Hear Gina’s live interview on KPFK Pacifica Radio for Los Angeles - 90.7FM- on the show called Transforming Consciousness, where she talks about Healing Generational Wounds in The Body.
Click to Hear Part 1 of the interview
Click to Hear Part 2 of the interview
Meet Gina Calderone | Physical Therapist
We had the good fortune of connecting with Gina Calderone and we’ve shared our conversation below.
You can also read ShoutoutLA’s article directly in the following link:
https://shoutoutla.com/meet-gina-calderone-physical-therapist/
Gina Calderone, MPT, physical therapist and founder of the Empowered Health Foundation, has treated hundreds of children, adults, and families with multiple diseases and disorders that are deep-seated in childhood trauma at Centripetal Force Studio® in Southern California over the last 18 years. She detects and heals the emotional and generational roots of pain, injury, disease and disorders that often repeat generation after generation. Her pioneering work with Adverse Childhood Experiences led to inventing Physioenergetic Therapy™, a unique solution that combines intensive investigation of life experiences and physical rehabilitation to restore the autonomic nervous system and biomechanics disrupted by the unresolved trauma and toxic grief stored in the body.
She’s focusing on building a research center that will join together an integrative team practicing an innovative method of physical therapy to reverse the physiological effects of ACEs at the root of skeletal fractures, chronic pain, ADHD, depression, addiction, autoimmune disorders, and more life-threatening diseases such as cancer . This new method, Physioenergetic Therapy, unites physical therapy to rehabilitate the traumatized body with measuring and restoring the energetic frequency of emotion that can be hyperactive or deficient.
The goal of the research center is to establish a central hub for children, adults and families to receive a multi-dimensional approach to treat physical and emotional pain to reenergize health, balance and purpose.
This healing center will serve as a beacon of evidence-based research to power a new future for health care through clinical research, education, and outreach training of healthcare practitioners, school/extracurricular educators, and justice system advocates on the frontlines of childhood trauma recovery.
Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I’m the person people call when they’ve exhausted the traditional healthcare model as well as dabbled in the alternative therapy world with little to no success healing the pain in their body. The initial conversation is typically about how they’ve done physical therapy, seen multiple doctors, tried acupuncture, injections cease to work and they refuse to take pain medication and avoiding surgery. They’re exhausted because they don’t sleep well, gained weight from a lack of exercise and talked to a therapist for years. Unfortunately, they feel like they are falling apart and they are confused why a friend has referred them to another physical therapist.
“She’s different,” they were told.
I explain to them “I am a physical therapist with a twist!” I have a completely different approach to treating pain in the body.
I help people understand the emotional root underlying their physical pain. We go through a person’s life experiences as well as their generational history that has most likely altered the physiology of their body. This is when they tell me that their mother just passed away, they got divorced last year and their dog is sick. These are heavy milestones of grief in life we carry and when we don’t clear it from the body the deep unresolved pain and trauma in the body it stays within us and manifests into physical pain, illness and disease.
For the past eighteen years, I’ve listened to people desperately pleading for a solution or a miracle to get out of their pain. For some, it’s sad because it’s the end of the road. I work with patients who have cancer and I use the same process of uncovering the total body pain. Some people completely turn their lives around with a different perspective, other’s connect with their life’s purpose while most peacefully transition and transcend to the afterlife. The work I do is special, I feel honored and blessed to be a witness during the sunset time of someone’s life.
I’ve spent years conditioning a new generation to find value in understanding your feelings and how to express your emotions in your body while teaching adults the importance of releasing toxic stress from childhood or after a divorce or death of a parent. Spiritual chaos is diagnosis I use often in my practice. When we can center ourselves and plug into the power of our emotions and our body we will find ourselves feeling good and loving our lives. Pain vanishes because it has no reason for it anymore, it doesn’t have to hide in your body any longer. You’re free!
Physical therapists go to school to learn how to treat pain in the body. If you really pay attention to your client they will always tell you what’s troubling them, you just have to listen. I am more than a healthcare professional, I became a healer and we need more healers in the healthcare system.
It’s going to take a major shift in healthcare to incorporate the emotional and physical bodies into academia, hospitals, clinician and medical offices. However, I’m hopeful and believe the younger generations are ready for this transformation and I’m doing everything I can to be on the frontlines of this movement.
Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
There are multiple people to thank for this beautiful journey of helping and servicing humanity. First, I have to thank my husband, Joel. He has worked so hard to support our family while I pursue my passion and dreams. This situation has caused an insurmountable load of stress on my husband, but I know at his core he believes in me and my determination and conviction to put healing in healthcare. Through me he feels he’s doing what he can for the world. It’s a beautiful thing.
I have an intelligent and strong group of woman who help me stay focused on building this dream and others who’ve helped along the way. Roslyn Blake, Jaclyn Munzer, Elissa Ennis, Sara Gonzales, Denise Carson, Rachel Cruz, Dana Frank, Erika Morgan, Maria Ines Llodra and Megan Tagliaferri. I’m grateful for these powerful women, their guidance, love, encouragement and support means everything when you’re walking the road less travelled.
Lastly, I’d like to thank John and Jan Doyle and The Belmont Athletic Club. They welcomed me like family and built me a space in the front window of their health club. I started a cash pay physical therapy business at a time when it was unheard of and with the loving support of the staff…we made it happen. I created a method and a treatment to heal childhood trauma and adverse childhood experiences stuck in the physical body.
