Pedro Campiao

PSYCHOTHERAPIST | FACILITATOR | EDUCATOR

Byron Bay Australia

Welcome

I’m Pedro Campiao, an industry accredited psychotherapist, educator, and retreat facilitator with nearly three decades of experience supporting people on their journeys home: to feeling deeply connected to themselves, to others, to the Earth, and to the sacred.

My work is for those navigating the impact of trauma, relationship challenges, life transitions, issues of meaning and purpose, integrating the sacred in the everyday, and living with the collective unease of our rapidly changing world.

I bring a grounded, skilled and highly experienced, compassionate presence and integrative approach to therapeutic exploration and transformation that draws on somatic, relational, ecological, and transpersonal traditions.

Whatever issues of emotional well-being you would like to explore and have support around, I offer a therapeutic container rooted in wisdom, integrity, and care.

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within your self that you have built against it"

Rumi

About My Practice

I bring nearly 30 yrs of experience in the therapeutic arts - from 14 years of counselling roles in Public Health, Hospital and Community settings (in the areas of family health, chronic illness, sexual health, men’s issues, addictions, and homelessness) to private practice, since 2008, as a psychotherapist, educator, and retreat facilitator in the Byron Bay, Northern Rivers region of NSW.

I work with:

Individuals (inc. youth over 16)
Therapeutic practitioners through supervision, training, and mentorship
Groups through 1 x day workshops to 6 x day residential retreats

My areas of interest include:

Trauma resolution
Post-traumatic growth
Men’s work
Relationships
Life transitions.
Existential concerns of meaning and purpose
Developmental/attachment dynamics
Family/ancestral systems
Spiritual inquiry & mythopoetics
Spiritual emergence/spiritual emergency
Psychedelic psychotherapy/plant medicine preparation & integration.
World & Eco grief.
The Poly-Crisis: living within uncertain times

Philosophy

My work is oriented towards the following areas:

Trauma (individual and collective)

My primary focus is supporting you to work through what hinders actualizing your fullest potential. Processing through your obstacles towards greater self-actualization is trauma work. Orienting the therapy towards what is unprocessed in you and gets in the way of a more satisfying life will support meeting whatever goals you bring to therapy.

The poly-crisis:

My work is grounded in the understanding that we are living through a time of profound transition. The polycrisis — marked by ecological degradation, social fragmentation, political instability, economic uncertainty, and a loss of shared meaning — is not only a global challenge but also a deeply personal one:

The planetary/world health crisis and our mental health crisis are closely intertwined.

This uncertain tumultuous world shows up in our bodies, our relationships, our disconnection from the earth, in our dreams, and our despair. My therapeutic approach helps people to meet these times with greater resilience, awareness, and connection.

Regenerative Culture

My work is situated within a regenerative cultural framework that values relational healing, ecological re-connection, and sacred renewal as pathways to wholeness.

From a regenerative culture perspective, many of the mental health challenges we face today are not simply individual pathologies, but symptoms of a broader rupture from a more primordial and alive intertwining with the source of life. The disconnection from self, from meaningful relationships, from the natural world, and from the sacred has left many of us isolated, disoriented, and yearning for something deeper.

My therapeutic work, rather than treating mental health in isolation, focuses on healing this wound of disconnection. I support people to move toward greater connection in all these domains — to reinhabit their bodies, to mend relationships, to rediscover kinship with the Earth, and to remember the sacred dimension of life. True mental health is not just about individual wellness; it’s about restoring our participation in the living web of life.

De-colonizing psychotherapy:

Decolonizing psychotherapy is a movement that seeks to challenge and transform the colonial foundations of mainstream therapeutic models. It questions the dominance of western individualistic, and pathology based paradigms, advocating instead for epistemic pluralisms (multiple ways of knowing) esp relational ways of knowing. This includes honouring indigenous, communal, embodied, feminine, ecological, and spiritual understandings of healing. that have been historically marginalized or suppressed by colonial systems.

This approach understands mental health not as an isolated issue but deeply tied to histories of colonization, systemic oppression, and disconnection from community, land and the sacred. Healing becomes a collective and political process of reconnection - to self, others, ancestors, the earth, and the more than human world - restoring what was fragmented by colonialism.

How I work

I work with people who are asking deep questions about life, love, belonging, purpose, meaning, and what it means to be live well in a world that is unwell.

In our work together I am interested in exploring and supporting you to deepen your sense of belonging to your self, to others, the earth and the sacred:

Coming home to yourself: reconnecting with your aliveness and embodied truth, vitality, needs, capacity for pleasure, potential to grow and movement towards deeper self actualization

Healing your relationships: transforming relational trauma, cultivating authentic intimacy, healthy boundaries and your capacity to build supportive community

Reclaiming connection to Earth: healing your disconnection to the earth, and re-awakening your sense of ecological belonging and kinship with the more-than-human world, which evidence shows is vital for emotional well-being.

