She is a clinical psychologist, but early on she realized that human beings need a broader, integrated view, as a whole. After marrying a Portuguese man, the Spanish-born Maria del Mar Cervantes made Portugal her home, built her career here and became a pioneer by opening a clinic and a school, Mentara, dedicated to Somatic Psychotherapy – a profession she is fighting to see regulated and independent. "It is a matter of time", she said in an interview with Integrall.

Until that happens, she continues to break new ground, certifying hundreds of psychotherapists. At the same time, she pursues her purpose of bringing psychotherapy to everyone through the social clinic, with sessions at affordable prices.

Integrall: Mentara is an internationally certified space dedicated to psychotherapy and wellbeing. How long has it been around?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: This space, as a company and a school, has existed since 2006, and in October this year we moved to new premises. It was born with the purpose of offering something with a structured backbone, because in these areas of development the work sometimes falls short for lack of certification and accreditation. That was always my goal: to have one foot in the system so I could take care of it – it is not all bad, but there is a lot that needs looking after – and, at the same time, to have the freedom to do what I believe in. So this school-clinic was founded in 2006, already holding the necessary national and international accreditations, so that we could offer the people who come to us something diverse and alternative, but at the same time with a great deal of structure, both academically and transpersonally.

I often tell my students that I would like them to have a language, first for themselves and then to give to the world, in which they could talk with someone who works in psychiatry, someone who works in spirituality, someone who works in neuroscience; in short, so that they can follow an integrative path.

Integrall: Why Mentara?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: Mentara came from the need to transform the name we had, which was much more classic – Centro de Psicoterapia Somática (Somatic Psychotherapy Center) – and which was wonderful for as long as it lasted, into something broader. Mentara is a word that can be said in any language; it has no translation. It brings together mind (mente) and air (ar), which speaks of breathing, and that is how all body psychotherapy began – with the observation of breathing. In fact, everything in life begins with the breath: the first thing we do is breathe in and the last is breathe out. So Mentara comes from a simple combination – I love simple things – of the mind, consciousness and air.

Integrall: Why did you decide to come to Portugal?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: I have been in Portugal since 1994. I married a Portuguese man; that is love, isn't it? When I met my first husband in 1990, I was 19 – I was very adventurous – and I thought it would be interesting to get to know other cultures, and I really liked the Portuguese one. So I took the plunge and came here, and I do not regret it at all; it is a very kind country. That is how I started my career, and I built it from a very young age.

Integrall: At that time, were you already working in psychotherapy?

"Portugal was missing a school with a backbone in the somatic field"

Maria del Mar Cervantes: Yes, I was always a psychologist, I always worked in psychotherapy. I did a lot of training in NLP, Gestalt, bioenergetics, biodynamics, biosynthesis, naturopathy, homeopathy and osteopathy. At the time, I was already working with therapy groups, but since work in a practice is very solitary, I also went to conferences and taught classes – I did a lot of things – and I came to realize that Portugal was missing a school with a backbone in the field I followed, which was the somatic line. As there was no school devoted to the whole body-based approach, bioenergetics, biosynthesis – which were great inspirations for me – I decided to create one. I began to make room for what is now the school and the clinic, to offer students placements, to build a whole process that took its time, until 2006. But, let's say, the school has been running since 1999; it is just that, until 2006, it ran more freely – the teachers came from abroad, we arranged the hotels and the rooms; in other words, it did not yet have a body, as it does today.

Integrall: Would you say that you were a pioneer in integral health in Portugal?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: I don't think I am the only one; obviously, there are other people who do this. But in truly bringing together psychotherapy, the body, medicine and the transpersonal side, I can say I was one of the first. Still, I have no narcissistic aspiration to stand on a podium for anything; I am not interested in that at all. What I am interested in is doing something meaningful – we are going to die, we all reach an end in this existence – so, rather than seeing myself as a pioneer, I want to see myself as someone who helps people truly get somewhere.

"Medicine needs us and we need medicine"

Integrall: But you broke new ground, and in that respect you were a pioneer.

