About me
Hey, I'm Nicholas Montaño. I've trained for 3 years with SE International to become a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP). I've also worked as a massage therapist after 800-hours of education and licensing, something that really helped me to gain experience with the subtleties of our bodies in a direct, more-than-cognitive way.
Complemented with a year of training in Inner Relationship Focusing, and nine months training in Hakomi, I've found somatic and mindfulness-based approaches to be a paradigm shift.
The support I offer through this website has been the result of everything that's made the biggest differences in my life, as well as the lives of my friends and family that have grown alongside me and what I've learned over the last five years.
Those years ago, this new path for me started from a quite clear moment of realization. After holding longstanding resentments about "trauma" and "triggers", I had an experience where I suddenly felt no distance between me and a sense that my childhood had been traumatic.
I've grown some much in learning to walk with and beyond that, but I really needed people I could trust. They really had to have faced their own darkness, and made it through in ways that felt like they made 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. And doing it is like knowing the recipe to getting what I was always trying to get from literature, or math, or programming, or physics, but could never stabilize: awe, beauty, transformation.
For me, this craft is the honing of how to go from suffering into wellbeing at the very core of the matter. And wow: that's all I've been trying to understand! I fucking love the endlessly curious journey it brings me on.
All that said. While I really mean what I say here, I'm kinda sick of the many false promises out there, and just want to anti-guru this stuff too: if you walk a similar path as me, don't worry, you're still going to feel like shit pretty often.
It's more like that in learning how the shit is never arbitrary, you start being able to work with it as it is, rather than what you wish it was. And to be honest, that does make a huge damn difference.
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, 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 foundations. I owe so deeply much to their wonderous insights. Reading The Master and His Emissary and A Process Model dissolved and recreated my sense of what intelligence and thinking even are.
