Life is exhausting. What you do to make it better shouldn't have to be.

Strengthening the Pillars of Your Life: Purpose, Action, and Relationships

One-on-one sessions for intelligent, creative, and heartful men, women, and trans/nonbinary folks who want to feel in integrity with their path, and at home in their relationships.

And priced on a sliding scale of $50–$90 a session.

My highest intentions for you

Through this work I wish for you to confidently step forward into your life and:

• Deeply understand what you're trying to get out of this life that you're not getting, and find a real direction and path that can take you towards what truly matters to you.
• Feel more empowerment and overcome what you've been avoiding, so that you run towards the things you really want or need to do instead of away from them.
• Get on the road towards a career that fits your values and sense of purpose.
• Feel so much more at ease in yourself in relationships that support you growing towards who you most want to become.
• Transform the most difficult and draining dynamics that come up for you around relationships to experience joyful connection and to truly feel worthy as you are.
• Experience more consistent awe and wonder in and about this life.

Who is this for?

These sessions are for you if you:

• Have been feeling somewhat depressed, apathetic, and hopeless, or numb, addicted, and agitated. If you have a direction, it often feels unsatisfying or like a compromise.
  
  While you're doing things that you feel truly passionate about you can feel the spark again, yet most of the time you're still feeling empty, numb, or lost.
  
  You really want more out of your life, but maybe don't know how to get there, or don't believe it's possible anymore. I call these struggles of purpose.
• Have a tendency to avoid life tasks and avoid life. You're not doing things you wish you did (or consistently enough), and because of that have lost some trust in yourself.
  
  You tend to feel self-frustration for not doing more, or world-frustration at things being so hard and bullshit to do in the first place.
  
  You may be feeling very overwhelmed about all that you're doing or not doing.
  
  And you may spend a lot of time numbing, trying to feel occupied or busy enough to forget what you truly should be doing. I call these struggles of action.
• Are ruminating a lot about, and experiencing challenging or overwhelming feelings around dynamics you're having with your friends, family, romantic partner(s), or community.
  
  You often feel like when these issues are up, that it's hard to do or enjoy anything else. It's like nothing is right while these things are wrong.
  
  You might wish you didn't even have to deal with these things to begin with. Or at least that they didn't have to feel so consuming. Or that you could say "no" and protect yourself better. I call these struggles of relationship.

If you resonate with even just one of these descriptions around struggles of purpose, action, or relationships, this work may very well be for you.

And who is it NOT for?

These sessions might not be for you if you:

• Expect me to make decisions for you or pressure you into goals. I want you to thrive in life, and I'm happy to share from my experience with you when relevant (and desired), as well as to follow-up with you on anything that you've asked me to hold you compassionately accountable to.
  
  But telling you what to do or being your external pressure source would—in my view—take away your ability to exercise your own agency to make decisions and follow-through, and leave you more dependent on my support, rather than more empowered in leading your life.
• Aren't interested in experiencing your body. The exception to this being if you're actually quite interested in exploring why you might feel opposed to this, or if you want to explore: issues that have happened when you've brought more awareness to your body; or how it's difficult for you to sense your body.
  
  Otherwise, while my work also centers on cognitive understandings, I rely quite a lot on awareness of the body to help clients to regulate their nervous systems and access their intuitions more deeply.
• Are in an intense crisis more suited for a therapy dynamic. Some therapists specialize in helping people through active crises and can be available in an emergency to help. I am not a therapist, and that is not a level of support I offer.
  
  Though I am trained to work with trauma and can help in session to process difficult experiences, that's not the same a crisis support, where it's normal to need ongoing guidance and in-the-world support.

My approach

Purpose, Action, Relationships. The robustness of these three pillars can make or break the quality of your life. Thankfully, by improving one, you improve them all.

I want to share a bit about how the three modalities I lean on the most in my work can help to strengthen them:

Purpose and Focusing

What makes psychotherapy effective for some people and not for others? In the 1960s, researchers at the University of Chicago dug into that question, and Focusing emerged as the answer. This highly influential method clarified what successful therapy clients were actually doing and translated that into steps anyone can learn.

What Focusing involves, in brief, is honing your inner sense of how your body and emotions respond to the words you're using. By "Focusing" on questions of purpose and meaning, it's very common to arrive at a lot more clarity about what you truly want in your life, and that clarity isn't just mental, it's a bodily shift that literally brings you closer to what you're yearning for.

Action and Somatic Experiencing (SE)

Procrastination. Overwhelm. Dread. This isn't what you want to have between you and what you need to do in your life, yet sometimes it's just the way it is. How can you deal with that?

Well, Somatic Experiencing evolved from the ground-up as a model for working with different kinds of stress and all the intensities of it. It's a trauma-informed model that can help you really understand what your nervous system is doing, why it's doing it, and techniques to guide it from being in a loop, to moving forward.

