Pedro Campiao

PSYCHOTHERAPIST | FACILITATOR | EDUCATOR

Byron Bay Australia

Welcome

I’m Pedro Campiao, an industry-accredited psychotherapist, educator, and retreat facilitator with almost thirty years of experience accompanying people on their journey home — toward deeper connection with themselves, with others, the wider world and to live with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.

My work supports those navigating the effects of trauma, relationship difficulties, and significant life transitions, as well as questions of meaning, purpose, and how to integrate the sacred into everyday life. I also work with those feeling the collective anxiety and uncertainty that arise in our rapidly changing world.

I offer a grounded, skilled, and deeply compassionate presence, informed by decades of clinical and experiential practice. My integrative approach draws from somatic, relational, ecological, and transpersonal traditions, creating space for both attuned exploration and deep transformation

Whatever aspects of your emotional well-being you wish to explore or receive support around, I provide a therapeutic container shaped by wisdom, integrity, and attentive care — a space where depth, safety, and authenticity can meet.

"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)
Couples
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 work supports you to gently explore what may be holding you back from living with greater ease, meaning, and vitality. Trauma, as I understand it, is not just about what happened in the past, but about what remains unprocessed and continues to shape how you experience yourself, your relationships, and the world.

In therapy, we turn toward these places with care and curiosity. By meeting what has been left unresolved, the work naturally supports greater self-understanding, choice, and a deeper sense of alignment with who you are and how you want to live.

Living in the Uncertain times (the polycrisis)

Many people come to therapy feeling overwhelmed, anxious, disconnected, or disoriented — not because something is “wrong” with them, but because we are living in deeply uncertain and rapidly changing times.

Ecological loss, social fragmentation, political and economic instability, and a widespread loss of shared meaning affect us not only intellectually, but emotionally, relationally, and somatically. These pressures show up in our bodies, our relationships, our dreams, and our sense of hope. My work supports you to meet these times with greater resilience, groundedness, and connection — both within yourself and with the world around you.

Regenerative Culture and Reconnection

My therapeutic approach is informed by a regenerative perspective that understands healing as a process of reconnection — with yourself, with others, with the Earth, and with what you hold as sacred.

From this view, many struggles with mental health are less about personal failure and more about living in a culture that has become disconnected from the living systems that sustain us.

Therapy becomes a space to restore connection: to your body, your emotions, your relationships, and your sense of belonging in the wider web of life. Healing is not only about feeling better, but about feeling more alive, more rooted, and more at home in yourself and the world.

Decolonizing: a Relational Approach

My work is also shaped by a decolonizing perspective in psychotherapy. This means gently questioning narrow, Western, individualistic models of mental health and making space for multiple ways of knowing and healing.

I honour relational, embodied, ecological, spiritual, and community-based understandings of wellbeing, including wisdom traditions that have been historically marginalized.

From this perspective, healing is not something you do alone. It is a process of remembering connection — to yourself, to others, to ancestry, to land, and to the more-than-human world. Therapy becomes a space where these threads of connection can be slowly restored, in ways that feel respectful, meaningful, and alive.

How I work

I work with people who are asking deep questions about life, love, belonging, purpose, meaning, and what it means to live well in a world that often feels unwell. Many come to this work not because something is broken, but because something essential is stirring and asking for attention.

In our work together, I support you to deepen your sense of belonging — to yourself, to others, to the Earth, and to what you hold as sacred. Therapy becomes a space to slow down, listen carefully, and reconnect with what brings aliveness, meaning, and integrity to your life.

Coming home to yourself involves reconnecting with your body, your emotional life, and your innate vitality. Through somatic psychotherapy and embodied awareness, we explore your lived experience — sensations, emotions, impulses, longings, limits, and needs — and learn to trust the body’s emotional intelligence as a guide. This work supports greater self-trust, authenticity, and movement toward deeper self-actualization.

Healing relationships is central to the work. Relational wounds often live in the nervous system and shape how we attach, protect, or withdraw. I work with relational and developmental trauma using embodied approaches and parts work (including Internal Family Systems–informed practices), supporting healthier boundaries, emotional honesty, deeper intimacy, and the capacity to build nourishing, supportive relationships and community.

Reclaiming connection with the Earth is also an important dimension of healing. Disconnection from the natural world is not only ecological, but psychological and spiritual. I weave eco-therapeutic perspectives into the therapy space, supporting a felt sense of ecological belonging and kinship with the more-than-human world — a vital source of resilience, regulation, and meaning, especially in these times of global uncertainty.

Grounding life in what is sacred means making space for mystery, spirit, and ultimate values — whatever form they take for you. I am interested in what sits at the centre of your life, what you orient around, and what gives you a sense of depth and direction. This includes exploring how spiritual beliefs and practices support you, as well as gently noticing places of spiritual bypassing, where emotional, embodied, or relational aspects of experience may have been left out. I am also attentive to experiences of spiritual emergence and how to integrate expanded states of awareness in grounded, life-affirming ways.

_________

My practice is grounded in somatic and emotion-focused psychotherapy, informed by a gestalt, phenomenological lens. We attend closely to the here and now of your experience — what is unfolding in your body, emotions, thoughts, and relationships — and explore it together with curiosity and care.

Trauma lives in the nervous system, and healing involves restoring safety, flexibility, and connection within it. I support nervous system regulation through embodied awareness, emotional processing, and polyvagal-informed practices that help the body rediscover its natural capacity for regulation, connection, and aliveness.

The therapeutic relationship itself is a central part of the work. I pay close attention to how you experience me and the therapy space, and how patterns that arise between us may mirror dynamics in your wider life. Exploring these relational patterns can open meaningful pathways for insight, repair, and change.

I am also attentive to the broader contexts shaping your life. Many personal struggles cannot be separated from the collective conditions we are living within — ecological strain, social fragmentation, and inherited cultural and historical wounds.

My work is informed by regenerative and decolonizing perspectives that honour multiple ways of knowing and healing, and understand distress not only as individual pathology, but as a response to disconnection from community, land, meaning, and belonging.

Therapy, as I offer it, is an invitation to come into deeper relationship with yourself and the world — to heal what has been wounded, to reconnect with what sustains you, and to find ways of living that feel more truthful, rooted, and alive.

A Life's Inquiry into Belonging

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

Arriving in Australia as a child opened a question that has never really left me:

Where is home?

That question became the thread guiding my life — through years of studying the humanities at university, travels across many cultures, training in diverse psychotherapeutic and spiritual traditions, and ongoing participation in the lived work of parenting and community building.

that question has also carried me through the challenge of integrating the sacred into everyday life, and a deep commitment to living with participation and embeddedness in the alive, relational field of the Earth.

Today, I understand belonging not as a destination to be reached, but as a sacred and ongoing practice — one that continually invites us into deeper relationship with ourselves, with one another, with the Earth, and with the sacred.

I currently live on four acres with my two Steiner-educated children, aged ten and thirteen.

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 interwoven fields/threads:

Healing trauma and supporting post-traumatic growth
Awakening somatic, emotional, and ecological (animate) intelligence
Tending individual healing alongside the restoration of community
Reconnecting with the Earth and honouring world-grief
Grounding spiritual emergence in the lived, embodied human experience
Unravelling dominant cultural narratives and re-enchanting our relationship with the Earth and the sacred
Exploring personal stories through myth, archetype, and 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