About Me

Hey, I'm Nicholas Montaño. I've trained for 3 years with SE International to become a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP). Complemented with a year of training in Inner Relationship Focusing, and 9 months training in Hakomi, I've found somatic and mindfulness-based approaches to be a paradigm shift.

This work has been the literal missing piece from my life. It's like what I was always trying to get from literature, or math, or programming, or physics, but could never stabilize. But it feels like my life makes sense now; like my endless feelings of angst and meaninglessness have ways of being touched and transformed directly. And that sense of empowerment, it just bleeds back into everything else I've loved.

Somatics with Nicholas is my biggest step forward and out after integrating this work into my personal life, including building an incredible mutual support network of trading sessions with practitioner friends (the secret to getting therapy three times a week 😆). I've offered my learnings and deep support to friends and family over the past five years, and a small but growing number of clients. Welcome 🙏

A couple fun things about me. I love watching great movies with my life partner. Some of our recent favorites have been Phantom Thread, Perfect Days, The Fisher King, Past Lives, Burning, and Paris, Texas.

I also have been a lifelong videogame addict enjoyer. Before I started doing the real work of starting a business, I loved to play Factorio, commonly known as a drug that turns gaming into a job. But now I literally don't have time for that lol. Lately, Silksong has been what I turn to.

I particularly love games that hit me on an existential level. The Beginner's Guide for all the ways it powerfully evokes feelings. The Witness for being one of the most shockingly well-designed, well-conceived, and beautiful games I've ever experienced. And Outer Wilds for literally contributing to my sense of place in the universe, and how I feel connected to reality itself.

Honestly, Outer Wilds is pretty spiritual for me. Feel free to keep reading for some thoughts on that loaded topic. But only if you really want to.

On spirituality

I've struggled a lot with the idea of being a spiritual person. Like, on the one hand our culture does a lot of empty shit. On the other, laced up monastic living seems empty in a whole other way to me, like the passion is gone.

I've explored my fair share of opposites, and had a decent period of saying "fuck it", of trying on more hedonism, of working to unshame what I'd shamed. But the most useful thing about that was realizing that, after the relief of dropping the shame, there was actually not much to get from those lifestyles either.

In a weird but heartfelt way, after totally renouncing the idea of god when I was in High School, and pushing back on my Jehovah's Witness upbrigning with militant atheism, I found a kind of spirituality in science itself.

And I thought that pursuing it would be a balm to my depressive, angsty, world-weary pains. But it wasn't. Academia slaughtered my sense of purpose in investing in science. And then I thought art and literature could reclaim it. But I found college killed those off for me too.

Iain McGilchrist was probably the first person I read who put to words the tremendous dissapointment college had been to this fire within my heart to really fucking feel something. I wanted the world. I wanted to stay in love with the powerful awe I knew I could feel. This incredible beauty somehow reachable through artistic creations and ways of looking.

But it never, ever, ever lasted.

When I started to work on personal issues, when I started to learn about therapy, trauma, healing, embodiment, and different modalities, I felt the fire again.

And everytime I could process my emotions (which was at times really difficult to figure out how to do), I felt renewed.

I finally found some sense of goddamn stability.

And I realized as I dabbled again in spirituality (mostly Buddhism, the popular not-Christianity for people in these fields), that I was basically practicing those teachings when I was in the process of doing deeper healing work, or when I was sincerely in the process showing up more caringly in relationships.

I've had years of working on these weird damn feelings about trusting gurus or supposed sources of divine knowledge. And still stumbled in yet more pitfalls after I swore off "belief systems" in my post-JW era.

But somehow (I mean, I can tell you what's worked for me) I've reached a place where I feel really content with my ever-evolving connection to "what more is out there". And without devoting myself towards a fixed/unchanging/unmodifiable belief system, nor person-with-all-the-answers.

I realize, in short, that in my own kind of way, hedonism wasn't the answer, just pursuing science and art wasn't the answer, building a career as a programmer wasn't the answer, even really good relationships wasn't the answer. It was doing things in a more spiritual way. It was a kind of approach to bringing my full self into things. It was something about meeting suffering with real care.

And learning how to not fall into the traps of being too ascetic or shaming "bad" habits and all that jazz, I realized spirituality is actually about coming to face reality, rather than being some pious judge of right and wrong.

And so, I've found philosophy to be incredibly nourishing of my spirituality.

And I'd probably say that my beliefs are some beautiful crossing between Eugene Gendlin and Iain McGilchrist's writings, how Thich Nhat Hanh presents Buddhism in The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching, all the wonderful Sufi teachings and practices I learn from my business mentor, Mark Silver, and Outer Wilds, because I wasn't joking about how much that game touches me.

And what would that be?

Well... in so few words it's something like:
the eye of the universe that seeps about from
every crack and solid in the space around
you within you on you under you how
if you pause and breathe and watch: an alien eye
that loves you through you as you beyond you
so deeply curious endlessly about how
anything everything can be at all and is foreveringly so