Peter's Expanded Bio

Peter began studying metaphysics when he was 14 years old. His life was turned upside down five years later when his father, to whom he was very close, died. The death of his father remains among the most significant events of Peter's life. "His death retriggered all of my previous losses: my parents' divorce, my birth trauma, and my feelings of emotional abandonment." Peter began shifting his focus from metaphysics to psychology, and began therapy. "I knew I wanted to be a counselor but quickly became disenchanted with the slow pace of what I was being taught in school." Peter sought out the experiential therapies he felt would be most helpful for him and his future career at Esalen Institute in Big Sur California, where he was a work scholar in 1978. "I felt there was tremendous value in everything I studied at Esalen, especially Gestalt and neo-Reichian therapy. I also experienced breathwork for the first time." He decided that breathwork was the process he had been looking for; it supported great release and was also very blissful, something he needed after the year of grief and rage he had experienced. "When I returned to school, I continued to be frustrated with the way things were presented, and six months later left to study breathwork and relationship counseling on a full-time basis."

Later that year (1979), he began his private practice as a breathworker, started leading seminars on relationships and other related topics, training other breathworkers. and became the Director of Theta Seminars in San Francisco (the original rebirthing center). In 1981, he became one of the original certified rebirthers. In 1982, he moved to New York City to work more closely with Sondra Ray's Loving Relationships Training (LRT), became a trainer for the LRT, and got married (to his now ex-wife). They moved to Seattle in 1986 after their first son was born. They chose Seattle as their favorite U.S. city with a healthy and somewhat evolved consciousness to raise a family.

Throughout the 80s, Peter felt the work of the Loving Relationships Training was moving in an increasingly metaphysical direction at the expense of working with the related emotional components of relationship issues. He realized that he needed to take his own path and work more with healing the emotional and the physical bodies as he had done before. It seemed that as a result of having children Peter faced his own issues even more deeply. Peter's life accelerated again, and he wanted to recapture the power of the more emotive therapies that had served him so well when his father died. Eventually, to feel fully able to accomplish this, he had to leave the LRT and return to doing only his own seminars. Peter resigned his position with the LRT in 1990 to create a new business, Relationships Transformations.

The most important thing to Peter is freedom. "To be free from and to be free with — to be free from the past, from abuse, from external authorities — to be free with relationships, with purposes, the earth, and commitments. Freedom comes from being present with life and relationships instead of trying to get away from them. The key to freedom is commitment: the more you're 'in' something, the freer you become.” Most aspects of Peter’s work can be connected to the context of being present emotionally.

Today, Peter counsels and coaches individuals, couples, and families, as well as speaking and facilitating workshops like Creating Intimacy. When not traveling and teaching workshops, Peter resides and practices near Seattle, in Redmond, Wash. Peter is available to teach or speak in your area or to your group.