Where this began
A few years ago, just after COVID, a client of mine was in Thailand when a nerve in her neck pinched so badly her whole face swelled. She couldn't sleep for days. Local treatment wasn't helping. She was helpless, frustrated, and far from home.
I didn't know if I could support her from a distance — I'd never tried anything like it.
But I suggested we give it a try anyway. She sent me photos of where the pain lived in her body, and I began guiding her, not with my hands, because I couldn't be there, but with everything I knew about the body, the nervous system, and how pain actually moves.
Within twenty-four hours, she was out of it.
What I learned went deeper than the relief itself. When people come to us in pain, there's often an unconscious expectation that we'll fix something for them — that's completely normal. But she was away, and I couldn't do anything to her. She had to take what I gave her and find her own way into her own body with it.
That wasn't just helpful. It was empowering.
I've felt ever since that this kind of empowerment shouldn't be reserved for people who happen to find their way into my practice.
Recently, a client with migraine attacks brought me back to this work, and I went looking for the old recordings. I realized I was six years older, six years more experienced, with more to offer than I had then — so I sat down and recorded the whole thing again, from scratch.
This course is that same guidance, built for you to work through on your own.
Pain is your body's alarm system — a messenger calling for attention. Two people can have identical scan results and completely different pain experiences, because pain is shaped by far more than tissue damage alone: by stress, by fear, by history, by how safe your system feels in a given moment.
This doesn't mean your pain isn't real. It means there is more available to work with than you might think.
This course focuses on physical pain — it's concrete, easy to locate, easy to build a practice around. But over more than a decade of work in the space between physical and emotional, between the motor and the psychological, I can tell you this: it's equally relevant to emotional pain. Our body braces and contracts in response to emotional pain the same way it does to physical pain — and very often, emotional pain is the underlying current beneath a physical one.
What pain actually is
Not proof
something's broken.
Built for anyone in pain — acute or chronic, recent or long-held. If your pain is acute, this is a practice for now. If it's chronic or recurring, this is a practice to return to again and again, not a single fix, but a capacity you build and keep.
You don't need a diagnosis, a certain fitness level, or any prior experience with somatic work. You need only a willingness to turn toward your own body and follow where it leads.
Everything is self-paced. No timer, no pressure to move faster than feels right. If you'd like personal support alongside the program, one-on-one sessions with Dana are also available.
Who this is for
A tool for life,
not a single fix.
Somatic psychotherapist, educator, supervisor, and Fascial manual therapist.
My practice draws on Somatic Developmental Psychology, Bodynamic Analysis, nervous system science, fascia manual therapy, and transpersonal approaches to the body.
I've spent over fifteen years working with chronic pain and early trauma — not as an outside observer, but as someone who lived with chronic pain myself for years before finding a different way through it.
That shift is what this course is built on. I'm not teaching you something abstract — I'm handing you what actually changed things, both for me and for the clients I've guided through it since.
Meet your teacher
Dana Biechonski Fernandes
This program is educational and does not replace medical care. It is not a substitute for diagnosis, treatment, or the advice of a qualified healthcare professional. If you are experiencing severe, worsening, or unexplained pain, please consult your doctor. Always listen to your body and seek professional support when needed.
