Marianne Montalvo · Cape Town

You're exhausted in a way
a two-week vacation
won't fix.
There's another way through this.

You don't quite recognise yourself anymore.
That's where we begin.

You're not broken. You're dysregulated. There's a difference.

The Work

You've built a life that looks good from the outside.
So why do you feel like the walls are closing in?

You're not just tired. You don't quite recognise yourself anymore.

You've tried the professionals, the supplements, checked every box. And still you don't feel like yourself. Maybe your body has started saying what your mind won't — the sleep problems, the brain fog, the exhaustion that just won't lift.

This is not a productivity problem, a mindset problem, or a willpower problem. It is a nervous system problem. And the analytical mind that the market keeps targeting is not the lever. The body is.

Each session begins with a somatic or breathwork practice. We regulate your nervous system before any conversation begins. Over time, you develop a precise language for your own experience — what dysregulation feels like, what it does to your thinking, and what helps.

The measure of this work is not what happens in sessions. It is what begins to shift in your life — first slowly, and then with more momentum.

Who This Is For

Maybe you recognise yourself here.

Maybe you keep going, exhausted, because stopping feels impossible. But you know you can't keep going like this.
Maybe you can describe your life — all the successes, the job, the relationships, the achievements — but you feel almost nothing when you do.
Maybe you don't quite fit the burnout content you find online, which makes you feel more broken, not less.
Maybe your body has started saying what your mind won't. You can't shake the sleep problems, the brain fog, the feeling of exhaustion, that pain that just won't go away.
If this is you — exhausted, disconnected, or running on empty — this work was built for you.
Book a Free Discovery Call
What to Expect

A different kind
of accompaniment.

01

Each session begins with a somatic or breathwork practice. We regulate your nervous system before any conversation begins.

02

We use body-based inquiry and mindfulness to understand what is actually happening in real-time in your nervous system.

03

Over time you will develop a precise language for your own experience — what dysregulation feels like, and what helps.

04

Between sessions, you may be invited into small daily practices — breathwork, body awareness, values clarification. These are not tasks. They are new ways of being, practised inside a real life.

05

The mechanism is not advice or direction. It is thinking alongside. Quiet spaces. Questions that deepen rather than push. You hold them longer, hear yourself more clearly, find your own way forward.

06

The measure of this work is not what happens in sessions. It is what begins to shift in your life — first slowly, and then with more momentum.

Book a Free Discovery Call
Work With Me

Working
together.

Every engagement begins with a free discovery call. No agenda, no sales pitch. An honest conversation to see if working together makes sense.

01 Free

Discovery Call

30 to 45 minutes

A free conversation. We talk, we get a sense of each other, and we decide together whether working together is the right fit. No obligation. No sales pitch. Just an honest conversation.

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02 Single Session

Clarity Session

One session, complete in itself

One standalone conversation for the person who needs to get unstuck, or who wants to experience accompanied thinking before committing to a longer engagement. A single session, complete in itself.

Book a Session
03 Six Sessions

Core Package

Three months · Every two weeks

One full spiral of rest, small joy, and the beginning of integration. We work at your pace, in your direction. Not a programme with a fixed outcome. An accompanied journey toward hearing yourself clearly again. Online globally or in person in Cape Town.

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About Marianne

I've been exactly
where you are.

Credentials Certified Coach · Certified Facilitator · Yale · Harvard
Experience 20 years · 13 countries · Cross-cultural facilitation and coaching
Approach Nervous system and trauma-informed · Science-based · Identity-centred
Available Online globally · In person in Cape Town

At some point, the fly on the wall became more interesting than the meeting I was running.

I was good at my job. People said so. I had the career, the salary, the credentials. I knew how to show up, how to read a room, how to find the right words at the right moment. And the performance had become so fluent I barely had to think about it anymore. That, I would eventually understand, was the problem.

"What I bring that no credential can name is this: I have been exactly where you are."

I have spent twenty years holding space for people in hard situations across four continents. I started this practice because I know this territory from the inside — not just professionally, but personally.

I didn't find my way back through a framework. I found it by stopping. By learning to listen to what was happening in my body before I tried to think my way out. By giving myself permission, slowly, imperfectly, to become exactly who I was.

Lucerna means lantern. Not the light at the end of the tunnel. The one that travels with you through the dark.

Begin With a Discovery Call
Book a Free Discovery Call
"
You're not as lost as you think.

— Marianne Montalvo

Begin Here

Your first conversation
is a gift.

No commitment, no pressure. Just an honest 30 to 45 minutes to explore where you are and whether working together makes sense.

Book a Free Discovery Call Read the Substack