About CAMILLA GRIGGERS
Camilla’s toolkit
The holistic toolkit I bring to my clients is a synergy of psycholinguistics including non-violent communication and conflict negotiation, touch-based somatic-emotional and somato-social integration methods, critical thinking about the bigger picture, and even the art of bodystorytelling. I help clients get beneath cover stories to resolve scar tissue, trauma memories, and patterns of attachment to unhealthy bodymindsets that are weaving their destiny unless they assert free will to change them from within. Touching the heart of the matter, we practice empathetic listening (including to your own body and heart), emotional honesty, and learn functional use of the Self and self-care 2.0. In this way, we develop more embodied consciousness, more emotional intelligence and resilience, more social connectedness, and more authentic loving relationships in our lives.
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 in body and mind. We want the body, mind and emotions to come into attunement, because when we live our lives with our eyes and ears wide open, with an open heart and mind, sensing our gut intuition and scar tissue, it’s easier to show up face-to-face in the present moment and land on our feet when life challenges us or we take a leap of faith. Somatic therapies that apply body psychology leverage sensory awareness of the mindbody connection for better self-regulation, emotional resilience and adaptability when it matters most—in a healing crisis or life phase transition or performance of a lifetime.
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 discursive practices, electronic culture and gender studies when I accidentally tripped into a healing crisis that sent me spinning. A conventional dentist 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.
The truth is, I had a doctoral degree and didn’t know how to choose a good systemic dentist or why. I copied my mother and chose a local dentist nearby close to home and work. As if any dentist would do.
Little did I know how much my life had changed in that moment. The drilling sprayed toxic mercury vapor and particulate into my face and I breathed it into my lungs. Soon enough, I was falling down a rabbit hole into a field of symptoms of ill health that culminated in an emergency surgery to remove an ovarian tumor. I was sick.
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 and critical thinking. Hungry for more knowledge about somatic therapies, detox practices and holistic health to heal myself, in 2002 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 my health.
I joined the English faculty at California State University at Channel Islands to teach critical thinking, linguistics and writing, while establishing a private practice in somatic therapy and education in Santa Monica. For four years, I also taught part-time at the Institute for Psycho Structural Balancing in Los Angeles (now the School for Integrative Psycho Structural Bodywork).
One day, as I was driving north up the Pacific Coast Highway to talk to the cognitive minds of university students, and later driving south to touch the bodies of bodywork students, I realized 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. Critical thinking with emotional intelligence grounded in the body—conscious embodiment. 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
As a doctoral student, I learned critical thinking under the direction of Dr. Gregory Ulmer at the University of Florida, founder of the Electronic Literacy Project, who primed my ability to think in radically interdisciplinary ways about the impact of postmodern culture on our bodies and minds. Later, I learned empathetic listening touch with my mentor, Ilana Rubenfeld, known as an innovative trailblazer in the fields 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.
Later, I went on to train with Doug Morrison, author of How We Heal, in Body Electronics and in Vedic meditation instruction and Ayurveda with Dr. Deepak Chopra at the Chopra Center in Carlsbad. Today, I bring my decades of education in both semantics and somatics to the table in my private therapy practice, helping clients integrate mind, body and emotions into one expression of authentic embodiment.