Grounded in the sacred: honouring mystery, spirit, and supporting you to live within a connection to ultimate values that are alive, imbued with depth, purpose and sanctity and that supports you to live in harmony with yourself and the world.

Practice

Working with me involves attuning to exploring the here and now in the therapy space, bringing a mindful awareness to what wants to speak within you and through you, building compassionate relationships to all your parts, esp those parts that struggle to find a voice amidst historical hurt.

I work from an emotion focused and somatic/body orientation. Much of my work involves finding ways to support you to connect to your body and your emotional life, cultivating emotional intelligence and nervous system regulation by attending to how our 'body speaks its mind'; learning to trust ourselves and our own innate body centred intelligence.

I am interested in the therapeutic relationship between us, bringing awareness to how you organize yourself somatically and emotionally in relationship to me and to the therapeutic space. And I am interested in how our relationship may mirror how you are in other relationships.

I have an interest in working with trauma and character defining wounds. Uncovering and healing these wounds requires slow and patient befriending of our emotional life and our embodied world (how we are in our body and nervous system) while raising awareness of how we are in our relationships.

I am also interested in the particular life situation and relationships you find yourself in; how they support and not support you. What narratives you find yourself enmeshed in, the power structures that your life is colonized by, how well are you able to voice your needs and embody your truth in these situations and relationships: whether at work, in your intimate partnership and other community spaces?

I also have a strong interest in ultimate values, what you orbit around your life, what is your axis, your centre: what gives you ultimate meaning, and what experiences and practices support this?

I am interested in issues of spiritual bypassing, whether your spiritual practices and beliefs ultimately support all of you and if they bypass your emotional, embodied and relational life. I am also interested in spiritual emergence, how certain experiences may open you up to broader spaces of awareness/connection and how to fully integrate these into your life.

A Life's Inquiry into Belonging

My own path has been shaped by a potent lifelong inquiry into what it means to belong.

Arriving in Australia as a child initiated a deep question:

Where is home?

This question became the thread that guided me through years of study in the humanities at university, travels through many cultures, training in diverse psychotherapeutic and spiritual traditions, ongoing participation in a life of parenting and community building, the challenges of embodying and integrating the sacred in the everyday, and that deep quest to live a life of deep participation and embeddedness within the alive and relational field of the earth.

Today, I see belonging not as a destination, but as a sacred practice — one that invites us into deeper relationship with ourselves, each other, the Earth, and the sacred.

I currently live on 4 acres with my 9 and 13 yr old Steiner children.

Retreats, Trainings & Group Work

While I continue to offer individual psychotherapy, much of my energy now goes into the facilitation of transformative group programs — retreats, workshops, and practitioner trainings.

These programs are small, intimate, and deeply experiential. Held in beautiful natural settings, they offer a chance to slow down, heal in community, and remember our belonging to, and participation, in wider fields of existence.

Our multidisciplinary team includes trauma-informed psychotherapists, psychiatrists, paramedics, somatic practitioners (yoga, Chi-Kung), art therapists, musicians, movement teachers (5 Rhythms), nutritionists more — all working together to support embodied social and personal change and embodied integration.

My Work

My work lives at the intersection of several fields:

Trauma resolution & post traumatic growth
Cultivation of somatic/emotional & ecological/animate intelligence
Individual healing & community restoration
Ecological reconnection and & Earth/world grief
Grounded embodiment & Spiritual Emergence.
Deconstructing dominant cultural narratives & the Re-enchantment of our relationship to the earth & the sacred
Exploring individual narratives and embodying myth, archetype & ancestral remembering

I bring an integrative, trauma-informed lens shaped by the following orientations:

Relational Gestalt Therapy
Somatic Psychotherapy
Internal Family Systems
Psychodynamic/attachment traditions.
Eco-Psychology
Transpersonal Psychology
De-colonizing and critical frameworks
The emerging worldview of the poly-crisis
Respectful weaving of traditional stories/life ways

Qualifications

BA Religious Studies
Grad Dip Adult Education
Grad Dip Counselling
Masters Gestalt Therapy
Cert Somatic Psychotherapy (420 hrs)
Diploma Zen Shiatsu
Cert IV Training & Assessment

"There is only one question: how to love this world"

Mary Oliver

Testimonials

“I had been unable to access childhood memories and they came flooding back almost immediately and explained so much of my conditioning. This work is so powerful.”

Mike

"There is a song that wants to sing itself through us.
We just have to be available to it"

Joanna Macy