We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Elizabeth Woods-Darby a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Elizabeth, thanks for joining us today. Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?

Ohh, what a great question, thank you! Yes, I actually have a two moments that feel relevant.
It was deep in 2020 and I was elbow deep in our toilet bowl. Literally. Pink, plastic gloves up to my elbows and a scrubby brush in my hand. My son was just a few months old at the time and he was sleeping. I had my headphones on and I was listening to the podcast Poetry Unbound.
Up till then, I’d been writing these little sketches of poems, in the snatches of time I got between feedings and naps and trying to catch up on laundry. Trying to capture the taste of that tender, early motherhood, the achingly sweet rightness of my son falling asleep on my chest, while I ached with such profoundly broken loneliness. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if I’d see my own reflection in the mirror when I opened the bathroom door in the morning. It was intense.
Okay, so the poem Pádraig Ó Tuama was covering that episode was One Tree by Philip Metres. It’s about a tree that shades two yards and the conflict between the neighbors over it. One wants to keep it, the other says it shades their vegetable garden.
Before I knew it, my hands had gone still in my rubber gloved scrubbing and tears were streaming silently down my face.
Something about that poem; so simple, elevating this one small human conflict into this accessible thing of beauty. It broke me, wide open, in the best way.
That was the moment I knew: what I’d began writing in those stolen stretches of darkness in the bathroom alone, was actually something that deserved being seen in the light. It was like something gripped my heart with this hot, strong, courageous fist and I knew that I had to try to make this raw, beautiful, transformative and unflinchingly invisible life, visible. So that was the moment I knew I wasn’t just trying to put myself on the page, I was writing a book. A multimedia book of poetry about becoming a mother in 2020. The working title is My Body of Windows.

Okay, so, defining moment number two: this past year I started my own Somatic Coaching & Soul Tending practice.
The moment I’m thinking of was this past February.

I was on the phone with my dear friend, who was also in the throws of starting her own private practice. I was sitting on the window seat in my office/studio/sons’s playroom and watching the snow gust around the maple tree we’d planted the summer before in our front yard. That little tree just stood there, as the wind gusted around its empty branches, tweaking at the dead looking twigs and making the snow dance. My friend, Zoe, who I’d graduated with from our Somatic Practioner Training in 2022 asked me where I was in landing on a name for my new coaching practice.

It just started pouring out of me while I looked at that little dried up twig tree in the snow. “It’s called Victory in the Roots”, I told her. “Because I believe our victories, they aren’t just alive in the big blooming branches of our lives. The big jobs and high profile projects, the accolades and relationships and fat salaries don’t hang in the wind like ribbons, without first living as sap in the deep warm depths of the roots of ourselves. That’s where we find and tend and love our purposes into being. And my practice is for exactly that.”

And so my coaching practice was born. “Victory in the Roots: Somatic Coaching and Soul Tending.“

I freaking love this work so much. The tools my training has given me, help me guide my clients back to their own well of knowing, giving us tools to interpret and partner with the deep wisdom of our own bodies and influencing our brain chemistry along the way. It’s fascinating, revolutionary and deeply accessible work. I absolutely love it.
I use it daily, but it’s hard to really describe how gratifying it is to sit with my clients and just be able to offer these tools that I know work, and watch them get back in touch with their own bodies innate knowing. I feel so lucky to have found this work and to be able to share it.

Elizabeth, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Oh, of course! My name is Elizabeth Woods-Darby. My friends joke that my tag line is “Never Just One Thing”, which is, well, very true. I’m a mom, a somatic coach, a many-media storyteller and a poet and the founder of Victory in the Roots, which is a somatic coaching and soul tending practice.

In my coaching practice I specifically work with folks who yearn for a life their soul wants to be living.
This is vital for so many folks, whether it’s channeling a new art project or book, navigating a career change or calling in your life partner, I love supporting folks in this deep work. Keep your eyes out on my website for a course this late fall for “Calling In The One,” if you or someone you know might be ready to dive into the tender and deep work of calling in real, deep, joyful, lasting partnership LOVE.
I also co-host ReWilding retreats in the mountains with SolVida Psychotherapy out of Boulder and I’ll be co-teaching an entry level course to the somatic work of The Evolutionary Power Institute, in Denver with Embodied Radiance founder Kathleen Shea this fall. I received my Somatic Practioner Certification through The Evolutionary Power Institute which is based in Boulder.

As an artist, a poet and a mom, I’m always trying to make a little more room for beauty in the world. For big feelings, for sitting in the stillness, for not rushing through this fragile and vibrant life. I pull on my wide background in the arts: film, acting, photography, writing, fine art, public speaking and performance. These days I’m channeling these into working on my multi-media book of poetry (and possible live show) about becoming a mother in 2020. It’s called My Body of Windows.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Woof. The thing I’m really trying to break myself of the habit of –and this is ongoing, so it’s not like I’m at the top of the mountain yet or anything– but it’s apologizing for taking up space and time. I actually had to give myself a couple pep talks while we’ve been doing this interview. It just always shows up, this pressure to be smaller, more compact, especially as a woman and artist with a hyphenated job description, and specifically as a mother I feel the obligation to apologize for taking up space all the time. It’s something I’m continually leaning into, somedays are better than others but I’m doing my best to remember what I tell my clients.
“You deserve to be here, to be held in all of your multifaceted glory and your deep feeling self. We are, here, alive. This is the miracle. You are the miracle. Let’s not miss it.”

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I feel like the words, “motherhood” and “pandemic” let alone, “artist” are synonymous with the word “resilience.”

I thought I was brave before becoming a mom, in the pandemic. But it was just a kind of strength training.

I gave birth to my son after 41 hours in labor in late May 2020. My husband was thankfully allowed to be in the midwife’s delivery room and he was there when our son was finally born and laid on my chest.
What we didn’t know was that the 5 hours of pushing in an awkward position had damaged the nerves in my legs and it would be three months before I could walk normally again, and a full year before the numbness in my feet would really recede.
Nothing prepared me for the grit I needed to get through that first year. I was the front line over and over again for my son, for my family, and with quarantine practices I didn’t have anyone to call for help when I was bone tired and desperate for rest.
My husband works for a local Denver startup, and in the first four months of my son’s life, he was pulling 13 hour days, 6, sometimes 7, days a week. Quarantined from our families, I was home alone with my tiny son, teaching myself how to walk again, trying to figure out how to be a mother, how to breastfeed, how to sleep, how to reckon with the sweetness of my newborn and the world burning down outside my door.

I know this may not seem related to what I do as a coach, or as an artist, but if I know anything it’s that all of our lives are connected to all the other parts of ourselves.
I cannot go anywhere without my mother self, even if I leave the diaper bag at home. Just as I never can leave my artist self at home, when I go for a walk with the baby in the stroller.

The grit and resiliency that I know I am capable of, in showing up again and again and again in my humanness, after missed naps and two hours of driving around in the middle of the night trying to get my son to sleep. It sits with me when it’s 3am and I’m giving a voice to myself by typing out the skeleton of a poem in the dark of the bathroom, bleary and sleep deprived, but, inspired.

All of this, joins my capacity for the space I can hold for a client or for the curriculum material we create for one of our retreats. We cannot partition ourselves away from ourselves. This I know. This is not a shortcoming. This is a gift.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.victoryintheroots.com/
• Instagram: @barefootinthefog

Image Credits
Teya Rose Media, Elizabeth Woods-Darby