About CAMILLA GRIGGERS
My holistic toolkit
I bring to the table with clients a multidisciplinary synergy of somatic psychology, psycholinguistics, emotional release work and trauma resolution. Together, we listen to your body story and touch, sense and feel your muscle memory, scar tissue and trauma to get beneath cover stories and 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—integrating your gut intuitions, embodied memories of the past and visions for a future worth living. My goal working with clients at any age is to leverage the mindbody connection to help you make functional adjustments in your bodymindset about health, self-care and intimate relationship—everything that really matters when it’s time to find your way home to your Core Self.
Mapping your body story is where body psychology starts. I teach clients to use touch to listen to the body metaphors that tell the truth of what happened and the feeling of what happened to them that is causing stress, discomfort and dysfunction. Only by identifying needs and getting them met can we live our lives free of psychic and physical pain. I use somatic therapies including sensory awareness, Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method and the Listening Hand technique of the Rubenfeld Synergy Method to teach conscious embodiment practices to clients of all ages. The result is better regulation, resilience and adaptability.
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 cultural theory, discursive practices, and media and gender studies when I accidentally tripped into a healing crisis that changed everything. 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.
Little did I know how much my life had changed in that moment. Drilling amalgam fillings in teeth 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, dental dam and elephant-nosed vacuum placed next to the mouth. I had none of these protections used by good oral-systemic dentists. As a result, I soon began to suffer a cascade of symptoms of ill health that culminated in a trip to the emergency room and a surgery to remove an ovarian tumor.
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.