Instagram story viewer> @ericajuliee> Posts

Erica Miles | Somatic & Spiritual Integration

@ericajuliee

1.7K

followers

2477

following

Moving wisdom into the nervous system
Former Fortune 100 Marketer
Somatic Regulation -Pattern Transformation -Community
1:1 • workshops • writing ↓

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Download All

An important part of doing the work: learning to take ourselves a whole lot less seriously!

Making room for play, dance, joy, laughter, and all the ridiculous parts of ourselves is just as much a part of the journey as the deeper inner work

The more we come home to ourselves, the less we need to worry about how we’re being perceived. It’s incredibly freeing letting ourselves be seen in all our different forms - the best medicine!

Apparently for me, that means dancing my way through NYC on whatever this musical contraption is while strangers stop to stare, point, laugh, and take pictures 💫 by @ericajuliee

39

4

2 days ago

I thought the measure of an experience like Burning Man would be how I felt while I was there

I’m learning a more interesting measure is what I do with it once I’m home

I wrote before I went that I wanted to make Burning Man a “high risk playground.” I had no idea how literally that would play out

Some of it sucked. Some of it was magical. And apparently I’m still figuring out what all of it did to me..

More on that soon…

Update: I wrote the whole story. “Phoenix” is now live on my Substack. Link in bio ❤️ by @ericajuliee

547

44

23 days ago

Dear Erica,

I will be here. This year you carried yourself through what you once thought could break you, held your own hand through the darkness, and kept walking until you found the light

I’m sorry for all the times you mistook protecting yourself for intuition, wrote stories before you had all the information, or acted from fear during moments you didn’t realize your own power to trust in the unknown

I forgive you for learning to read a room before learning to rest inside one. For all the times you left before you could be left and for hardening in moments you wanted to be held. I forgive you for the times your attempts to protect yourself caused pain - to yourself and to others

I’m proud of you for having the courage to look at yourself honestly without turning away. For choosing curiosity when certainty felt safer, vulnerability when armor felt easier, and walking toward the places in yourself you once would have run from

You were never meant to be only light. You are the darkness too. Pain and pleasure. Tenderness and fire. Grief and ecstasy. Yes, you have broken and you keep discovering that breaking open only makes room for more

Every time you’ve walked toward what you once wanted to run from, you’ve been met with more freedom and oh so much joy on the other side ✨

I love you! by @ericajuliee

24

4

a month ago

We’re in the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a time in the Jewish calendar devoted to looking inward, taking accountability and asking for forgiveness

Were essentially cleansing, looking at where we’ve caused harm, where we’re holding judgment, anger, shame or resentment, and what needs to shift so we can receive more of the blessings available to us in the year ahead

For a long time, forgiveness was REALLY hard for me. Partly because I had a completely skewed definition of what it meant

I associated needing to forgive with things that didn’t seem authentic to me

Then I learned a definition that changed everything:

Forgiveness is letting go of the wish that the past had been different

It doesn’t mean pretending something didn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean abandoning boundaries or accountability.

If I hurt someone, I can own what I did, repair what I can and choose differently. If someone hurt me, I can understand their humanity without pretending it didn’t happen

And the same applies to forgiving ourselves.

We all have patterns and blind spots. We’ve all done things from less conscious versions of ourselves that we might do differently now

Radical accountability asks us to look at that honestly. Forgiveness asks us not to live there forever.

Replacing an even spiritual question “Why did this happen?” with a more spiritual one “What was this here to show me?” is the best way to cleanse

Even an experience I never would have chosen can reveal something, teach me something or ask me to expand more

And that’s how we stop wishing the past were different. As Steven Levine says “We can throw someone out of our house but don’t throw them out of our hearts” most importantly ourselves 🥰

Shana Tova 🍎🍯 by @ericajuliee

62

12

a month ago

First Burn observations from someone who doesn’t do drugs, loves sleep, and can’t ride a bike 😂

Some of it was incredible. Some of it sucked.

Would I go back?

Yeah.

Eventually😂 by @ericajuliee

146

43

a month ago

Whether you’re Jewish or not, the gates are open to every individual right now and you will get a million times more support now than ever before. It’s a powerful time to stop and ask:

What am I ready to change?

We’re currently in the first day of Rosh Hashanah. Tomorrow night Rosh Hashanah ends, but the work doesn’t.

From here, we move into the days of leading to Yom Kippur — a period of reflection, transformation and clearing before Yom Kippur brings an even deeper reset.

Rosh Hashanah is considered a time when “the gates are open” — when we’re given extra support to transform our consciousness and plant different seeds for what we want to create

What patterns am I still repeating?
What qualities do I want to embody more of?
Where am I reacting instead of choosing?
What am I judging?
What do I consciously desire while subconsciously believing it might be unsafe to receive?

And as we move toward Yom Kippur, the work shifts toward what we’re ready to clear and release — judgment, limitations, old vows, and the belief that our fulfillment has to come from something outside of us.

