Neel Panchmatia (he/them), MS, LPC

Hello, Jambo, and Namaste.

I was born and raised in Kenya in a fourth-generation East Indian immigrant family. I grew up in Kisumu, a quiet town on the shores of Lake Victoria, surrounded by equatorial sunsets, open skies, and the everyday beauty of many cultures living side by side. That early sense of place shaped me deeply. It gave me a lasting love for nature, language, story, belonging, and the many ways people learn to make a home in the world.

I moved to the United States in 2002, and Portland has been home since 2013. I am multilingual and speak English, Gujarati, Hindi, Swahili, and Punjabi. I have also lived in different parts of the United States, Canada, and England. These experiences shape the way I sit with clients: with curiosity, humility, and an awareness that each person carries not only an individual story, but also a cultural, ancestral, relational, and historical one.

I hold a Master’s degree in Counseling from Portland State University and a Master’s degree in Sociology, with a focus on immigrant and refugee arrival and adjustment experiences in the United States. I am a Licensed Professional Counselor in Oregon. Over the years, I have worked with individuals, couples, and groups across a range of clinical settings. For a list of services I currently offer, please visit the Counseling page.

My work is relational, collaborative, trauma-informed, and social justice-oriented. I believe therapy should be a place where you are met as a whole person: not just as a set of symptoms, but as someone shaped by body, mind, spirit, identity, culture, relationships, community, systems, grief, resilience, and longing.

I work with adults and couples navigating grief, anxiety, trauma, burnout, identity exploration, relationship challenges, spirituality, and major life transitions. Many of my clients are seeking an affirming space where all parts of themselves are welcome, especially after loss, marginalization, disconnection, or years of adapting in order to survive.

My approach is non-hierarchical and collaborative. You are not a problem to be fixed. You are a person to be understood, supported, and accompanied. Together, we clarify what matters, explore what hurts, build steadiness, and reconnect with your voice, body, values, and inner wisdom.

I draw from existential-humanistic therapy, Gestalt therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Internal Family Systems and parts work, feminist therapy, somatic and mindfulness-based approaches, and culturally responsive care. I also integrate narrative, relational, contemplative, and compassion-focused perspectives when they are useful to the work.

In practice, this means we may explore the stories you have inherited, the roles you have had to play, the parts of you that are exhausted or protective, the grief you have not had room to feel, the relationships that shape you, and the deeper questions of meaning, purpose, faith, identity, and belonging.

I believe therapy is most effective when it is tailored to the person in front of me. Some clients need grounding and nervous system support. Some need space to grieve. Some need help understanding patterns in relationships. Some need to reclaim their voice after years of shrinking. Some are trying to build a life that finally feels honest and their own.

My work honors the connection between mind, body, spirit, and lived experience. Healing is not only about thinking differently. It can also involve feeling safely in the body, grieving what has been lost, reconnecting with desire and purpose, restoring self-trust, and making meaning from what life has asked you to carry.

I welcome both spiritual and non-spiritual clients. For some people, spirituality, faith, ritual, ancestry, or devotion are central parts of healing. For others, meaning is found through relationships, justice, creativity, nature, embodiment, chosen family, or simply learning to live with more honesty and presence. My role is not to impose a worldview, but to honor the meaning-making language that is most true for you.

As a queer, South Asian/East African, neurodivergent, immigrant therapist of color, my work is also shaped by my own lived experience of identity, culture, migration, body, belonging, and difference. I hold a deep respect for clients who live at intersections: queer and trans clients, immigrants and children of immigrants, neurodivergent clients, fat and larger-bodied clients, disabled clients, spiritually complex clients, and those who have often had to translate themselves in order to be understood.

• I believe healing often begins when we no longer have to abandon ourselves to be accepted.
  

• I believe grief is not only about death, but also about identity, culture, family rupture, migration, body changes, lost futures, spiritual disconnection, and the lives we imagined for ourselves.
  

• I believe therapy can be a place of return: to the body, to truth, to tenderness, to agency, to connection, and to the parts of us that were never truly gone.
  

• I believe in compassion, accountability, curiosity, courage, and the possibility of becoming more fully ourselves.

• Above all, I believe that therapy should help you feel less alone. My hope is to offer a space where you can exhale, tell the truth, be met with care, and move toward a life that feels more grounded, honest, connected, and whole.

If this feels like the kind of support you're looking for, you're welcome to schedule a free consultation. 

May all beings be peaceful. 

May all beings be happy. 

May all beings be well. 

May all beings be safe. 

May all beings be free from suffering.

May all beings come together as one.