Today we’d like to introduce you to Nancy Parker.
Hi Nancy, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
It started with my own body falling apart, honestly.
I was in my twenties, working in gyms and physical therapy clinics, and I kept getting hurt. I’d have pain with no clear cause, & health issues that were nothing western medicine could explain. So I went looking. I studied everything I could get my hands on: postural therapy, corrective exercise, functional nutrition & health. I ended up working alongside people like Paul Chek and Dr. Daniel Kalish, and eventually became Head of Therapeutic Exercise and Wellness Coach at Rancho La Puerta Spa.
That work taught me how to “fix” a body, but I kept running into the same walls. I could get someone pain-free, aligned, strong… and as we solved those issues the deeper ones would emerge. They’d sit across from me and say, “Something is still not quite right.” Or “I still feel off, dull. Something’s still missing.”
That sent me down a different road entirely. I started studying the nervous system, energy medicine, Reiki, tantric, taoist, and somatic healing practices, anything that could explain why a “fixed” body could still feel shut down. That question is really what InBody Wisdom grew out of starting back in 2010. A few years later I founded Ecstatic Dance San Diego, because I felt people needed sober spaces where people felt permission to move, to feel, to connect, with no choreography, no performing, just allowing space for our bodies to move through to the truth.
Over 25 years and 30,000+ people later, my work has landed somewhere very specific: high functioning, highly sensitive women (HSP’s) who look fine on the outside. They are often successful, capable, holding it all together, but feel shut down inside, especially in their intimacy and their aliveness. These are not women who need more information. Most of them have already read the books and tried the willpower route. What they need is embodied permission, in a container held enough to actually let go and reconnect to self in.
This is the work now. Through The Feminine Reset ™, is often someone’s first taste of what it feels like to come back into their body, and Energy Mastery for Sensitive Women, a deeper program for women ready to rebuild their relationship to pleasure, boundaries, and power from the inside out. Both of these offer different entry points, to the same root: helping a woman come home to herself and open up to deeper intimacy without losing herself.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Not even close, and that’s exactly why I do this work.
Long before I had words for it, I was a kid who learned how to disconnect from my body to get through things. I dealt with chronic health issues that landed me in the hospital many, many times. When your body is constantly fighting itself you learn to cope, to brace, to numb. It’s strange yet ultimately empowering as an adult to realize that a survival skill you built as a sick kid could be quietly running the show decades later.
In my early twenties, as I was building a career teaching people how to be strong and healthy in their bodies, I had what I called my quarter-century life crisis. (I was always an overachiever, ahead of the game, lol.) My adrenals were spent, my digestive system broke down, all with no real answers from western medicine. I spent years feeling wrecked and exhausted. But along the way I became my own case study – researching, experimenting, & ultimately healing myself from the inside out, before I ever dared to coach others through it.
I was still working through my own patterns of disconnection, overwhelm and checking out when things got too vulnerable or too close, though. I could help a client eliminate years of chronic pain and still go home and not fully see my own deeper patterns of disconnection. That gap was humbling, and it’s ultimately what pushed me deeper, into nervous system work, energy medicine, and the somatic and tantric practices that became the walls and roof of the foundational work I had been offering, and is what I teach now.
The road hasn’t been a straight line. It’s been more like a spiral, going back to the same core wound at deeper layers, each time with more capacity to stay present with it. I don’t think that road ever fully ends. I often say, “As long as we are alive, we still have growing to do”. But it’s exactly why I can sit across from a woman who feels overwhelmed, lost, disconnected from herself while taking care of everything else, and say, with complete confidence, “I know the way back. I’ve walked it myself.”
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
At the core, I help high-functioning, highly sensitive women deepen their connection to health and pleasure in their bodies and relationships, specifically around intimacy, feminine power, and radiance.
The women who find me are usually high-functioning and outwardly “fine”. They are successful, capable, & holding everything together. But underneath, they are quietly exhausted. They’ve learned to disappear a little in every relationship, giving so much of themselves that there’s nothing left for their own pleasure, their own desire, their own aliveness. They know how to achieve. They don’t always know how to soften, surrender, or receive without sacrificing themselves.
What that actually looks like: learning to stay centered in yourself while connecting to others. Clarifying boundaries. Resourcing your energy so you’re not left depleted after every interaction. Learning to stay in your own feelings, needs, and desires with someone, instead of losing yourself to keep the peace or caretake theirs. And having the actual skills to communicate that, so the answer is never isolating or going it alone. You get to have deeply fulfilling relationships without abandoning yourself to do so.
I teach this through a few offerings. The Feminine Reset ™ is a 90 min embodied ritual, & offers a dip into of what it feels like to center in yourself, your body, mind, spirit & heart. From there, women often move into Energy Mastery for Sensitive Women, a deeper container where we work with Ecstatic Self Care practices in an intimate group of women, to rebuild that felt sense of boundaries, resourcing, and pleasure from the inside out. And for women ready to go further, in a more personalized setting, I offer one-on-one coaching.
What sets me apart is that this isn’t information-based work. Most women who come to me have already read the books & tried the “push through it” or “figure it out on my own” route. That doesn’t change a nervous system, experience does, co regulation does, in a container held clearly & compassionately enough to actually let someone open, feel and reconnect. That’s what I’ve spent over 25 years learning to build.
I’m proudest of the women who come back and say they can finally own their needs and desires, ask for what they want & stay open to receive it, without disappearing or over efforting to do so. Staying strong, soft & open. That’s the whole game!
What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
That connection to others can never come before connection to yourself.
For most of my life, I had it backwards. I thought love and belonging meant making myself smaller, quieter, easier. Reading the room and adjusting before anyone even had to ask. It worked, in the sense that people loved being around me, of course! But I wasn’t actually there. I was managing everyone else’s experience instead of having my own.
The lesson, the one I keep re-learning at deeper layers, is that real intimacy requires you to stay – to stay in your own body, your own feelings, your own wants, even (& especially) while you’re close to someone else. Not instead of connection. Alongside it. You don’t have to choose between being open to another person and being true to yourself. That’s actually the whole skill: staying soft and staying sovereign, at the same time.
It sounds simple, yet it is not always simple to do. But it’s the difference between relationships that quietly drain you and relationships that actually feed you. And it’s the exact thing I now spend my life teaching other women how to do.
Pricing:
- Feminine Reset $44
- Energy Mastery for Women $888
- 1 on 1 Coaching by Design
Contact Info:
- Website: https://inbodywisdom.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nancyparkerembodiment/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancy-parker-embodiment/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3B5eMuhGt2pIJ1h2VplJSFtY9Xu6lg_c
