About Peter
NatureConnect Journey
During my 20s and 30s I worked in the environmental planning field primarily as a consultant and acquired degrees in ecology (BSc), and sustainability (MSc). During and after this time I volunteered significant time for numerous community and environmental organisations. I became a father at 33 and focused substantial time at home raising him while my partner returned to her career.
In my early 40s, my environmental work ended and an extended period of disharmony ensued at a personal level. This mid-life upheaval, with part-time work and single parenting, allowed me to undertake an ecopsychology doctorate (PhD) to investigate the experience of nature connectedness in relation to shifts in consciousness and identity.
After developing an approach during my research based on contemplative, affective and perceptual activities, I conducted numerous guided walks for individuals and groups in Sydney and Blue Mountains between 2010-2020. The testimonials beneath offer some insights into the effects on participants.
Between 2010 and 2014 I wrote four articles on connection and other similar subjects for the international peer-reviewed journal Ecopsychology and a similar number of environmental articles for the magazine, Australian Wellbeing. I self-published a book in 2012 – In the Presence of Nature: a guide for connecting in a climate of change – based on my doctorate.
With my focus now on wholeness mentoring, I do not promote my NatureConnect Program but rather include it for clients open to being in nature to explore their own wholeness. Creating an atmosphere of connectedness and love and acceptance is very conducive to exploring the many parts that make up our total self or totality. Immersive nature time also evokes a tangible sense of being whole and being part of a greater ecological or landform whole.
Wholeness Journey
It was early 2020 when I became aware of an inner calling to become whole, to be more than the divided, broken, limited self I had become. My unhappiness, my anxiety and fear of staying rooted in psychological tension and blockage led me to explore possibilities that I had never considered.
What follows is a summary of the stages of exploring wholeness I experienced. It will provide the context and basis of my wholeness understanding and capacity to be a mentor.
Stage 1: Before the Journey
In the years leading to the beginning of my wholeness journey in 2020, my inner life was becoming increasingly tense and disconnected. I had not been able to reinvent myself vocationally after my environmental consulting career had ended many years previous. I was on a part-time income with my partner and young son. I was focused on parenting and running a small business, but beneath it all I felt hollow, weighed down by regret, anxiety, and self-doubt. By 2019, I was at breaking point—unhappy, insecure, and despairing that the life I had created was a dead end. I had lost my mojo, my sense of life purpose and fearing I would never be able to find a way through my sense of stuckness and emptiness within.
Stage 2: The Catalyst
By early 2020 I could no longer pretend things were okay — the truth that I couldn’t keep doing what I’d always done landed with a force. This realisation had been gradually consolidating throughout 2019 although it had been seeded from an ayahuasca weekend in 2017 with its profound, disturbing experiences of Divine connection, immortality and ego death. Something shifted within but I did not understand how to integrate those experiences into another way of renewing my sense of self and life.
The year of 2019 had been one of increasing tension after closing my photographic gallery, the ongoing tension and breakdown of my marriage, the gnawing tension of living with inadequate life purpose and meaning, and the threat of bushfires near our home. I felt deeply broken and impotent. I knew I had been numbing and avoiding acknowledging the unconscious wounds that were shaping my sense of self, my life patterns.
A small, unlikely step — visiting a psychic medium late in 2019 for possible direction — nudged this realisation into motion. During one of the seven or so sessions a presence called Michael spoke through the medium and suggested I would learn to channel. I was disbelieving yet with support from the psychic and my own practice in early 2020, I began to trance channel.
The entity, Michael, introduced me to the idea of wholeness as a path of psychological and spiritual integration. I was not familiar with the idea except having experienced it during some NatureConnect sessions in the year or so leading up to that session. I began to receive guidance about my brokenness, my wholeness and why I had led the life I had. Then COVID lockdowns kept me home and, paradoxically, gave me the time and space to sit with this new practice and research wholeness with a view to writing a book.
Stage 3: The Journey
The journey into wholeness began in the midst of ordinary life — relationships, parenting, responsibilities, and all the messiness of domestic reality. I was fortunate to have time and flexibility to explore this path, though at first it carried an air of escapism, a familiar way of avoiding discomfort and old patterns. Yet as I leaned in, I began to see it differently: this wasn’t about running away but about answering a long-delayed calling to finally grow up, to step into something more real and sustaining.
The process wasn’t smooth. My ego resisted at every turn, clinging to old beliefs and defences, reluctant to let go of familiar identities built on insecurity and wounds. Often I gravitated to my ego tendency to intellectualise by focusing on researching, writing, and turning wholeness into an idea rather than a lived practice. But my yearning for becoming consciously whole required that I feel what I had avoided, to acknowledge the many parts of me shaped by pain and limitation, and to let those parts be acknowledged and integrated into a higher self, which later I would call my Father or Warrior self.