I’ve been doing my own prep this week and somehow my notes turned into a 9-page Rosh Hashanah + Yom Kippur Kabbalistic prep guide 😂

If you want it, comment PREP and I’ll send it to you ❤️🍎🍯

And if you already got it from my Stories, tell me what’s resonating most.

Shana Tova ❤️ by @ericajuliee

23

4

a month ago

For years, Burning Man sounded like my personal nightmare.

I don’t do any substances. I love sleeping. I don’t even know how to ride a bike😂

For a long time, all I pictured was a bunch of weird people doing drugs in the desert

Then I became friends with people who actually went so I went to all the pre Burn parties and post Burn integrations, just never to the main event. I heard story after story, and slowly realized… this is not what I thought it was.

So this year, after somehow helping create an event for 5,000 people on playa before ever setting foot there, I finally went.

And Burning Man was… everything. I don’t mean “everything” in the BEST WEEK OF MY LIFE 🤯❤️‍🔥 instagram caption sense

Literally everything.

Beautiful and fucking miserable. Expansive and exhausting. Communal and lonely. Playful and confronting. Magical and wildly inconvenient.

There were moments I understood why people come back year after year, and others when I couldn’t understand why any sane person would pay thousands of dollars to do this to themselves. 😂

I was hot. I was freezing. I got caught in dust storms and mud. Things broke. I cried. I laughed. I danced. Strangers went wildly out of their way to help me, and I found myself doing the same

On my first hard day, I wrote a poem asking:

“What if I treat this experience as a high risk playground?”

I had no idea how literally the playa would answer me.

Burning Man became a playground on steroids for so much of what I’ve been working on: self-reliance, receiving help, vulnerability, trust, control, surrender, and anticipating what could go wrong instead of trusting myself to handle what does.

What’s hard to explain is how something can be so uncomfortable and so beautiful at the same time.

And I don’t mean the hard parts are secretly amazing. Some of it fucking sucks. 😂

One of the biggest things Burning Man showed me is that I have far less control over what happens around me than I’d like. But I know my mind has an insane amount of power over my experience of it.

The playa gives you a concentrated classroom to see who you become when all comforts are stripped away by @ericajuliee

154

34

a month ago

Most special shabbat candle lighting on the playa

#shabbat #jew #jewish #candle #burningman taken in Burning Man by @ericajuliee

16k

2k

a month ago

This was the one event I went into Burning Man knowing I had to go to

Everything else I left to chance

And I almost missed it if it wasn’t for running into @spivak at a Hebrew וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ art piece when he told me he was on his way to Shabbat

Then they surprised us with a wedding and chuppah

If you ever go to Burning Man don’t miss out on Shabbat on the Playa

#jewish #jew #shabbat #burningman #playa taken in Burning Man by @ericajuliee

12k

557

a month ago

We all congregated for Shabbat and then right before they surprised us with a fully Jewish wedding…chuppah and all!

Shout out to @blackrockcityshabbat for organizing this!

#jewish #jew #burningman #burningman2026 taken in Burning Man by @ericajuliee

18k

672

a month ago

I’ve been thinking a lot about how easily we use the word “misunderstanding” as an ending

Someone says or does something. We interpret it a certain way. Maybe we feel rejected, disrespected, excluded, controlled, taken advantage of — whatever it is. Our mind fills in the blanks, our body responds accordingly, and suddenly we’re reacting to an entire reality we’ve constructed

Then we get more information and realize: Oh. That’s not what they meant

Just a misunderstanding

And externally? Maybe it was

But internally, that’s exactly where the interesting part begins

Because why did my mind fill in the blank that way?

Why was that the story it reached for?

What old experience, belief, fear, protection, pattern or identity made that interpretation feel so immediately true that my body began responding as though it were reality?

I genuinely can’t think of a therapist, teacher or coach I’ve worked with who, after discovering I’d misinterpreted someone’s intentions, has said: “Oh! Just a misunderstanding. Nothing to look at here.”

It’s usually the opposite.

There’s the material.

Every reaction does not need to be pathologized or endlessly analyzed. Sometimes a misunderstanding really is just a misunderstanding.

But when something activates us — especially when it activates us strongly — dismissing the whole experience once we learn the external truth can mean missing what the internal experience was trying to show us

Today I got to see one of my own stories dissolve in real time

And instead of just feeling relieved that I’d misunderstood, I got curious about the version of reality my mind had created before I had all the information

That curiosity feels like freedom

Every time I can see a story as a story, I have a little more choice about whether I keep living inside it

And a little more of me becomes available for what’s actually here by @ericajuliee

30

5

2 months ago

Next Friday night, BRC Shabbat returns to Deep Playa for our 18th year. ❤️‍🔥

Join us at @thegothicfolly for live music, choir, ceremony, and a night of dancing with the @edenartcar, David Block, Saar Harari & Captain Hook Gaga Experience.

🗓 Friday, September 4
📍 Gothic Folly · 11:30 Deep Playa
🕡 Starting at 6:30 PM

People of all faiths (and no faith) welcome! by @ericajuliee

824

30

2 months ago