Since the age of 10, Erin May has been helping people.

“My mom would come home from a nursing shift and ask me to rub her back and legs,” she says. “I found that my hands would heat up and I could easily find the tight areas and relieve her pain. I told myself then that I would like to train my hands to help others.”

At the age of 12 her brother and grandfather died in separate motor vehicle accidents just two weeks apart.

“I saw the devastating effects of trauma on my family,” she recalls. Her father was diagnosed with cancer and her mother with MS after those losses.

“Right then the mind-body connection was obvious to me,” Erin says, of what has been a 40-year journey of researching, learning and implementing her mission to help others.

“From what I have seen and experienced, most illnesses are stress- and life-related, not just random occurrences,” Erin states. “When we can identify the contributing factors, then real change and healing can happen.”

Erin attended Lakehead University for a B.A.in Biology and Psychology. After graduating from The Guild for Structural Integration in Boulder, Colo., she returned to her hometown of Thunder Bay to open The Bodymind Centre in 1995. Over the last 25 years, The BMC has grown into a multi-disciplinary wellness centre that offers a variety of yoga and pilates classes, RMT massage, Reiki, Craniosacral Therapy, Structural Integration and meditation.

“We have a spectacular team of 30 instructors, practitioners and staff who care deeply about our clients and deliver great classes, treatments and service,” Erin says.

In 2003, The BMC expanded to three studios offering hot yoga, pilates mat and reformer, and a retail boutique featuring lululemon and Ivivva apparel, and organic skin care.

Erin’s current passion is the Vagal nervous system. She has developed a special, easy protocol that helps people relax, ease anxiety and reduce inflammation by turning the healing switch on. She believes the power to heal is within all of us. It’s just a matter of how to access that ability.

“People for the most part do not know that healing is up to them,” she says. “The ability is within, waiting for us to find it and activate it.”