Sybil Meyer is a psychotherapist, dancer, artist, and wilderness quest guide.  She designed an independent major on the roots of creativity in playfulness for her BA degree at University of California in Santa Cruz, and earned a Masters degree in Creative Arts Therapy at the University of San Francisco. She has extensive experience in a variety of art processes including drawing and painting, film and video production, writing, clowning, photography, puppetry, fabric art, yoga and movement.  The art works on this website are original works by Sybil.

Sybil’s background in movement and performance art includes both choreographed and improvised performances of modern dance, contact improv, aerial dance, dancing on stilts, folk dancing, and sacred dance. She has studied Motion improvisational theater with Nina Wise; Authentic Movement  with Joan Chodorow and Lysa Castro; sacred and creative movement with Arisika Razak; Motivity (Improvisational Dance with Trapeze) with Terry Sendgraff; Contact Improvisation with Nita Little, Amy Pine, and Thais Masur; Release Technique with Ellen Webb; and Modern Dance with Joanna Gewertz and Ruth Pearson.

Sybil began her career in mental health as a dance/movement therapist, later obtaining her license in Marriage and Family Therapy. She has combined working in public mental health with a private practice doing psychotherapy and expressive arts therapy for the last thirty years.  This mix of settings and involvement with diverse communities has been important in the development of her philosophy.  For ten years she was program director of the Berkeley Creative Living Center, a day treatment program featuring expressive arts therapies. There she supervised graduate students and interns in training to enter the field of psychology.  She also volunteered as an intern supervisor at Pacific Center in Berkeley for several years.

Sybil trained as a Vision Quest Guide with Wilderness Rites and has led vision fasts sponsored by Rites of Passage.  Questing has shown her that our individual wholeness is connected to the life of the planet, and that nature is our best teacher.

Publications by Sybil Meyer

“Out of the Office and Onto the Land”
a web journal-- Circles on the Mountain, 2007:
http://www.circlesonthemountain.org

“A Supervision Case Study in a Public Mental Health Setting”,
The California Therapist, CAMFT, July/August issue, 2001.

“Writing About the Vision Quest is a Way to Hold On”
Notes at the Stonepile, Wilderness Rites Press, 1997.

“Women and Conflict in Dance Therapy”
Women and Therapy, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1985. 
http://www.haworthpress.com/store/ArticleAbstract.asp?sid=
80UHDWGMC1FB9MP28662HACPW0FFDDVF&ID=16650

“The Use of Creative Mythology in Dance Therapy”
American Journal of Dance Therapy, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1978.

Body Talk: Scenes from Dance Therapy Workshops
Produced and directed this documentary videotape, 1975.