About Pedro Campiao
Psychotherapist, educator, supervisor, and retreat facilitator supporting healing and growth: Mullumbimby, Byron Bay and online.
I'm an industry-accredited psychotherapist, supervisor, educator and retreat facilitator based in Mullumbimby, in the Byron Bay hinterland. I offer psychotherapy in person and online. For almost thirty years, I have accompanied people through periods of change, crisis, loss, growth, and awakening. My work is grounded in the belief that healing is not simply the absence of symptoms, but a movement towards greater wholeness, connection, and aliveness.
Professional Background
I set up my first therapy practice (Shiatsu bodywork) in 1999, and started training in psychotherapy in 2003, beginning work as a counsellor in 2005. Since that time I have worked as a counsellor for over 10 yrs in Gov and non-gov organisations in the areas of family health, chronic illness, sexual health, men's wellbeing, alcohol and other drug services, and homelessness. I entered private practice as a psychotherapist in the Byron Bay in 2008. Alongside my clinical work, I facilitate retreats and professional trainings.
Qualifications
BA Religious Studies
Grad Dip Adult Education
Grad Dip Counselling
Masters Gestalt Therapy
Cert Somatic Psychotherapy (420 hrs face to face)
Diploma Zen Shiatsu
Cert IV Training & Assessment
A Journey of Belonging
I grew up in Portugal and came to Australia at the age of nine. This transition and disruption gave rise to a question that has stayed alive for me personally and has strongly shaped my therapeutic work: What is home? What does it mean to belong—in our bodies, our relationships, our culture, the land, and in the realm of the sacred? How do we cultivate this sense of belonging? And as a therapist, what is the most meaningful way I can support others in finding it?
My mother's family was from Angola, and from an early age, through hearing family stories, I became fascinated by Indigenous cultures, by cultural diversity, and by the ways communities organised themselves around beliefs and practices that held the sacred at their centre. Reinforced by extensive travels through North Africa, India, Asia and the Middle East, this curiosity eventually led me to undertake a Bachelor of Arts Religious Studies and Philosophy. Looking back, I can see that I wasn't simply interested in different cultures—I was searching for different ways that human beings create belonging with one another, with the Earth, and with what they experience as sacred.
Being part of a colonial family that had benefited from the exploitation of African peoples also awakened a deep commitment to social justice and an enduring interest in what a more life-giving culture might look like. Charles Eisenstein speaks of "the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible." This question and vision of a regenerative culture informs both my politics and therapeutic work: how can my work be in support of such a vision.
Culture, Justice, and Equality
At fifteen I became became involved in the Palm Sunday Peace Marches, one of the movements that helped shape Australia's protest culture during the 1980s. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s I remained active in Sydney's environmental and social justice movements, involved in organizing in Reclaim the Streets (exploring how to turn public spaces into potent regenerative community spaces), involved with Students for the Environment at Sydney University, where I played a leading role in establishing an organic food co-operative on campus.
In 1998 I travelled to Jabiluka in Kakadu National Park to join the blockade opposing uranium mining. It was a remarkable time, where Indigenous leadership, environmental activism, international organizations such as UNESCO, and non-violent direct action came together in a way that showed me the transformative power of community acting with purpose making a difference. It deepened my appreciation that healing is not only personal; it is also cultural, ecological and collective.
Embodiment and Spirituality
During my teenage years I had a psychedelic experience that profoundly changed the course of my life. It opened something in me, helped heal aspects of trauma that had been holding me back, and awakened enduring questions about what it means to be human. It deepened my passion for therapy, transformation and spirituality.
I began reading widely, particularly the writings of the 60’s Human Potential Movement, attended my first meditation retreat at eighteen at the Theosophical Society in Sydney, and started exploring float tanks (amongst many other things) around the same time.
In my late teens early 20s The Theosophical Society was a potent crucible for the exploration of contemporary western spirituality. Here I really grounded myself in how, without strong traditions, western folks end up hybridizing different spiritual and therapeutic forms into practices that best meet their needs, and how this can be a useful practice. I have had a long interest in this process of contemporary hybridization, and how I can support people to inquire and discover what spiritual and therapeutic practices best fit their current needs, knowing well these needs change as we develop and transform throughout our lives. Like many westerners I am at ease with exploring different traditions, knowing they all provide, in their difference, some support in our human journey.
My interest in altered states has remained with me ever since. In 1998 I presented a paper at Sydney University entitled Psychedelics and the Mystical Experience. One of the primary areas of interest of my undergraduate studies was how patriarchy and other dominant cultural narratives have marginalised many ways of knowing the world—somatic, emotional, ecological, intuitive, mystical ways of knowing that do not privilege reason alone and have often been associated with the feminine and Indigenous cultures. My interest in altered states and marginalized ways of knowing began to be coupled politically with an interest into an inquiry into how late stage capitalism, and the worlds it creates, can be profoundly unhealthy and what sort of therapeutic and healing practices are needed for contemporary people.
