about

Dr Emily Tunks (she/her)
Health Psychologist MAAPi
Somatic and Psychedelic Integration Psychotherapist
Supervision. Training. Consultation.

Emily aims to support individuals understand their whole selves - body and mind, so that their health, relationships, vocation and life purpose may thrive, in spite of set-backs and ongoing challenges. Emily is a member of the Australian Association of Psychologists Inc. and is endorsed in Health Psychology (AHPRA). She maintains a commitment to excellence through researching best-practice techniques and her strong understanding of health psychology, clinical psychology, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, somatic (body) psychotherapy, psychodynamic psychotherapy, physiology, ecotherapy and psychoneuroimmunology. Both in session and outside, Emily draws on her modern practice of contemplation traditions and is a graduate and teaching assistant of Hakomi Somatic Psychotherapy professional training.

Since beginning clinical research in Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapy (PAT) for the first Australian study of psilocin for depression (2022), Emily has been a co-therapist in both local and international trials - including MDMA for PTSD in First Responders at Monash University (in collaboration with MAPS/USA) and intravenous (IV) studies with psilocin at Swinburne University. As part of her commitment to this potent and humbling research, Emily continues to train extensively with leading international experts in PAT, trauma and somatic psychotherapy and in 2025, Emily was invited to study in Brazil with Dr Luis Eduardo Luna; Anthropologist, Author and the Director of Wasiwaska Research Centre. Emily offers a harm reduction framework that deeply respects the healing potential of “non-ordinary” states of consciousness but most importantly, their safe, ethical and useful integration.

Emily co-majored in Psychology and Psychophysiology at Swinburne University, and after obtaining first class honours in 2002, she was awarded a full scholarship to complete a Doctorate of Psychology (Health) at Deakin University. Her doctoral qualitative research investigated Australian specialists' attitudes and practices of death determination methods, end-of-life care and organ donation, which was published in a high impact, international SAGE scientific journal: Journal of Health Psychology (under previous name: E. Macvean). 

In addition to private clinical work, Emily has over a decade of multidisciplinary team experience in world-leading pain management and chronic illness hospital units, rehabilitation units, community health settings and university lecturing.

Emily’s 2025 interview with P.U.N.K International Podcast about the Somatic Foundations in Psychedelic Therapy and the Necessity of Therapist Well-Being

Health Psychology and Board Approved Supervision

Emily offers clinical health psychology and supervision, which is a field of psychology that focuses on the overlap between biological, psychological, social and emotional aspects of health and disease, and how to better understand and treat this crucial intersection.

While an established offering in many public hospital psychology units, private health psychology services are much harder to find. This prompted Emily to establish embody being™, now located in two inner Melbourne locations and online. With our improving awareness of neurodivergence, incidents of chronic illness are rising but so is life expectancy. To maximise our quality of life, there has never been a more important time for health psychology in Australia.

Emily discusses the life-changing significance of holistic health care, in a written interview for Australian Unity here.

For more about Health Psychology here in Australia, America and England please see:

 

“Health psychologists use their knowledge of psychology and health to promote general well-being and understand physical illness.

They are specially trained to help people deal with the psychological and emotional aspects of health and illness as well as supporting people who are chronically ill. ”

— The British Psychological Society

Somatic Psychotherapy

It was the Eastern principles (Hakomi: Mind-Body Holism, Organicity, Mindfulness, Unity and Non-violence) that initially drew Emily to find additional ways of supporting people in their therapy: “what I didn’t anticipate is just how deeply these five principles continue to impact me and my practice”.

Through mindful exploration, relationally-based psychodynamic process and contemporary developmental maps, somatic psychotherapy offers the ‘curious of mind’ a multitude of non-pathologising methods to better understand our individual and shared conditioning. Most importantly, it shows therapist and client how to authentically integrate these experiences back into our hearts, bodies and relationships (note that touch is not required).

Somatic psychotherapy will support us to ‘see’ the things that are always present, but we may not have been previously guided on how or where to notice them. It offers elegantly simple but strikingly powerful methods to meet others, so that the unconscious, its innate wisdom and any protective ‘resistance’ is genuinely welcomed like it’s the most insightful part in the room, because it is.

Therapy then becomes a true method of assisted self-discovery, which makes the ‘work’ of being both a client and therapist enriching, inspiring and sustaining.

For more information on how somatic psychotherapy differs, see here for Hakomi Trainer Donna Martin’s short example of one practice.

Qualifications and Recent Courses

  • 2025 Wasiwaska Research Centre, Brazil: Bridging Indigenous Wisdom & Modern Psychiatry - a Culturally Sensitive Approach to PAT

  • 2025 AHPRA Board Approved Psychology Supervisor (Health Psychology Endorsement)

  • 2024/25 Hakomi Somatic Psychotherapy Professional Training, Melbourne: Teaching Assistant (levels 1-3)

  • 2024 Indigenous Psychedelic Assisted Therapies (IPAT): We-Al-li Trauma Informed Care and Practice

  • 2023 Advanced Hakomi Somatic Psychotherapy Clinical Supervision, 3rd Year

  • 2021/22 Advanced Somatic Intelligence Trauma Training Approach, 1st and 2nd Year

  • 2021 Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS, USA): MDMA Assisted Psychotherapy

  • 2020 Hakomi Somatic Psychotherapy Professional Training, Year Two

  • 2018-2019 Hakomi Somatic Psychotherapy Workshops and Professional Training, Year One

  • 2007-2010 Doctorate of Psychology (Health)

  • 2002 Bachelor of Science – Psychophysiology Honours (First Class)

  • 1997-2001 Bachelor of Arts – Psychology/Psychophysiology

Speaking Engagements

Invited Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapy speaker at recent multidisciplinary scientific conferences:

  • Keynote speaker at the 2025 VAADA Victorian AOD Service Providers Conference

  • Plenary panellist at the 45th Australian Pain Society Conference, Melbourne 2025

  • Speaker and panellist at the 2025 Northern Australian Psychedelic Science Conference, Brisbane, delivering a paper titled: Becoming Somebody before Becoming Nobody - Somatic and Relational Approaches to MDMA Therapy

Associations and Memberships