Over the years I developed an ecology of practices to explore and integrate all my parts into a sense of wholeness: meditation, nature connection, imaginal practice, mantras, trance channelling, reflection, full body stretching, mindfulness practices, daily exercise (cardio and resistance) and journalling. Each of these practices allowed my normal waking self to recognise and respond to the signals, feelings, intuitions, dreams expressed from my unconscious, my totality self and my spirit friends.
Through these practices, I gradually came to understand and integrate the complexity of becoming consciously whole into daily normal awareness. I developed compassion for those parts of me and began to weave them together into a deeper self-understanding. The teachings that emerged through spirit and experience distilled into what I now call the five pillars of wholeness: self-acceptance, self-forgiveness, self-love, humility, and gratitude. Not abstract ideals, but living practices that became anchors in my journey.
Where I’m at in my wholeness journey
Yes, becoming consciously whole (not just abstractly know we are inherently whole) requires inner ‘work’ – integrating experiential and reflective knowing into daily living. It can be experienced as a state of consciousness, a state of selfhood, a state of Being that is potentially present in each moment. Becoming conscious of this is a lifelong process, a step by step journey through the resistances, difficulties and breakthroughs.
Through these practices, I am not just maintaining a whole-of-self balance, a life balance, but maintaining a strong psychological foundation to manage the heavy states that still arise from my now familiar family of selves and my witnessing of the global breakdown: limiting thoughts, self-doubt, heavy feeling states such as anxiety, fear, guilt, remorse, despair, anger, waves of sadness, or old patterns of withdrawal.
Instead of being consumed by them as I once was, I now meet them with more patience, awareness, and perspective. Where before I resisted and/or was consumed by them, now I can see them in the larger context of who I am. Wholeness doesn’t mean those parts vanish; it means I can hold them within a larger sense of who I am. The way I engage my parts with their protective or adaptive dispositions has changed to a more accepting, compassionate relationship. That shift in perspective and deep awareness of one’s wholeness is the essence of what I call living wholeness.
What I’ve Learned About Myself
Too much to delve in here. Self-understanding is helpful at a rational, story-telling level but its self-acceptance, self compassion and self-love thats more crucial. You dont need to know everything, nor can you. I wilI share just one insight into my wholeness here.
I have learnt much about the family of selves that constitute my psyche, each self having his own perspective, own wounding or insecurity and associated reactive or deflective effects on my ego consciousness. They each have their own protective traits such as self-judgement, withdrawal and distrust of others.
I have had to acknowledge parts of myself that I had kept locked away in denial or ignorance. I could explain, in my mind, why relationships had broken down or how childhood shaped me. But I resisted allowing myself to feel the emotions that sat beneath those explanations.
When I finally allowed myself to feel the intense disconnect, fear, and vulnerability of my baby and child self with compassion, especially the little boy who believed he was unworthy or unlovable or unacceptable, I experienced relief and very gradually healing and a letting go.
Meeting those repressed emotions, and the boy who carried them, opened a space for compassion. I saw how my younger self created strategies to survive, to avoid pain, to hide feelings of being unworthy or unlovable.
I realised that many of my adult strategies — intellectualising, withdrawing, numbing, or escaping into nature — were ways of avoiding truly acknowledging and feeling those emotions. For me, this was a turning point: healing comes not only from insight but from allowing yourself to create the inner space of acceptance and compassion to feel what was once too painful to feel.
My Understanding of Wholeness Today
Wholeness may be inherent within each of us but only a few become consciously whole, that is, consciously integrate their unconscious and conscious parts into one overall empowered sense of self. It requires substantial, persistent inner work of compassionately embracing various aspects of totality – psychological, spiritual, consciousness, physical and the world we live in. It certainly helps if you are supported and guided on your journey of healing and inner growth.
Channelling journey
My spiritual searching began, at least consciously so, when I was 21 or 22. I became aware of an existential anxiety relating to death which represented non-existence, the void of nothingness. I felt sandwiched between the idea of this non-existence after one died and the religious notions of an afterlife. Both seemed fantastical, the former was obvious given our physical embodied nature, the latter seemed delusory and unprovable.
My spiritual search tended to be a cerebral one of reading the new age literature, as well as books and articles for laypeople on consciousness, Eastern philosophy and quantum physics. The most important guide in explaining the nature of reality, self and afterdeath existence were the Seth books trance channelled by American Jane Roberts in the 1960s through to the 1980s. I returned to certain Seth books for over 20 years when I needed re-affirmation about the nature of reality or who I really was beyond my physical body.
Learning to channel beyond the initial guidance I received was very challenging given my belief I was not in any way psychic. With my scientific oriented career, my very cognitive focus to my spirituality and my three science degrees, I experienced resistances to fully believing I could do it, despite actually doing it. I guess my inner sceptic was constantly casting doubts about this process. Nevertheless I learnt to surrender enough to let go and received the messages from my friends. I channel most days, have channelled through well over 100 entities during several thousand sessions over five years. I now focus on enhancing the meditative depth in order to improve my channelling experience and capacity. Go to the Messages from Spirit page for some examples of messages that have been expressed.