About me

Hey, I'm Nicholas Montaño. I've trained for 3 years with SE International to become a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP), and am on the assisting team for the Portland SE training. I've also worked as a licensed massage therapist, something that really helped me to gain experience with the subtleties of our bodies in a direct, more-than-cognitive way (and a great brain rebalancing after 7 years of Software Engineering).

I've found somatic and mindfulness-based approaches to be a paradigm shift, and joyfully continue training in them, including a year of training in Inner Relationship Focusing (IRF), and nine months training in Hakomi. Lately, I've been finding the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) to be an incredibly helpful addition for both my own growth and my work with clients.

I’ve blended these modalities into both hands-on massage work and talk-based work, and I’m now focused solely on somatic coaching. I’ve given more than 250 somatic coaching sessions so far.

The path towards this work began five years ago, after a critical realization.

My partner and I had been fighting for months about how they felt that when we got close, I wouldn't be as loving. I felt so frustrated at the idea that I wasn't loving; I knew I was, I just needed space! Yet during a moment of deep vulnerability, I saw in realtime how as an anxious feeling arose, the very strong love I'd just been feeling got completely shut off, in a way that felt so very familiar.

I started to realize that my capacity to feel this love had been there the whole time, but this other feeling kept clamping down on it. And that feeling, even though it included anxiety, that feeling was more.

I felt vague, eerie memories of this feeling being there as a child. And here I was feeling it still, blocking off my connection to my partner. Huh! I guess that's what people meant by trauma then...

To work with that, I really needed people I could trust. They had to have faced their own darkness, and made it through in ways that made enough sense to me. That's how I chose my first therapist, and everyone who has helped me since.

Healing work—particularly around embodiment—has been the literal missing piece from my life. Because through it I've learned direct ways of getting what I was always trying to get from literature, or math, or programming, or physics, but could never stabilize: peace, transformation, and true moments of awe and beauty throughout.

For me, this is the art of directly touching our suffering, directly experiencing how it can change through awareness. It leads to growing an effortless, fundamental trust in ourselves that we know how to heal, and that we can transform our lives. I've had so many experiences as a client of this work where, by earnestly bringing what's next on my mind to work on, answers emerge.

It's not so much that the problem I want to resolve always goes flatly away, but more so that it always feels like I'm on a real path when I do this work, a path where whatever I keep my heart on will grow and change. The incredible relief that that's brought me is what led me to become a practitioner, a fruition of the longing I'd had my whole adult life to do work that actually makes a difference, that actually makes for a better world.

If you'd like to zoom out to some things I enjoy, feel free to read on.

My favorite hobbies: some movies and videogames I enjoy

I love watching great movies with my partner. Some of our favorites in the past few years have been Phantom Thread, Perfect Days, Sentimental Value, The Fisher King, Past Lives, Burning, and Paris, Texas.

And then with videogames, they've been the thing for me since I was a kid. At times a joy, at times a huge burden and addiction. But mostly now just something I love to dip into with little bursts (I'm working through Silksong right now).

I want to share a sparkling couplet of the games that brought me to my most contemplative, and hit me on an existential level:

• The Witness, one of the most shockingly well-designed, well-conceived, and beautiful games I've ever experienced. So much of what Iain McGilchrist writes about on the ideal use of hemispheres in thinking and creation is exemplified by this game.
• Outer Wilds for literally contributing to my sense of place in the universe, and how I feel connected to reality itself. I love it so dearly, and only wish for others to have their inner sense of wonder propelled by it too.

My healing-work bookshelf

I curated this shelf (which sits behind me in sessions) to represent some of the many forces that have deeply influenced my growth and the theory of what I'm doing with myself and clients to heal and change.

The left and the right sides, McGilchrist and Gendlin, are my pillars. After doing a lot of somatic practices and really gaining respect for the intuitive, The Master and His Emissary and A Process Model really helped bring me back into balance with the analytical person I'd been before. I feel indebted to them for giving me the science and concepts to etch at the ineffable I'd been journeying with.

If you're curious how some of these influences have shown up in my work, check out my regular newsletter for applications of these and more. And if you haven't seen it already, my How it works page looks at four key principles behind my work that emerged at the intersection of these works and my own healing journey.