Nicholas Montaño (he/him)

Somatic Therapy (Body Centered)

I'm a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) and an assistant on the Portland SE training team. I also have training in Inner Relationship Focusing and Hakomi, and have worked as a licensed massage therapist. I've personally been relying on somatic approaches for years in my own healing journey, and have found them to be an incredible and profound shift in my capacity to heal as a historically brainy, rational person. I deeply love to help thoughtful clients grow in their power of intuition.

Coaching

As a somatic coach, I support clients to make active changes in their lives, particularly in terms of finding career alignment, deeper friendships, and transformative romances. Yet, having received over four years of work as a client in therapy, I also know how central developmental work is to growth. Thus my somatic coaching is a weave of the yang energy of life change, with the yin energy of deep processing where needed. I believe bringing both approaches accelerates long-term thriving.

Mindfulness-based

My primary modalities include Somatic Experiencing (SE), (Inner Relationship) Focusing, and Hakomi, which are all mindfulness-based approaches. Because SE is a deeply trauma-informed approach, you might find the way I do mindfulness to be quite healing if you've had adverse effects with meditation in your life. Similarly, some people have found mindfulness to be confusing or unhelpful (I have too, at many points), so my approach really aims to give you the most useful tools for *you*.

Existential

I have trained in and extensively studied Gene Gendlin's Focusing approach and philosophy, which was developed while he was learning therapy from Carl Rogers. The short version is that existential meaning arises at the boundary of our unconscious (dreamlike) impulses towards growth, and our conscious integration of those more-than-symbolic meanings. I love guiding clients through Focusing processes at that threshold of consciousness, helping unfold out the depths of meaning into their lives.

ADHD

One of the most powerful ways to work with procrastination and task-avoidance is to really honor how distressing these experiences *actually are* for you, even if they "shouldn't be". I know first-hand how painful working on something that you don't want to do can feel. With Somatic Experiencing we're able to really gently come into the distress and digest it. It can be profound to experience the anger underneath hopelessness, and find yourself charging ahead into life with passionate fire.

Depression

Depression makes so much sense to feel in this under-resourced world with so many superficial interactions. Part of the healing work that I do around depression is really inviting you to connect with the things that have brought you meaning in your life, while simultaneously helping you to expand your nervous system around constrictive experiences and beliefs of "I can't" to find the life energy underneath. Through grief and anger, comes simply action in the direction of your heart.

Loss or Grief

Working with grief has been one of the most profound liberators in my life. If you've been struggling with a significant loss—like losing someone to death or to a breakup, losing a culture you once had, losing community, losing your job, or just having a really painful experience—no matter how long ago those things happened, they can hurt. And grief is the medicine we need to move forward form loss into life. The trick isn't to try and grieve: it's to help whatever gets in the way of it to heal.

Anxiety

I like to think of anxiety as stemming from two simultaneous experiences: needing to process what you're anxious about, and practicing living in the present moment. If we just focus on presence, we can delegitimize the real need to process experiences that are giving us worry and distress. But if we just focus on processing, we can gloss over how one of the fuels of anxiety is an *intolerance* of present moment experience. When both are here, you can prepare, but also rest into living your life.

Spirituality

I grew up a Jehovah's Witness, and left in my early teens. I then rebounded into militant atheism, and tried to find a path through science, not faith. All told, I have a deep respect for people who are cynical about religion. Yet also, have found myself really growing in spirituality in new and nurturing ways for some years. I would be honored to support your own grapplings with spirituality and meaning, and have found Gendlin's Focusing approach to powerfully support existential unfoldings.