire for that toy, the brain, the nervous system, the whole organism kicks into gear to accomplish that desire. It's not a you know, we don't have to think our way through that. We just have to have that clarity of intent. So when I work with people, it's really important I ask them, what do you desire for your body? What is your how do you what how do you interpret where you want to be with your body? What does that look like to you? What does that feel like to you? Because that is going to direct how I work with them and how they experience their own embodiment. Okay. So when I was teaching the structural integration work, I would use the movement work, the Labon Bartanyev movement work that is based around these developmental patterns of how we originally learned to move, how the organism is designed to move. Then I would use that material to teach kinesiology, which is the study of movement. So people would have an embodied experience of how it is we learn to move, right? As they were learning about that in a in a uh classroom type of sitting setting. So the thing that was so fascinating, though, is that I would videotape these students and I would have them walk around the room and just have them notice how they were feeling. And then I would have them go down to the ground, however they wanted to, and come back up and then walk around the room again. And then we would I would turn the video off and we would go down to the ground and we would do, I would teach them this exploratory type of movement that brings us out of working from our muscles and back into working with the breath and tuning into the fluidity of the cells, you know. I mean, it was like all this internal imagery, and and it took me a while to get them to go with me on it, but they would they would do that within a few minutes, and you could see, and this is Emily Conrad Dow was playing with a lot of that, and and then we would start moving these developmental patterns in these really simple ways. And after about a half an hour of this exploration, we would bring it to completion, and I would turn on the video camera, and I would have them stand up, walk around the room, do the same thing, go down to the ground, come back up off the ground, and walk around the room again. And visually, you couldn't miss it. You could not miss the change in the quality of their movement. And then I would ask them, and they would be like, Wow, I can't believe the difference, how much easier it was to get down on the ground and come back up. So, you know, it's like this. What I love about this material is that you're not teaching them something that they don't know. It's like the the body, the organism knows how to do this. This is what's natural to it. It's just that we have to, you know, shift that intention to let it have that voice and let it reset itself back to that original pattern. And that's the power of it. And then you take that into anything else like a yoga practice, then you go into yoga, and and you know, the body is is organizing itself in a more optimal, um uh inn sensitive, yeah, an innate way, the way it's designed to move. So you can't get hurt, you you just won't get hurt doing that, and you won't overdo because you're not muscle it's not about muscle, it's about weight shift and interconnections.
SPEAKER_00:I think the I think the most important thing you just said there is that the body already knows. Yes, you know, the body knows what to eat, the body knows how to move, the body knows how to feel, the body knows how to sleep. Uh I and I I would watch something recently where this woman was explaining, it was so interesting. The body knows how to die, yes, step by step. The body goes through the dying process until you inhale, exhale, and that's it. And it was I and it was really everything, the whole breakdown of it, and I and that I think of everything you know about the five bodies is that it's all there, it's all innate. It knows, and if we just move that ego aside, right, and take the mental, you know, the the negative aspect of the well, the false the artificial programmings that we were from the uh from other people the world, from you have to do it this way, right? There's artificial programmings, that's software, you know, realize that that's what that is, and that we know already what to do, right?
SPEAKER_01:If we listen, if we listen, and that's awareness develop, right? That's what we have to develop is that ability and willingness to listen and then respond to that, the mindfulness, yes, instead of overlaying and teaching something.
SPEAKER_00:Well, you know, that's what it's all about is practice, you know, finding the right discipline for yourself. I should even say discipline, finding the right practice, right?
SPEAKER_01:The the right moment to moment, yeah, the practice of moment to moment.
SPEAKER_00:The practice of moment to moment. There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, okay, okay, all right. And that was Marcia Ward, structural integration therapist, somatic healer, and so brilliantly articulate on the many facets of our physical body. I really love that interview. And you can read more about Marcia on this podcast post on my dealaquigly.substack.com. That's my site, my writings, my podcast. And if you're interested in learning more, I'm teaching on learnitlive.com. That's learnitlive.com, where we'll explore the physical body as the grounding force for your energy, mental wisdom, and divine bodies. Much of what we were talking about on this episode. I'll also be sharing how nutritional needs evolve with age, especially for women, and offer some common sense dietary guidance that supports vitality rather than restricting it. You'll also learn how movement and exercise can be adapted to honor your changing body, shifting from punishment to nourishment, from doing more to moving with intelligence and care. Again, much of what Marcia's covered here in this episode. I really hope you'll join me. You've been listening to stories? I'm your host, Delia Quigley. Until next time,
