Diego Pinzon Rubiano M.A.

The path that brought me here

This work isn't theoretical for me. I found my way to somatic psychotherapy through my own life, not just through study, and I think that's worth being honest about.

I grew up in a home marked by rupture. My parents' relationship was difficult and often in conflict, and they eventually separated; my father struggled with alcohol for much of my childhood. School wasn't an easy place for me either. I thought differently to the people around me, and for a long time I carried a quiet sense that I didn't quite belong to the world as it was arranged for me.

At seventeen or eighteen, psychedelics cracked something open, and what followed were years of genuine exploration: long stretches of consciousness work alongside formal study in psychology. I found real insight in that period, ideas and experiences that reorganised how I understood myself and the people around me. But if I'm honest, insight on its own didn't change very much. I could see my patterns clearly and still feel stuck inside them. Understanding a thing and being free of it turned out to be two very different projects.

Insight without integration, I eventually realised, is not the same as healing.

The shift came in 2020, when I began my own bioenergetic therapy. That's where I found what mainstream talk therapy, for all its value, had never quite reached for me: that lasting change asks something of the body, not only the mind. Working somatically, consistently, over an extended period of time, I found the missing half of what I'd been looking for since I was a teenager. Mind, body, energy, and emotion stopped being separate categories and started to feel like one integrated system, which is, I think, what they actually are.

That discovery reshaped my professional path as much as my personal one. I'd already completed a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and a Master of Arts in Transpersonal Psychology, and later a Diploma in Psychedelics and Health, each one part of trying to understand the mind and its further reaches. But it was the somatic work that finally gave me a method, not just a framework. In 2024 I began training in Core Energetics at the Institute of Body Psychotherapy in Brisbane, work I'm continuing now, in my third and final year, completing in 2026.

Alongside the training, I was drawn into some of the more pioneering edges of this field. I contributed to the psilocybin trial for end-of-life depression and anxiety at St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne, taught and coordinated for Psychedelics Today's Vital program, and worked with the Psychedelic Institute Australia. That world tends to get talked about in terms of the substances themselves. What it actually taught me was something older and simpler: how to sit with a person in a non-ordinary state, how to keep a space steady when someone is in deep and unfamiliar territory, and how much the integration afterwards matters more than the experience itself. It turned out to be the same skill the body asks for, because somatic sessions can open into their own altered, expanded and cathartic states, with no substance involved at all.

I share this not to make the work about me, but because I think it matters that the person sitting across from you has actually walked the path they're pointing you toward.