While understanding why you procrastinate, why you're overwhelmed, and what you're dreading can all help, really it's being able to work directly with the energies themselves—particularly in ways that aren't more overwhelming—that often makes the biggest difference. That's where SE comes in, and that's why it can often help turn avoidance into action.

Relationships and the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM)

NARM was created by Dr. Laurence Heller, a previous trainer of Somatic Experiencing (SE). Dr. Heller wanted to focus on issues we carry in us that emerge out of failures in relationship, and he created a new approach that made SE more effective for working with the unmet needs people carry with them from childhood and teenage years into adulthood.

What NARM does is support you to deeply explore how your thoughts, beliefs, and moment-to-moment experience are shaping your reality. It is a deeply introspective approach that can help you to clearly identify what you want out of your relationships, and then go deep into examining what is actually getting in the way of you getting there.

This is the approach I most often reach for when people are dealing with the same kind of issue or pattern in relationships, and they are sick of it and want it to stop happening. I reach for NARM because it helps those patterns to permanently change, and all without needing to dig through past memories, or go deeper than you want to go.

Though each of these modalities has unique ways to support Purpose, Action, and Relationship, in so many situations they'll be interweaving naturally into our work, playing off of each others' strengths to best support you in getting where you want to be in your life.

About Me

Hey, I'm Nicholas Montaño. I've trained for three years with SE International to become a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP), and I'm on the assisting team for the Portland SE training. In my work, I draw on SE as well as my trainings in Inner Relationship Focusing (IRF), Hakomi, and massage therapy; my avid enthusiasm for NARM being my most recent addition, which I'm excited to train in in the future. I've facilitated over 250 one-on-one sessions using these approaches.

I used to struggle a lot. With loneliness. With love. With life in general. One of the most important things for me has been—and continues to be—feeling connected to and seen by other people. Yet I also used to find myself, weirdly, doing lots of things to disconnect from people I cared about too: losing touch with my feelings when getting close with someone, pulling away right when I most wanted to be there. I kept getting in my own way, and I didn't understand why.

On the about page on this site, I share a bit more about the moment this all came into focus for me and started changing. I was with my partner, and I realized that what was cutting me off from connection had so much to do with getting in my head to avoid uncomfortable feelings, rather than examining those feelings from my head and my body. As I started learning about trauma and embodiment, I started to realize that the traps I got into weren't just things I would forever have to deal with, instead, I could actually get out of these traps.

To do that, I needed people I could really trust—people who had faced their own darkness and made it through in ways that I could relate to. I started therapy, started reading tons about it too, and a couple years later found myself in the trainings I described above.

Healing work—especially around being in the body, the somatic experience—turned out to be the missing piece I’d been looking for in literature, math, programming, physics...all the places I went trying to touch awe, beauty, and aliveness but couldn’t quite bring that back into the rest of my life and struggles in ways that helped me to stay feeling alright in the world.

This work started personally for me, and ripples out into every aspect of my life. I've seen the incredible change that can come out of my own work into the lives of those around me. And I watch regularly how clients spread these gifts throughout their lives too. This kind of wellbeing is a joy to spread.

I am touched to see how this path of healing my own pains wasn't just my isolated experience, but is something so much of this world has been hungry for too.

What we can work on

There are many directions we can go together in our work. Here are some examples of things we could support your exploration in:

Purpose and Direction

• Reconnecting with a sense of purpose in your life.
• Getting clarity on whether the path you’re on is right for you, and what might be missing from it.
• Recognize what’s not feeling good in your life right now, so that you can use that awareness to find paths out of your suffering and towards wellbeing.
• Finding a path with more harmony when you’re feeling pulled in conflicting directions about important life decisions.

Action and Energy

• Helping you to move from paralysis to action around blocks in your life that you deeply want to overcome.
• Shifting your cycles of going hard and then wiping out into balanced ways of getting things done without burning out.
• Honing your gut instincts so you feel more empowered when making decisions that are right for you, and more confident saying no to things that feel off.
• Welcoming grief when it shows up as depression, emptiness, or loneliness, to undo the stories that it's not okay to feel these ways, and paradoxically not feel as weighed down by them.

Relationships and Spirituality

• Feeling more aligned with how you want to act and who you want to be in relationships, overcoming difficulties through self-awareness and compassion.
• Mindfully exploring patterns of self-blame, self-hate, and self-shaming to transform your relationship to your own experience and grow your capacity to feel more fully.
• Exploring your relationship to spirituality—whether it be for, against, unsure, yearning but not having, having but not enjoying, and all that lies between—and how you can let a bigger picture of life support you with what you’re carrying.
• Supporting healing from any issues that you may have had arise from meditation, intense drug experiences, or altered states in general.