Maria del Mar Cervantes: Yes, in the sense of giving it structure and credibility, of building a bridge to bring seriousness to this field, which was sometimes considered – and still is – strange, alternative, yes. It is not alternative, it is complementary. People can say what they like. Medicine needs us and we need medicine, so yes, we can say that, in that sense, it is complementary.

Integrall: At what point in your life did this wish to look at the human being as a whole arise?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: I have been devoted to this since I was very young. Mine is not the story of people who have a path, a profession, then something happens in their lives, they want to change and so they take up another profession. I have always had this wish, this vision; I cannot remember myself any other way. In fact, when I was very little – and did not yet understand certain things – I remember wanting to build bridges. I remember reading strange books; my father was a writer, very cultured, and he opened my mind a great deal. At home I had access to books on everything. As I did not adapt very well in adolescence, it was not very easy for me; I spent a lot of time alone, reading and trying to understand the world, and because it was hard for me to fit in, it gave me a wonderful time to look at myself and realize that everything is connected. So what I kept finding served to complement, broaden and teach me what was already inside me.

"(Self-)knowledge begins with a healthy selfish moment"

Integrall: So you started out self-taught?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: Yes, and like anyone, I think we have to be humbled to understand all this: we are all wounded souls. It was a bit like the story of Chiron, the centaur who, according to Greek mythology, was a healer who was once wounded and spent his whole life trying to heal his wound – something that never fully happens – but, as he kept looking for a cure, he found himself, learned to know himself better and to grow beyond himself. He was far richer for what he found along the way than for the healing of the wound itself. So, to understand myself and to understand the world – I think (self-)knowledge begins with a healthy selfish moment – I became interested in these subjects, and then the chance arose to share it and to help others as a therapist.

"Mentara trains professionals and has a social clinic that sees people at low cost (…) the world has become very individualistic. We need to give, collaborate, build community, help others"

Integrall: Has Mentara managed to fulfill its mission of bringing psychotherapy to everyone?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: I believe so. I always say that Mentara is like my fourth child. I have three children, and Mentara is like the fourth.

Mentara's aim is to train professionals, and it also has a social clinic that sees people at low cost. In other words, we guarantee placements for our students, who then go on to have their own practice – it gives me enormous joy that they have a professional future here, especially if they do good work – and, at the same time, they see the people who come to us for help at a symbolic price, much lower than the market rate. These people can be supported by our colleagues, both privately and through the social clinic, through which we provide a service to the community.

So my goal is to train people who make a difference in the world, in society, in groups, in their different areas, who touch people and, at the same time, help those who come to us, because not everyone wants to be a psychotherapist or therapist. We have a very large clinic, with around 50 therapists. It is low-cost therapy, but supervised. It is on the basis of this therapy and these client hours that our students earn their diploma at the end of the program. They have to give a lot in order to receive, not only the accreditation but also the understanding that the world has become very individualistic. We need to give, collaborate, build community, help others.

"The goal of Psychotherapy, as a field, is to one day be an independent profession"

Integrall: When you talk about training professionals, do you mean people who already have a degree in Psychology but want to move into Somatic Psychotherapy?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: We have national and European accreditation. The goal of Psychotherapy, as a field, is to one day be an independent profession, as Psychology once was when it separated from Medicine. It is in progress, but at the moment it is a specialization that lasts about five years. It is almost three thousand hours of very solid training, personal transformation and knowledge. So the entry requirement is a degree, which may be in Psychology, Medicine or Nursing, but people without a degree in these fields can also apply, with a very specific résumé and an interview, although they then have to take some separate ad hoc exams in psychopathology, developmental theory and diagnostic techniques so that they have a clinical language. If they pass the interview, they can go on to the European diploma. What we want is for them to be mature people, obviously over 23, whose aim is to go through an extraordinary journey in which, beyond the academic component, they themselves will be the object of their own work. It is a training very focused on developing awareness, the body, what one has to give, and also learning to give to others, but where the student is the main object of study.

Integrall: How many people have you trained over these 20 years?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: Hundreds. We have students here, in Spain and in Brazil.

Integrall: Who are the teachers on your team? Do they come from a wide range of fields?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: Yes, they come from various fields. We have psychologists, psychotherapists and doctors. Some of them were even my students for a while. I love spotting talent, I really do; if they grow, I grow. We all grow. So it is a multidisciplinary team, but above all they are people with very solid training and commitment.

