About Peter

I've always been drawn to spaces that recognise that some moments hold more weight than others. It's probably one of the reasons I've spent much of my adult life living in intentional and spiritual communities.

I spent 12 years at the Findhorn Community, an ecological village in Scotland, where ceremony, silence and prayer were woven into everyday life. While I was there, I watched a number of people go through interfaith ministry training. They seemed to flower. One man in particular was just so full of love and open to life. I remember thinking, "I'd like some of that." So I did the training myself!

After two years of study in London, I was ordained as an interfaith minister in 2008. I loved it. It opened up a way of offering sacredness in an everyday way, particularly for those of us who don't belong to a formally religious culture. My first wedding came a month after I was ordained and from there, it just flowed. The more ceremonies I hold, the more I understand them as threshold moments of change, and what it means to hold those moments with care. My curiosity about people and our inner worlds also led me to nine years of training in psychotherapy and process work, and I continue to support and counsel couples from diverse cultures today.

In my own life, I've experienced the power of ceremony to meet threshold spaces. When my father died, I hadn't cried since I was an adolescent. At his funeral, the ritual moments dropped me into a different space and asked me to meet what was happening.

Perhaps it makes sense that this work and interfaith ministry felt so natural to me. I grew up in Hong Kong, speak Mandarin, and have spent much of my life living across different countries, cultures and communities. After Findhorn, I lived in Auroville in South India for five years and today I'm settled in Crystal Waters in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland. Safe to say, I seem to be drawn to places that experiment with how we live and what it means to be human.

I've learned that ceremony continues to work on us long after the moment itself. My wife Kathy and I still come back to the vows we made at our wedding. One of mine was that "love is a practice." Love as something we choose, and return to. Our vows have become something we can hold onto and, inevitably, wrestle with as life changes.

That is what I hope to offer others… a ceremony that sends ripples into the life that follows.

With love,
Peter