And more

• Gently working to digest and integrate the powerful energy of traumas that may be echoing in your body and nervous system, without needing to dive into the past.
• For men and clients interested in exploring masculinity, offering a space where anything related to masculinity and being a man can be explored, and stuck-feeling places around masculinity can move forward instead of remaining a shadow that holds you back.
• Accessing your capacity for intuition and creativity more reliably.
• Bringing in different resources—books, YouTube channels, programs, and other practitioners—that could really support the journey you’re on.

And all of this in a space where what you're most yearning for drives our time together.

What’s involved?

Weekly one-on-one sessions with me

We’ll meet for 60 minutes, four times a month, for the duration of our agreement (most likely 3 months). I see clients on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, from 11:30am to 5:00pm Pacific Time.

At the start of our work, we’ll spend some time getting really clear on what you’re hoping this arc will support. Together we’ll make an (always updatable) list of larger intentions to thread through our sessions—the goals and yearnings you most want to move toward.

From there, each session begins with checking in: what feels most alive to work on today? Sometimes that comes straight from those larger intentions, and sometimes it’s something new that’s pressing in the moment. We follow the threads until there’s real clarity about where you want to focus, and then we stay with that together (unless or until you decide otherwise).

If follow-through is hard for you, this rhythm also creates a natural kind of accountability. Because your intentions are clear and written down, it’s easy for us to keep returning to what matters session to session, and to stay with the change over time instead of losing track of it.

Between-session support through email and text

Between sessions, you’re not dropped back into your life alone with everything we opened up. I know first-hand how even asking a question or naming a difficulty can bring relief and momentum. So throughout the week I stay available by email and text to help you stay connected with what we’re working on. I'll respond by the next day, unless it's the weekend.

If you're exploring something you learned in session—like trying out a technique, a practice, or a new way of relating—and it feels confusing, stuck, or even like it's making things worse, that's exactly the moment to reach out. A mentor of mine teaches that "learning is error-correction": we can use those moments to adjust together instead of you feeling like you’ve "failed" the work.

Building purpose, action, and relationships more deeply into my life takes... how long exactly?

The short version is that ongoing work over 2-4 months will support meaningful change.

And of course, the real answer to this depends on what you're wanting to work on and how much you're wanting to change about your life. Yet, there's also a general truth:

The kind of work I offer supports growing embodiment and self-awareness. Embodiment and awareness naturally leads to change, and this change often ends up encompassing more than just the issues you've come in to address.

During our consultation, I'll help you understand what changes might look like for you on the particular issues you come in to work on if you do this work for 2-4 months.

If you decide to work with me, we'll set an intention for how many months to do our initial period of work.

It's just an intention. It's not a binding contract.

Without an intention, I know that as a client I've had weeks where I'm wondering what the point of the work I'm doing even is.

Creating a space together where we know what we'll be working towards, and know approximately how long we'll be working towards it for, helps to keep things focused, and prevents stagnation.

If you choose to extend our work, it feels like a real choice and intention, rather than a passive default.

And when you feel complete, you're complete. Whether it's at our intended end, or because you've reached your goals already, or maybe even you just decide you want to do something else with your time and money partway through.

It's as simple as that. We'll have a last session to close out our arc of work together, and you're welcome back anytime.

The cost

I offer 60-minute sessions on a sliding scale of $50–$90 dollars per session.

The monthly commitment is $200–$360 per four sessions, paid either in full every month, or in two biweekly installments. As an estimate, you'd spend $600–$1080 in total over 3 months of work.

I use Stripe or Venmo to handle payments.

About the sliding scale, and how to feel at peace in picking where you land on it

By using a sliding scale, I'm able to support clients with a broader range incomes and life situations, while also earning enough for my work to be sustainable.

I've spent time with my heart to know that it's really important for me to be able reach people in difficult financial situations. Yet, I also know that it isn't sustainable for my business to offer work for less than $50 a session.

Furthermore, when clients are able to afford $280-$360 a month as a meaningful but not undue expense, it really supports my business being able to offer the lower end of the scale.

In Portland, Somatic Experiencing Practitioners and coaches with completed training in other somatic modalities commonly charge $120-$175 a session, with sliding scales—when they're offered—rarely going lower than $80.

The practical economy is difficult right now, and I'm happy to offer the scale that I do, going all the way down to $50 a session.

If you're in an industry that's doing well right now and your circumstances are okay, consider paying towards the higher end.

If you're having to tightly budget your life, and restricting yourself in many ways, consider paying less than you'd want to if you were doing well.

In any case, truly:

I want you to feel at peace with the price. Here's two steps to getting there:

First, decide if you want to work with me at this current point in your life. Feel into the possibility of what this kind of support could mean for you and where you want to be with having purpose, taking action, and cultivating relationships in your life.