"The world has changed, but the body has not"

Integrall: Is serious training needed in the field of caring for people?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: Without a doubt, and that is what I think is missing, because the human path is to question oneself, to question what is happening. The world has changed, but the body has not; it is still slow. Training is truly needed on how to care and how to give, but also on how the students themselves are doing; self-development is extremely important. For many years, training in which the student is passive has made no sense to me. Students have to take part, they have to do therapy and supervision, and work on every subject. Memorizing things is very important – I also love reading – it is essential, but you have to do much more than that, and few schools in the world do it.

"Just taking books home and sitting exams is absurdly unpedagogical"

Integrall: Is this way of teaching what sets Mentara apart?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: Without a doubt. One thing we do here is a lot of study but also a lot of practice from day one: students start listening to others, listening to themselves, meditating, observing themselves and doing individual psychotherapy. We have an integrated system in which people, when they join, come to undertake deep self-development and deep study, and for that we give them the necessary skills and tools. It is not just about taking books home and sitting exams; that is absurdly unpedagogical. Exams here are dynamic, they are real deep dives; there are monographs, research projects, sharing among peers, retreats and trips together. It is very important to realize that the way we teach and receive needs to be integrated. We do not learn only cognitively; we learn because we are touched and because we touch, because we are affected and take that home, into our lives. What sinks in becomes lived experience.

Integrall: Should there be regulation in this field?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: The Portuguese Federation of Psychotherapy (FEPSI), which I founded with other colleagues, has been fighting for several years for the regulation of the somatic psychotherapist profession, a field that includes the body but also other psychotherapies – there are more than 21 modalities – and which is still not regulated in Portugal. There is a struggle, just as there was at the time when doctors did not want psychologists to be professionals. Now it is psychologists – they have their reasons – who do not want non-psychologists to be psychotherapists, but I believe it is a matter of time. For me, as a psychologist and psychotherapist, what matters is not whether someone is a psychologist or a psychotherapist; there has to be training in psychotherapy solid enough to bring seriousness, proper care, ethics and a structured education to truly help people. Regulation will allow us to keep offering all of this, with the very high standards of the Society of Psychotherapy and the World Council for Psychotherapy. Sometimes we need to explain to people – and even to many fellow psychologists – that solid training in psychotherapy, which requires many years of study and dedication, is one thing, and a weekend course, with no dedication, no understanding and no process of developing excellence in order to create good professionals, is another. Regulation is needed, and that is what we do at Mentara, with a five-year program, and we work together with the Portuguese Federation of Psychotherapy and also with the European Association for Psychotherapy.

Integrall: What difficulties have you faced in getting psychotherapy regulated as a profession?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: The difficulties have to do with lack of knowledge, because people often do not know what a psychologist is, let alone a psychotherapist. Mental health and therapeutic processes are hard to explain because we live in a society of productivity, consumption, doing your best and leadership. At FEPSI, we went to talk to politicians to explain the difference between psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy, to tell them we are not witches – nothing of the sort – and they had no idea about any of it. Many were surprised and delighted. So it is a process that is not regulated, on the one hand, because of lack of knowledge, and on the other, because there are opposing forces, above all from the Portuguese Order of Psychologists, which feels threatened – instead of seeing this as an asset, as something we can work on together – and puts a lot of pressure to be the ones coordinating and leading within psychology, when this is a field that has been operating since 1994/1995. In the European Association for Psychotherapy (EAP), we are a group of thousands of people, spread across several countries, with schools of psychotherapy, who reached this conclusion a long time ago. In addition, we have the Strasbourg Declaration, which states that anyone who is neither a psychologist nor a doctor can be a psychotherapy professional, provided they train at a school with high teaching standards.