This interest in the question that Nietzsche framed as "what is most needful" in these times, later led me to inquire into what indigenous forms of healing had to offer to
Alongside my university studies I immersed myself in yoga, Chi Kung and dance. My thesis explored Embodied Spirituality—a vision of spirituality that is not dissociated from the body, but lived through the heart, lived through our relationships and bodily experience, and inclusive of our emotions. It was another expression of the same question that had been unfolding since childhood: how do we come home to ourselves rather than split ourselves apart? This interest in embodiment, healing and spirituality, and integrating rather than separating these dimensions of life, has remained central to how I practice psychotherapy today.
Becoming a Therapist
Following my Bachelor degree I took my interest in embodiment and healing into the study of Chinese Medicine through Shiatsu. I opened a therapy practice in Sydney's inner west in 1999 before later studying Somatic Shiatsu under Ross Newberry, whose work integrated Somatic Psychotherapy, Gerda Boyesen's work, Bioenergetics and Hakomi principles. The Sydney Shiatsu community during the 1990s and early 2000s was a vibrant space for the emerging field of somatic therapy, and it profoundly influenced my development.
I initially worked primarily through touch and body process before undertaking a two-year face to face training in Somatic Psychotherapy in 2003 (Somatics College of Body-Oriented Psychotherapy). This expanded my work to include the verbal and relational dimensions of healing alongside the body. It felt like another step in understanding that healing happens not only within us, but also between us in the relational domain. I stopped using touch in my practice in 2008 when I moved to the Northern Rivers.
Between 2004 and 2006 I completed a Graduate Diploma in Counselling. Over the following decade I worked in both government and non-government organisations in the areas of chronic illness, sexual health, men's health, family health, addictions and homelessness. In 2007 I won a scholarship to research transformative experiences during chronic illness treatment. These varied experiences gave me valuable skills in working within organizations oriented around a medical mental health model, in working with psychiatric populations, clients in crisis , and within multi-disciplinary teams. Working within these organizations and within these frameworks was challenging for me regarding holding onto humanistic therapeutic values within medical frameworks, but it taught me vital skills in creating bridges across disciplines. I believe one of my most potent therapeutic skills is being able to speak across disciplines and frameworks.
I entered private practice in the Northern Rivers in 2008, while continuing to work part time 16 hrs with NSW Health as a counsellor, and eventually moved into full-time private practice in 2015.
Psychotherapy and Relational Practice
Completing a Master's in Gestalt Therapy in 2011 further expanded my understanding of psychotherapy. Gestalt's relational and field-oriented perspective offered a potent way of holding the psychological, bodily, relational, cultural, ecological and spiritual dimensions of life together rather than separating them, in its unique field perspective. This way of practising provided a potent embodied framework, and more important a way of being with clients, that supported a deep integration of all aspects a person's life.
Over time I realised that the question of belonging had quietly become the organising principle of my work. Trauma often fractures our sense of belonging—to ourselves, to others, to our bodies, to community, to our history and ancestors, to land, earth and our earth kin, and to the deeper primal sources of life nourishment like the sacred. Healing, for me, is the gradual restoration of these relationships.
This understanding also inspired my writing. I later published several peer-reviewed articles including: one on spiritual bypassing and embodied spirituality, and another on vital aspects of the therapeutic relationship. Both remain central interests of mine and the articles are included here:
Embodying and Integrating Spirituality: A Vital Role for Psychotherapy 2011
Retreats and Community
From around 2012 my work increasingly shifted towards the healing potential of relationship and community. I began my formal therapeutic journey, being part of therapy groups from 2001, and all my psychotherapy trainings involved large components of group therapy as a vital educational component of learning to become a therapist through working on our own personal material. I knew how potent interpersonal work can be.
Around 2012 I began to work more intentionally with the therapeutic relationship with individuals, I began facilitating couples therapy, running 10 week interpersonal process groups based on Gestalt principles and the work of Irvin Yalom, and I began to lead therapeutic retreats.
The retreat space has allowed me to weave together many of the threads of my life: interpersonal healing and the repair of attachment wounds; trauma resolution through nervous-system-informed practices; connection with the natural world as a profound holding environment; the integration of altered states alongside grounded embodiment; an exploration of the sacred within a relational context.
The beauty of the retreat space is that programs can be created that allow these different pathways to healing to be integrated towards the one destination: helping people experience a deeper sense of belonging with themselves, with others, with the Earth, and with life itself and the mystery at the heart of all things.
Link to my current retreat format
I am currently having a break from running retreats until we purchase a property where we can create a humble retreat space.
Today
After living on acreage in the Northern Rivers for almost twenty years, I recently moved into Mullumbimby township to simplify my life. I continue to work on a book exploring psychotherapy, although it has taken a back seat as my children move into adolescence and require the presence, care and guidance that this stage of life invites.
I am currently taking a break from facilitating retreats and am focusing on working with individuals and couples.
I am a single father of two and parenting has become one of the deepest places of my own healing. It continues to teach me about love, humility, repair and belonging, reminding me each day that healing is not simply an individual achievement but something that unfolds within relationship and community.
I look forward to connecting with you.
"There is a song that wants to sing itself through us.
We just have to be available to it"
Joanna Macy