Second, if you decide "yes", then make a decision of how much per month. Take some time to reflect on the reality of your financial situation, and also the reality of my business being supported by your money. Without guilt or shame, simply acknowledge both realities, yours and mine, and sense into your body, your heart, a number that is right for you to pay on a monthly basis.

If you're struggling to feel at peace with the monthly total you come up with, try subtracting $10-$20 dollars and see if it feels better, or worse? Similarly, try adding $10-$20 dollars and see how it feels. Notice if paying more, or less, supports peace.

It doesn't always happen for folks, but often the right price will feel like a relief to you. That's what I truly hope for you to feel in this process 🙏.

If you said "yes" to the first question, I trust what you come up with in the second. And I look forward to consulting with you!

The next step is a conversation

By learning where you're coming from and where you want to get to, I can offer you a roadmap of what it might look like for us to get there.

The first step is to fill out this form below. Once I get that, I'll read it and respond to any questions, and we'll schedule a conversation (about 30-45 minutes). Together, we'll figure out if this is going to be the most supportive way for you to move your life forward.

And if you haven't figured out where feels right on sliding scale yet, don't worry: I only need to know after the consult, and if you're ready to work with me as a client.

Ready? Let's start exploring:

Work together with less risk

A first-month guarantee

If you don't feel like continuing anytime during our first month together, you'll get half your money back.

Research shows that by 2 sessions in, you should feel like working with me is the right vibe. Otherwise, we're probably not a fit.

That's the first check.

Research also shows that if you experience even a small shift in your issues or your perspective on them within the first 2–4 sessions, you're very likely to keep making progress on them throughout our work. But if you haven't, you're much less likely to.

That's the second check.

While my hope is that we'll be a great fit, I'm also doing my part to seeing if we are reaching these two research-based markers in our work together.

Because if you feel that our work isn't clicking, or you're not noticing any signs of change, I don't want to misuse your time or your money.

So: I'm more than happy to offer you a 50% refund if you choose to back out during our first month together. And I'm also more than happy to support you transitioning out of our work and into other avenues that may be more helpful for you.

Cancellations and refunds

I've sat with these policies for a significant amount of time. My hope is that they feel straightforward and respectful to both of our needs for flexibility and consistency, autonomy and commitment.

Refunds

At the core, I do not offer refunds for sessions in general, and instead focus on two things: (1) refunding unused but paid-for sessions, and (2) refunding an early mismatch.

1. Refunding unused, paid-for sessions

Because I ask that you pay me on either a monthly or biweekly basis, that may lead to situations where you feel complete with our work earlier, but have also paid for more sessions than you've used.

I will always refund unused sessions when we close out our current arc of work.

2. Refunding mismatches early on (first-month guarantee)

If, during our first month together, you feel that our work is mismatching your expectations or needs, just let me know what's going on. We'll confirm if you want to wind out, and I'm happy to refund you half of what you've paid for that first month.

This is the same first-month guarantee I describe above—I would rather you trust your sense of rightness than keep working with me out of obligation.

Cancellations, Rescheduling & Holidays

The policies I hold for cancellations are all about striking a balance between supporting life to happen and things to come up, while ensuring we have enough consistency in our container of work to make a real difference in your life.

On the note of consistency, when either of us cancels an appointment, it means we extend our intended (non-binding) working agreement another week so that we still have the same amount of actual appointments together to work on the goals you come in to work on.

Here's all you need to know about cancellations, late-cancels, planned absences, holidays, and rescheduling.

For every 12 sessions we have together, you're able to cancel 2 of them given at least two hours' notice, but ideally a day's notice or more. Giving less than two hours' notice or a no-show (outside of an emergency) will be considered a late cancel.

Planned absences mentioned at the start of our working period—which includes when our appointments would fall on or near major holidays—don't count towards this limit.

And if you give me at least a day's notice in making a request to reschedule your appointment, and we can find a time within five days of your original appointment, that also doesn't count towards the 2 out of 12 cancellation limit.

If you do cancel more appointments than that, have a late cancel, or ask to reschedule with too short notice or where we can't find another time within five days of your appointment, I will charge the full fee you'd normally pay per session.

These policies apply to me too

And I also try to abide giving you as much notice as possible, and trying to never cancel or reschedule day-of.

But if I happen to cancel more than 2 appointments out of 12, or cancel with less than two hour's notice outside of an emergency, I will pay you back a full session fee, or decrease your next bill by that amount.

Questions?

Ask me any and all questions about the one-on-one work I offer.

I'm always grateful when people reach out in this way! As a client of other practioners, I know how significant it can feel to be considering work like this, and that having my questions answered ahead of time brings a lot of relief.

Please send me any of your confusion or curiosities so that I can try my best to bring clarity and depth to them. You'll probably help me realize where I can improve how I explain things in the process, so thank you for that.