I’m forever grateful and excited to integrate my method into the western medical model one day. To teach up and coming healthcare professionals how to recognize emotions through other’s life experiences and how they can empower their clients and patients to thrive in life.
Conversations with the Inspiring Gina Calderone
Today we’d like to introduce you to Gina Calderone.
Gina, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
More than 15 years ago, I started in traditional physical therapy primarily treating a high volume of patients with musculoskeletal pain in a busy orthopedic clinic. Early on, I recognized that the feelings of pain experienced by my patients outweighed the diagnosis. When I used massage and hands-on soft-tissue mobilization to unravel their tense muscles, stories of unresolved trauma and grief came up. Their body stories showed me, people in physical pain are in emotional pain. They also guided me to the understanding that people craved good touch and connection. At the time, I was teaching Pilates privately outside of the clinic. I noticed how people were more invested in taking the time to do the work to restore their bodies instead of this fix-me attitude pervasive in the clinic. I sensed unearthing emotional pain in the body would require a different atmosphere, attitude and touch. Time to listen to my patients was vital. I decided to start a cash-pay physical therapy practice, Centripetal Force Studio, inside a private health club. People with chronic pain kept walking through my door. They had been through the merry-go-round of failed pain medications, pain management procedures, and surgeries. Together, we unraveled the emotional root of physical pain in their bodies. They, like me, were intrigued with how their memories of trauma invaded the muscles and joints with constant signals of threat that activated the body to tighten inward in a closed-fetal stance and movements to protect itself. I realized the time had come to go beyond the musculoskeletal pain. I delved into the emotional system of the body—energy anatomy and energy medicine that involves hands-on treatment to balance heighten or depleted frequencies and patterns of pain and disease in the body. I hung up my white coat and dove into becoming the body detective healing puzzling pain that has now led me into diagnoses such as cancer and addiction. The key is finding the emotional and generational root, the invisible wound.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome? Any advice for other women, particularly young women who are just starting their journey?
No, it hasn’t been a smooth road at all. There were sacrifices, I strained my marriage by investing so much time and money in this business because I believed I was getting to the root of people’s pain. My husband saw it too, but he continued to work hard to provide for our family while I continued to run my studio that became my research lab. With this newfound knowledge of the body, I couldn’t go back to being a traditional PT. I would’ve lost my soul. I had to keep investigating chronic pain and how to get people out of it. The challenges at the beginning of my practice were that people didn’t understand why they would pay cash for physical therapy when they had insurance benefits. Word on the street was I could get them out of pain, but they would have to pay out of pocket. It’s a mindset we have to crush because we are stuck in an outdated healthcare model that focuses on numbing the symptoms of the pain while ignoring how emotional life experiences are affecting the body. Patients would see the traditional PT and still come back to see me. That back and forth changed when I would uncover the emotional root and implement energy therapy. At the time, I had no idea I was creating my own lane of healthcare. I was just subjectively listening to my patients and allowing them the space to process the emotions through their body while reconnecting back to the core of who they are physically and spiritually.
My advice to young women starting a career in the healing arts is to take the time and do your healing work first. Dig into your shadows and find your hurts. When you are able to heal your pain, it’s much easier to connect with others from a place of empathy and hold the space for people to heal. Secondly, don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions, ask if anyone has ever hurt them or their body and if they reflexively say “no”, ask again. Use your gut instincts to connect with others, if you feel “foul-play” in their body and energy field, hold the intention, confidence for the healing to transpire while also having the patience for it to surface. It’s pure magic.
What should we know about Centripetal Force Studio? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
I specialize in chronic pain, ADD, autism, addiction, and cancer. I treat them as energetic disorders – hyperactive or deficient patterns or frequencies in the communication system of the body. These diagnoses are physical but there is an emotional and generational root. Once the root is found, I reconnect the core and rebuild the body using Pilates and Gyrotonic methods. I welcome complex and mystery patient cases. I don’t believe in pain management, I deeply feel we are all meant to heal in this lifetime. Our body will expose what our mind can’t process and it builds patterns originated from negative emotions and energy, which manifest into accidents, physical symptoms, pain, illness, and disease. Many of these patterns, I observed, are in the bloodlines and behaviors are learned causing many of the same diagnoses in our children and the generations after. If we choose to numb instead of healing our pain, it’s passed on to our children and they are responsible for sifting back through the generational lines to investigate the legacy of traumas and hurts.
I’m proud that I pioneered a path for people to heal using Physical + Energetic Therapy. My body can rest now knowing that people have a place to go and heal after their bodies have been sexually violated, neglected, physically and emotionally abused. There is a place and team of people who believe children with autism are our emotional compasses, the child with ADD is actually the shock absorber of the family and most of all that we can heal cancer and addiction when we eliminate the “fix-me” mentality and instead focus on the work to transform the body in crisis for not just the patient, but the entire family and their home. You cannot heal in the house where you became sick. It’s the only way we will connect again, repair our homes, build our communities and elevate our world.
What do you feel are the biggest barriers today to female leadership, in your industry or generally?
I believe the biggest barrier is women coming forward in healthcare leadership roles using their feminine energy to open up the conversation about how vital it is for healthcare practitioners to use their instincts and ask the hard questions about someone’s life when they are suffering in pain and nothing else is working. Women in leadership need to bring their hearts into the game and love hard. People need more than medicine, they need love and it’s tough to give love without some hard ass trying to stomp it.
I do believe women are on their way to leading this Healership. Our nation is in a great deal of pain and we need love. The mother wound is at an all-time high and we are starving for loving touch we can trust.