About CAMILLA GRIGGERS

Camilla’s holistic toolkit

I bring to the table a synergy of psycholinguistics, somatics, emotional release work and trauma resolution. Listening with you to your body story, touching and sensing your muscle memory, scar tissue and trauma, together we get beneath cover stories to resolve the root cause of physical, emotional and mental pain and discomfort. Touching the heart of the matter, we listen empathetically, communicate with emotional honesty, and practice functional use of the whole Self—from your gut intuitions, to your heartthrobs, to your runaway, or frozen, legs. The goal at any age is to make functional adjustments in our bodymindset about who we are and where we’re going. About health, about care of the self and care of others in our intimate and social relationships. Everything that matters, by leveraging the mindbody connection using both empathetic listening touch and embodied talk about your bodystory and how you want to write it.

Mapping the body story is where body psychology starts, touching and listening to the body metaphors that tell the truth of what happened and the feeling of what happened in one’s life that is causing stress and separation in body and mind. When we live our lives with our eyes and ears wide open, with an open heart and mind, sensing in our gut intuition and working with our scar tissue, we find it becomes easier to land on our feet when life challenges us or we take a leap of faith into the performance of a lifetime. Somatic therapies use sensory awareness to teach conscious embodiment techniques and leverage the mindbody connection to develop better regulation, resilience and adaptability when it matters most in your life.

My story

My own body story explains how I came to a holistic bodymind approach to education, therapy and bodywork. I was a 30-something professor at Carnegie Mellon University teaching critical theory, discursive practices, and media and gender studies when I accidentally tripped into a healing crisis that changed the direction of my life. I went to a conventional dentist who drilled a mercury amalgam filling I cracked on a popcorn kernel that another conventional dentist had placed in a molar when I was 12 years old.

I had a doctoral degree and didn’t know how to choose a good systemic dentist or why it mattered! I chose a local dentist nearby close to home and work, copying my mother. As if any dentist would do.

Little did I know how much my life would change in that moment. Drilling amalgam fillings sprays toxic mercury vapor and particulate into the face of patients who can breathe it into their lungs if not protected with a nasal oxygen mask and an elephant-nosed vacuum placed next to the mouth. I had none of that. Afterwards was a cascade of symptoms of ill health for years that culminated in an emergency surgery to remove an ovarian tumor. I was sick and had not yet realized I had been mercury poisoned.

Every body has a story

Crossing the mind/body divide

Luckily, instinct, gut intuition and neuroplasticity kicked in. Seemingly suddenly, I started mousing with my left hand and decided to train in neuromuscular bodywork at the Pittsburgh School of Massage Therapy and later in the Rubenfeld Synergy Method® of touch-talk therapy in Toronto. While I was regaining balance, my skills in somatics began to match my cognitive skills in semantics. Hungry for more knowledge about somatic therapies and holistic health, I moved from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles in search of a natural health community of holistic dentists, doctors, naturopaths and cranial-sacral osteopaths to help me remove toxic mercury metal from my mouthbody and recover better overall health.

At California State University at Channel Islands I taught critical thinking, linguistics and writing. In Santa Monica, I established a private practice in somatic therapy. And for four years, I drove further south to teach boundaries, communication and nonviolent conflict negotiation to bodywork students at the Institute for Psycho Structural Balancing in Los Angeles (now the School for Integrative Psycho Structural Bodywork).

One morning, as I was driving north up the Pacific Coast Highway to talk to the cognitive minds of university students, before later driving south to touch the bodies of bodywork students, I realized I what I was doing. I was literally driving back and forth across the mind/body divide! After years of commuting, I finally got it. My mission became integrating somatics (the language of the body) with semantics (the language of the cognitive mind) with sentics (the language of the emotions) all at the same time. I share the how-to in my practice, books and projects.

Publications

You can read my articles on body psychology in culture, education, therapy and bodywork in Semiotica, Somatics, Postmodern Culture, and The Handbook of Body Psychotherapy and Somatic Psychology. I am the author of the books Fast Therapy, Mouthbody Healthcare and Becoming-Woman, creator of the digital artwork Alienations of the Mother Tongue, and co-director of the documentary film Memories of a Forgotten War.

Education & Training

I earned my doctoral degree at the University of Florida in the Critical Theory Program in English. Working with Dr. Gregory Ulmer, founder of the Electronic Literacy Project, I learned to think in radically interdisciplinary ways about the impact of postmodern electronic culture on our bodies and minds. A decade later, I trained in empathetic listening touch with my mentor, Ilana Rubenfeld, known as an innovative trailblazer in the field of somatic education and body psychotherapy. Together Ilana and I coauthored articles on bodymind integration methods for Somatics Journal and The Handbook of Body Psychotherapy and Somatic Psychology. You can learn more about the Rubenfeld Synergy Method® at The Ilana Rubenfeld Foundation. I went on to train in Vedic meditation instruction and Ayurveda with Dr. Deepak Chopra at the Chopra Center in Carlsbad. Today, I bring decades of education and experience in somatic education strategies and practices to private therapy sessions, both remote and in person, helping clients integrate mind, body and emotions into one harmonious expression of conscious embodiment.