About

Dana Biechonski Fernandes is a highly attuned and warm somatic psychotherapist, known for her grounded presence and her capacity to meet complexity with sensitivity, clarity, and care. Her work is rooted in a deep respect for the body’s intelligence and in the understanding that healing unfolds through safety, relationship, and embodied listening.

She is a Somatic Psychotherapist and Certified Supervisor with Bodynamic International, the Danish school of somatic developmental psychology. Since 2014, Dana has worked internationally in private practice, supporting people with a wide range of body–mind and psychosomatic symptoms through an embodied, nervous-system-based approach.

Long before entering the somatic field, her path was shaped by years of immersion in transpersonal psychology, yoga, meditation, energetic and embodied practices, and encounters with ancient wisdom traditions. These formative explorations laid the ground for a way of listening that honors subtlety, presence, and aliveness, and the body as a site of meaning—not just symptom.

Her clinical and teaching work integrates somatic psychology, psychomotor research, nervous system science, and fascia studies. She explores how trauma, regulation, and connective tissue are interwoven, always holding this inquiry within an attuned therapeutic relationship that supports integration rather than force.

​

Dana’s work is deeply integrative, shaped by parallel professional trainings across psychotherapy, bodywork, and movement education, alongside earlier studies in transpersonal and energy-based modalities, including ThetaHealing, which contributed to her sensitivity to subtle processes and inner states.

She is a member of the Fascia Research Society and the European Association for Body Psychotherapy, and serves on the board of the Association for Bodynamic Psychology.

Drawing on somatic developmental psychology, polyvagal theory, and fascial science, she bridges hands-on manual work, somatic psychotherapy, and movement awareness. This multi-layered approach honors body, emotions, mind, and spirit as one living system, allowing healing to emerge through multiple entry points.

Within the Bodynamic community, Dana has contributed to professional and humanitarian initiatives, including facilitating support groups for Ukrainians during the first year of the war.

She is also the creator and facilitator of The Family Playground, a project fostering playful movement and embodied connection between parents and children, and The Playground, a program introducing embodiment-based practices into psychotherapeutic trainings that are traditionally more cognitively or verbally oriented.

Her professional path is inseparable from her lived experience. After a childhood immersed in movement—from Olympic gymnastics to yoga and acrobatics—she later lived with chronic pain that conventional approaches could not resolve. Turning toward somatic therapy marked a profound shift: within a year of deep body–emotional work, the pain eased, unresolved experiences surfaced to be met, and a renewed sense of vitality and inner connection emerged.

Years of living and studying in India further shaped her orientation, deepening her engagement with spiritual traditions, meditation, and embodied awareness practices across cultures, and refining her understanding of healing as a bridge between the somatic and the spiritual—between the intelligence of the body and the human longing for meaning and connection.

For over a decade, Dana has accompanied people in returning to an inner sense of stability, safety, and resilience—inviting them to experience the body not as a problem to be fixed, but as a wise and reliable guide home to themselves.