Integrall: As is the case with yours?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: As is the case with ours, whose standards are even higher than the EAP's. But in fact the great barrier, besides lack of knowledge, is the Order of Psychologists itself, which does not know us. I have invited psychologists from the Order to come here and see what we do, and when they come, they are delighted. When you do not know something, you are left with a sense of threat. So there is a war, in some ways political and also economic, because I feel they feel threatened, but we have FEPSI as our voice in the dialogue, and we hope they will become more open-minded, which I think will happen in the future, not so that they regulate us, but so that they do not block our regulation. We do not want psychologists to be the ones regulating us. What we want is for them not to block regulation and to be our partners, because we are not against them, but they are a little against us.

Integrall: Are you the president of FEPSI?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: No, I no longer hold a management position. I am the national delegate of the European Association for Psychotherapy – I represent Europe here – and I am one of the founders of the Portuguese Federation of Psychotherapy.

Integrall: In which countries is there already regulation?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: In Malta and Ireland; the others are in progress.

"The psychologist works a lot on behavior, on what is visible, and the psychotherapist works on what lies deeper"

Integrall: What is the difference between what a psychologist and a psychotherapist do?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: Beyond what they do, it is also about how a psychologist is trained, with little clinical practice. It is more a matter of study; individual psychotherapy is not mandatory. So, in a way – I felt this myself while I was training – the psychologist knows many theories and is able to make some kind of diagnosis; it is as if they were the general practitioner, who can screen and run some tests – and that can certainly make a difference – but a psychotherapist is someone who accompanies the person through the unconscious process, in awareness, in the body, someone who goes much deeper into what is going on; it is not only behavioral. The psychologist works a lot on behavior, on what is visible, and the psychotherapist works on what lies much deeper: consciousness, the unconscious, values, the organic side, how a person falls ill or does not, what breathing mechanisms they have, body language, transpersonal language, the language of systems. In other words, they have very solid training to go deeper. The goal is not to reduce symptoms; it is to walk a life path, which is very different from working with visible behavior.

Integrall: Where does the psychiatrist come in?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: The psychiatrist is a doctor and performs a medical act. When a person's symptoms disturb them to such an extent that they cannot lead a normal life, then a psychiatrist may be involved. We also have that integrated here at the school. I am not against medication; I am against overmedication. I think that for a person to be medicated, they have to be in a great, great deal of suffering. The psychiatrist intervenes with medication to regulate the person's chemistry and help them reduce symptoms that can make it unbearable to work or sleep and that prevent them from leading a normal life.

"A person cannot be seen in parts. I do not go to the doctor with a liver complaint and leave my head or my heart at home"

Integrall: Coming back to Mentara, your school approaches the person as a whole and takes an integral view of the human being.

Maria del Mar Cervantes: Yes, without a doubt. In fact, it was one of the things that drew me in from very early on: we cannot work with a person based only on what they think, say or express emotionally. We cannot set aside why they fall ill with cancer, or have pain, or have problems with their eyesight or skin, and what usually happens to them when they are more stressed, what triggers more explosive emotions, why they hold back, why they express themselves, why they have that tone of voice, why they dress that way, why they make that gesture, what their family is like, their origins, their culture, how they relate to the transpersonal, to death, to life. What can we learn from their biology? I love Biology; I did a doctorate in Psychosomatics and Neural Biology to bring it together with all this knowledge. So a person cannot be seen in parts. I do not go to the doctor with a liver complaint and leave my head or my heart at home. I go with my liver and with my heart. So it is very important for the doctor to ask me how my life is going, but they do not. I cannot go to a psychologist to complain that I have problems with my mother-in-law and have them not ask me what my values are, not work with my breathing or my body, not understand biology, attachment, a safe space or trauma. Human beings are very complex, and including everything is simpler than it seems. We have to pay attention.

"We do not know whether the body holds the soul or the soul holds the body, but it is the body that gives form to the embrace, the anguish, the anger"

Integrall: Does the body speak?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: Without a doubt.

Integrall: How does the body speak to us?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: The body speaks what the mind lies about. The mind lies. The body does not lie. The body is constantly telling us how we feel: when we get more irritated, when we are somewhere we do not feel good, when we have a coughing fit in a meeting, which is a way of telling us we are hearing something we do not want to hear and cannot swallow. We have unconscious movements in the body, like children who, for example, are very irritated and kick their legs because they want to run off at that moment but cannot. The body is constantly telling us how we feel in the world. When I am sad, it is on my chest that I put my hand. When I forget something, it is on my head that I put my hand. The body is always talking to us, and we do not know whether the body holds the soul or the soul holds the body, but it is the body that gives form to the embrace, the anguish, the anger. Things are happening inside us at every moment, and illnesses are the expression of all of that.

