Who i am and what i stand for
Hello, I am Peter Ajemian. I create a safe and supportive container for psychedelic exploration, guiding clients through a multi-modal approach designed to foster profound personal evolution.
As a Minister within the Congregation for Sacred Practices, a recognized 501(c)(3) religious organization, I provide multi-modal spiritual support, integrating diverse therapeutic approaches, to facilitate personal growth and contemplative practices. This may include the use of sacramental substances within a safe container. I see psychedelic guiding as an orchestration of psychotherapy, spiritual guidance, mindfulness, and intuition, recognizing the unique needs of each individual.
My devotion to seeing others thrive and transform was forged in the crucible of my childhood. Raised in a family focused on community building, I tuned in early on to the importance of helping make the lives of others better. In parallel with this, my family would go on long family vacations in nature … the desert, the ocean, and the sprawling forests of the Cascades, filling my heart with a joyful sense of the connectedness of everything and waking me up to the experience of mindfulness.
At age 11, I followed my older brother to traditional karate, starting me on a 40-plus year trajectory of martial arts trainings, including White Crane Silat kung fu, various forms of Jiujitsu, kick boxing, Wing Tsun kung fu, and Systema, deepening my mindfulness practice along the way. After a foray into the world of community development and collaborative art making — which included receiving a master’s degree in public policy — I re-focused my attention on community building and collaboration in the context of movement and fitness coaching, and martial arts and mindfulness practices and trainings. My diverse experience gives me the capacity to assist you in create sustainable positive personal behavioral change over 3 – 6 months of weekly meetings. When I’m not working with clients, I’m out in the world hiking, paddleboarding, surfing, mushroom hunting, and romping with my dog M’ija.
Peter’s Values
Safety: Peter builds physical and emotional safety into every interaction and experience.
Diversity: Peter welcomes diverse types of bodies, ages, genders, learning styles, and cultural backgrounds.
Play: Peter believes that humans learn most quickly through play, he helps his clients overcome perceived obstacles by using different play strategies.
Strength & Conditioning
Peter guides you through diverse fitness challenges that he has trained over the past 40 years while studying different types of martial arts, yoga and gymnastics programs. Peter customizes these programs to make you stronger and more aware, so that you can actually sustain your growth over years, not just a few weeks, with minimal training injuries. Starting with foundational movement techniques to build coordinated body movement, Peter leads you through different natural human body movements that challenge your mind, body & soul simultaneously. Peter builds your awareness (mindfulness) by helping you understand it’s not what you’re doing, it’s how your doing it, one of his core training principles.
Stress Relief & Mindfulness Training
Are you a working professional? With kids? Full-time dad or mom, plus working professional? COVID got you down? Systematic racism and political polarity in our county & climate change get you stressed out occasionally? Peter offers you a multitude of techniques that help you release your stress from simple breath work techniques to healthy movement to self-massage that you can do anywhere, anytime. Peter has been training meditation through breathwork since he was 12 years old. He started with a traditional practice of seated breath work under John Lawrence, and then moved on to moving meditation through his various martial arts training. Currently he follows the training of Dan Brule’, which is to say he simplifies the process for his clients to grow over time with small steps leading to sustainable, constructive outcomes.
Martial Arts
Peter’s Training Experience & Teaching Method of Embodied Movement:
I employ Principles-Based Training techniques throughout his teaching. By principles based, I mean I focus on building fundamental blocks of movement and the strategies and principles which improve all of your movement. All of my training is informed by physical therapists & anatomy teachers with a real world application in mind. I believe in cultivating a rigorous search for the truth that allows for cross-platform discussions of effective and healthy body movement.
My movement training lineages:
My long term martial arts study is rooted in western functional movement training, traditional Chinese and Indonesian martial arts styles, including PGB White Crane Silat (Shaolin Kung Fu mixed with Pencak Silat), Wing Tsun; Russian Systema, Chi Gung, T’ai Chi, Shito Ryu Karate, and Eskrima and various grappling arts including Brazilian Jiujitsu. My self-defense system comes from Rory Miller’s Chiron Training program. I have trained various forms of yoga, gymnastics and anatomy over 30 years with different teachers.
Applied Self Defense Training
After training in traditional martial arts systems for 30 years, Peter met Rory Miller in 2008 and has studied his applied self-defense system with him since then. Rory’s Chiron Training program is a concept-based teaching program based on the simple and effective movement and human predatory psychology. Peter assesses his client’s “victim profile status” with in-depth personal interviews, then offers practical life choices that vary greatly based on peoples’ lifestyles and goals. Peter strongly believes that everybody has the right to defend themselves and their loved ones regardless of any physical limitations. Great for beginners and intermediate clients who “don’t like to fight.” For those who like to roughhouse, and don’t have much physical training, Peter creates different training programs.