I’m Pedro,
a somatic therapist and coach based in Portugal.
I work with high-functioning adults stuck in the same emotional patterns — trauma, attachment wounds, emotional unavailability — despite years of therapy, meditation or plant medicine. My work is somatic integration: sessions start in the body and move through emotion to clarity, so insight becomes real change. I’m based in Sintra, Portugal, and work 1:1, usually online, across Europe, the US and beyond.
At 21, I couldn't name what was wrong with me. I was just hurting—a deep, overwhelming pain I couldn't explain or even fully feel.
I was so numb, so dissociated, so frozen that if I'd been able to perceive the true extent of what I was carrying, I probably wouldn't have been able to cope. My nervous system was protecting me by keeping me shut down, even as the emotional pain leaked through in ways that made no sense to me, in ways I couldn't control.
I had no language for any of this. I didn't know what trauma was, what it meant to be frozen, in shock, or why my own body felt like a prison. I just knew something was deeply, fundamentally wrong.
So I left everything behind to find out what.
Ten years of daily practice
Ten years of daily practice
At 21, I couldn’t name what was wrong with me. I was just hurting — a deep, overwhelming pain I couldn’t explain or even fully feel. I was so numb, so frozen, that my nervous system was protecting me by keeping me shut down. I just knew something was fundamentally out of place.
So I left everything behind to find out what.
After finishing my architecture degree, I traveled the world looking for proof that this wasn’t who I was. From 26 to 36, practice wasn’t something I did; it was what I did. Practically a monk: most of every day spent being present with whatever was there, letting layer after layer of illusion, distortion and distraction fall away.
Stillness. Three years of 10-day Vipassana courses — 1,000 hours of sitting — and thousands more serving and managing the centres, plus two years of Tibetan Buddhist tantra.
Plant medicine. Years of work with ayahuasca, mushrooms, mdma, and alongside it, supporting many others through what comes after. That’s where I learned that integration is most of the work.
Body and emotion. Three years of weekly Bioenergetics and eight multi-day retreats, four years of Osho active meditations (including two 20-day cycles of Dynamic Meditation), two years of rebirthing breathwork, a year of Somatic Experiencing, four years of the Completion Process and a year of Joe Hudson’s work.
Relationship. Hundreds of hours of Nonviolent Communication, three years of contact improvisation, and years of studying how people love, hurt and repair.
It wasn’t glamorous. It was daily, and often uncomfortable. But slowly, I began to thaw.
Learning to feel
As I came out of the freeze, I had to learn an entirely new language — the language of emotions, of the body, of the nervous system. I learned to ask “what happened to me?” instead of “what’s wrong with me?” And most importantly, I learned that healing requires the willingness to feel, not just the desire to feel better.
I had locked myself in a cage to survive my childhood. To free myself, I had to face the feelings I’d been avoiding my entire life. That process set me free.
What changed
I’ll never forget the first time I felt truly alive in my body. I was camping by a lake, by myself, opening my eyes from morning meditation, and I realized I wasn’t bracing against the next wave of anxiety, shame or fear. I was just… happy to be there, happy to be me.
That’s when I understood: this is what I’d been searching for. Not the absence of pain, but the presence of aliveness.
Over those ten years, I went:
From CPTSD to a life where it no longer runs.
From relationships that kept breaking to one I can stay present in.
From a life in pieces to an integrated one.
That’s what integration means to me: not becoming someone else, but finally being in one piece.
What I bring to a session
What I bring to a session
Those ten years trained my attention for one thing: seeing what’s true underneath the story. I can usually hear the pattern in the first few minutes, often before it’s said out loud, and I don’t get pulled into it: I spent a decade getting un-pulled from my own. Shadow work, somatic practices and embodiment are how I guide what that seeing opens up. And I built this practice from zero, so I know the pressure founders carry from the inside.
Over the past 6 years, I’ve worked with 57 long-term clients across 1,700+ sessions: engineers, artists, directors, entrepreneurs, scientists. Pattern breakers and cycle breakers, building lives that outgrew the context they were born into. Many had built a new cage out of years of working on themselves. They were stuck where I was: understanding their patterns, but still living them.
“I worked with Pedro for six months and deeply appreciated his warm, grounded presence, even through Zoom.” — Tania Urvois
How we work together
I don’t see you as broken. You’re carrying survival patterns that once kept you safe and have outlived their purpose. We work with them where they still live — in your body and in what you feel — until what you know, what you feel and how your body reacts finally agree.
I’m not offering speed; I’m offering depth. Because the work goes deep, things tend to move faster than people expect.
I’ve been where you are: stuck in patterns I understood but couldn’t break. I found the way through, and I’d be honoured to walk it with you. We work 1:1, usually online, in 13-week cycles, and it starts with a free 90-minute session.