Integrall: How do you interpret the body's messages?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: We have a training called Psychosomatics and Epigenetics for psychotherapists. It is another training for understanding the language of symptoms. We do not carry out a medical intervention, because that is not the aim, but we understand how illness comes to us, what it wants to tell us, what it forces us and does not force us to do. What does fibromyalgia force a person to do? It forces them to stop and understand what is happening in their life. For example, in people with fibromyalgia we find similar patterns: very rigid, very demanding minds, for whom it is very hard to make their thinking more flexible, and their body ends up screaming – obviously, this is a very simplistic explanation; I am just drawing an analogy. For example, in people with cancer, if we look at what their life was like three years earlier, we discover many triggers. It is very interesting. I have been doing this in psychosomatics with my patients for many years, in a safe environment where they lower their defenses, and when I ask them why they think they became ill, they all know.

Integrall: And why is that?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: People say: "it was when I separated, it was when I was fired, it was when my mother fell ill, it was when I lost my friend", because that is when they pay more attention to themselves, when they look less outward and more inward. At that point, they know everything. It is when there is a shock to the body that is unbearable and unexpected, when one lives in loneliness without a way out, when one lives in isolation, in an utterly dramatic way – above all, dramatic – that the body takes the impact and has to respond. So it starts producing fear and anger; the organs start overproducing or stop producing things that are needed, developing illnesses. As Carl Gustav Jung said, "illness comes to heal the person, it comes to tell us things". It is good that we do something with that.

"What is not expressed becomes distorted"

Integrall: How important is it for people to live their emotions, rather than cover them up, in the process of preventing illness?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: Emotion is energy. If a person has a very strong emotion, sadness for example, and swallows it, does not talk, does not ask for help, does not dive in to understand how they are, when they do not express it, what is not expressed becomes distorted. It is one of the first sentences students learn here: "what is not expressed becomes distorted". What is not said stays inside, disturbed. Energy that does not expand, for which no way of sharing is found, implodes like any other, and certain organs have an affinity: sadness usually goes to the respiratory tract, anger goes more to the liver and gallbladder, inability to move and rigidity go to the bones – put very simply, this is what we work on here. When it is not expressed, the organism has to respond; it has to deal with what it cannot release, and that is where the body expresses itself and symptoms remain.

Integrall: Have Mentara and you, with your integrative view of health, already helped many people?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: That is what gives me the greatest joy: the thousands of people we have accompanied at the clinic and the school. My greatest joy is knowing that this has been happening for a long time and that many people keep coming to us.

Integrall: What transformations have you witnessed in people's lives?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: Transformations in people, in relationships or at work, who were falling ill and had very severe symptoms, such as hair loss and skin problems, and who began a process and started to feel more energy, more desire to live, more eroticism. Work is what comes to mind, but I have seen people for whom what was impossible became possible, people who went to live in other countries and now devote themselves to living somewhere simpler.

I remember a patient who, in the 2008 financial crisis, the subprime crisis, lost everything: his wife, his money, and he grew more and more fearful, because he was very stressed, with many issues. He arrived here in a very dramatic situation, with practically no money – of course we saw him – and, for him, the world was horrible; he wanted to kill himself, he had a very strong suicidal impulse. We kept working so that he could understand that every crisis holds both danger and opportunity, and little by little he came to understand that everything passes. One day, he was sitting in a park with his son and they bought a cheap ice cream – he who usually bought very expensive things – and then his five-year-old son said to him: "you've lost your age" – which was his way of telling his father he looked younger – and added: "I like you much more now, we can do this all the time".

Integrall: Are those the things that stay with you?

Maria del Mar Cervantes: They are things that stay with me because they are about the heart, about opening the mind, and about realizing that life asks much more of us than it seems, but that we can be much happier by being much deeper and simpler.

Source: Integrall