When the case doesn't fit the framework you have.
Somatic Consultation is the professional-facing practice of Lucas Vergnettes, DO(FR) — structured consultation, ongoing mentoring, and study groups for practitioners navigating presentations that standard training doesn't fully address. I work with peers who need someone to think with: someone who will read the complexity honestly and tell you what falls inside and outside the scope of an engagement.
Practitioners who need someone to think with.
DOMP · DO · physio · RMT · craniosacral
You have years of clinical experience and cases that no single framework fully accounts for. You want a peer who can sit with that complexity — not another technique to add to the stack.
SEP · sensorimotor · NARM · IFS · body-oriented modalities
You work in nervous-system and trauma-aware terms and want to understand what a hands-on practitioner reads through touch — for your referral decisions and your own intellectual development. You want a peer who speaks both languages without translating either down.
PhD candidates · faculty · journal reviewers · course designers
You are working at the intersection of manual therapy, somatic practice, and pain science. You want a practitioner with a current research orientation and an established clinical record.
Midwifery practices · perinatal clinics · osteopathic schools · trauma-informed group practices
You need something durable from an external engagement — a protocol, a training framework, a curriculum module. Engagements begin with a written scope and a defined deliverable.
Three forms of engagement.
Professional Consultation
$250/hrUSD or EUR · GST included · 60 or 90 min
A single structured session: brief case presentation, clinical discussion, written summary within two working days. Online or in-person in Oak Bay, Victoria.
Mentoring
By enquirySix or twelve months · Application required · 4+ years practice
Monthly 90-minute sessions over six or twelve months, with email contact between sessions. Limited to a small number of active mentees at any time.
Bodies as agents actively constructing predictions about their world, not passively receiving sensation.
The clinical frame I work from is enactive. The work of Thomson, Esteves, and Sposato on active inference in manual therapy has given precise language to what practitioner training often left implicit: that palpatory attention is a mutual encounter, not an extraction of information from a passive tissue.
My clinical formation is in the biodynamic tradition. Fulford and Becker shaped how I was trained to attend — with patience, with a quality of listening that precedes any technique decision. That lineage does not mean I work only with breath and tide; it means that the quality of attention I bring into a clinical encounter was formed in a tradition that takes sustained observation seriously as a clinical act.
I use Bach's framework not as a system of remedies but as an observational structure — a vocabulary for reading how a person organises their relationship to difficulty. Bohlen and Draper-Rodi have kept this orientation alive in clinical contexts where it can look like soft thinking but functions as precision: attending to what a person does with constraint, rather than only to the constraint itself.
I am currently completing a Master's in pain science and person-centred care at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, Helsinki. That engagement keeps my clinical reasoning in active conversation with the current literature on central sensitisation, predictive processing, and evidence-informed practice.
Full approach and lineage →Lucas Vergnettes, DO(FR)
I graduated from the Institut Supérieur d'Ostéopathie in Aix-en-Provence in 2003 and have been in continuous clinical practice since. I spent five years on faculty at CEESO Paris, teaching in the osteopathic programme, and served as president of the Académie d'Ostéopathie de France from 2012 to 2015. I moved to Victoria, BC in 2018. My current research sits at the intersection of pain science, predictive processing, and person-centred manual practice — I am working toward a Master's at Metropolia UAS, Helsinki. I see clinical patients through Saisons Osteopathy in Oak Bay.
Full background →Structured reading and case discussion — forming now.
Small groups meeting regularly to work through clinical literature, case presentations, and the practical application of frameworks from pain science, enactive cognition, and somatic therapy. Format and frequency determined by group; participation by enquiry.
Consultations book directly. Mentoring and study groups begin with an enquiry.
A consultation requires no prior contact — book and arrive with the case or question. For mentoring and study group enquiries, a short email is the right starting point.