How Dance Heals Trauma: Emma Leach on Five Rhythms, Grief & Finding Your Voice

About this episode

Emma Leach discusses how dance and creative expression aid in healing trauma and coping with grief.

Host Dave Roberts welcomes Emma Leach to the Teaching Journeys podcast to discuss how art and movement shape healing and meaning. Leach describes a childhood rooted in theater and visual art amid family instability and bullying, and how creative expression helped her cope. She shares the loss of her first love, Ray, who died of a heroin overdose at 27, and how discovering Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms dance practice became a turning point, leading her to teach the method for 25 years and apply arts-based work with marginalized youth, prisons, and addiction. Leach explains Five Rhythms (flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, stillness) as an energetic “wave” that supports intuition and trauma release. She also outlines her in-progress documentary, Let It Play, centered on Ray’s handmade guitar as a metaphor for grief, hope, and storytelling through musicians and dance. Emma's Bio and Contact Information Emma Leach has spent 35 years listening to bodies. Not as objects to be trained or corrected, but as living texts, fluent in a language older than speech. Movement, for her, is not decoration or performance. It is metaphor in motion. A way meaning arrives before thought has time to…

People in this episode

Host: Dave Roberts

Guest: Emma Leach

Topics covered

• dance therapy
• trauma healing
• creative expression
• grief
• Five Rhythms
• art and movement
• marginalized youth

Keywords

• dance
• trauma
• healing
• Five Rhythms
• grief
• art
• movement
• addiction
• documentary

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms

Books & works: Let It Play

More episodes of The Teaching Journeys Podcast

• Legacy Architect Debbie Simmons: From Quadruplet Loss to Nonprofit CEO and Adoptive Mom of Nine · June 12, 2026 · 46 min
• "I Had to Choose the Day My Husband Died" : Erica Baccus on Love, Dementia & Letting Go · June 10, 2026 · 1h 1m
• Walking in Joy After Tragedy: Carrie Eaton on Child Loss, Near-Death Experiences & Faith · June 8, 2026 · 43 min
• The Walkabout Method: How Claudia Wyatt Turned Tragedy Into Purpose and Transformed Her Life · June 5, 2026 · 51 min
• How to Rebuild Trust After Infidelity: A Betrayal Recovery Expert Explains · June 3, 2026 · 58 min
• Surviving Domestic Violence: How Courage, Curiosity & Connection Lead to Healing · June 1, 2026 · 42 min