Taught by the great teachers of the last century.

Before the path

Peter spent the first part of his working life in his family’s automotive business. It gave him everything material and, as he tells it, no joy.

His recovery began more than thirty years ago. Early on, a mentor pointed him to the Eleventh Step, which asks us to seek through prayer and meditation, and gave him an unusual instruction: don’t wait years to get there. Start now.

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The teachers

That instruction led him to Deepak Chopra, with whom he trained in Primordial Sound Meditation; he has taught it as a Chopra-certified instructor ever since. In 1998 he was ordained in the Plum Village tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, receiving the Dharma name Chan Thiet Hanh, “Creative Practice of the Heart.” He later received the Lamp Transmission, making him a 43rd-generation teacher in the Linji School of Zen.

He studied yoga under Gurudev Amrit Desai, founder of Kripalu Yoga, who named him Rajesh and recognized him as a Yoga Master in the Integrative Amrit Method. He trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, the approach Jon Kabat-Zinn brought into Western clinical medicine.

Then, in 1999, came India. From the moment he stepped off the plane in Delhi, he describes it as arriving in another world. He spent time at the foot of Arunachala, the holy mountain of Tiruvannamalai, in the tradition of Ramana Maharshi, whose single question, “Who am I?”, sits at the root of everything Peter teaches. He stayed at Sathya Sai Baba’s ashram at Puttaparthi and visited the ashram of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. He wrote about that journey in his chapter “India: The Mother of Love” in A Blessing in Disguise.

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The work

In 1997 he founded Harmony Mountain Institute in Dalton, Pennsylvania, and Inner Harmony Wellness, now in Dalton and Stuart, Florida. He wanted a place where people could make the same journey he had made, without it taking half a lifetime.

He also worked to bring integrative medicine into the mainstream. With Dr. Andrew Weil he co-founded and chaired the National Integrative Medicine Council, the body instrumental in establishing the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health at the National Institutes of Health. He served on the Board of Regents of Bastyr University and helped develop the integrative medicine curriculum at the University of Arizona alongside Dr. Weil.

Alongside the practice, he kept studying: a degree in natural health sciences and nutrition, a master’s in transpersonal psychology, and in 2016 a PhD in Mind-Body Medicine from Saybrook University. His dissertation, The Theory of Awakening, mapped four states of consciousness, four stages of developmental awareness and thirteen behavioral patterns across the whole spiral of human awakening.

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“We’re just spiritual beings having a human experience.”