The Ghosts Movement didn’t arrive all at once. It wasn’t launched or planned. It emerged slowly, like a memory surfacing through silence, shaped by lived moments, long walks, quiet questions, and a life that never fully fit the script it was given.

Its earliest roots stretch back to my childhood. I was the youngest of three children in a home that overflowed with love. Family wasn’t just present, it was foundational. We lived in a house where affection hummed in every room. There was laughter, chaos, warmth, and constant connection. That kind of love gave me something rare, a secure backdrop against which I could rebel. And I did. I pushed boundaries, took risks, found freedom in not being watched too closely. But in the fullness of such a busy, loving home, it was also easy to become invisible. When everyone is busy being seen, the quiet ones can slip through the cracks. I learned how to vanish gently, to move between things, to feel what wasn’t said.

Books became my refuge, but it wasn’t easy. I lived with undiagnosed dyslexia, so every page was a climb. Every sentence demanded patience. Reading was never fast, never effortless. But that slowness gave me something others missed. Each word carried weight. Each pause became a doorway. I lingered in the gaps between phrases, and that space became its own kind of literacy. I didn’t just read the words. I lived in the silences around them.

Reading became my first portal, a place where I could disappear and return changed. A way to feel what others didn’t speak. This opened my imagination and the worlds I would create. I dreamed in smells and saw colours that didn’t exist. If something wasn’t possible, I imagined it into being. This was my world. My escape. Pedro’s playground.

At night, I would lie awake, listening to rain on the window, wondering if hot and cold held secret meetings before deciding how warm each raindrop should be. I felt things most people didn’t name, the ache beneath beauty, the shimmer behind stillness. I now call that presence, but back then it was simply the way I saw the world.

In my mid-teens, something broke open. The darkness came. Not the kind that poets write about, but the heavy, unbearable kind that strips you of your sense of belonging. I didn’t want to die, not exactly. I just didn’t know how to live.

What kept me here wasn’t therapy or rescue. It was something I now call the watcher, a still, silent awareness within me that simply stayed. It didn’t offer advice. It didn’t argue. It just witnessed, even when I couldn’t. And somehow, that witnessing became a boundary. A thin but sacred edge between collapse and endurance.

I began to develop rituals to protect myself from my own thoughts. I believed, long before I knew the word for it, that thoughts could shape reality. That letting a dark idea linger could give it power. So whenever something unbearable entered my mind, whether it was a vision of pain, or loss, or self-destruction, I whispered a phrase to myself, always the same: ‘Go away silly thoughts.’ I said it softly but with force, like a spell. Like closing a door I refused to walk through.

That phrase became my lifeline. My invisible practice. I was the gatekeeper to my own mind. The watcher behind the watcher. Garbage in, garbage out. If I could spin it first, I could stop it from hurting me. I believed that if I didn’t stop the thought, it might come true. If I didn’t push it out, it might pull me under. I couldn’t afford to entertain it, so I cast it out.

Eventually, I gave form to these defences. I imagined creatures in my mind, small, twisting guardians I called spin worms. They reworked the thoughts before they could settle. Not erasing them, just altering their shape. Making them smaller. Softer. Less believable. The watcher and the spin worms became my mental guardians. Together, they helped me stay. This was my firewall.

In my late teens, I became involved in Amway, a business network that, at the time, was known as much for its self-development culture as for its product sales. While others were doing typical teenage things, I was attending business seminars, listening to tapes on belief, mindset, and success, and reading every personal growth book I could find. It was a world of optimism and performance, where people were taught to visualise big futures and speak with conviction. For a time, I lived inside that world. It gave me structure, language, and energy. I credit those years with helping me build businesses, lead teams, and walk into rooms with confidence. That version of me, the speaker, the optimist, the visualiser, was real.

But he was only half the story. Another version of me remained. A quieter one. The trained optimism always had to dance with the unspoken shadows I carried. There were thoughts I couldn’t reframe into affirmations. Feelings that didn’t fit the seminar script. I held both. I still do.

Adulthood brought a life that looked successful from the outside. I ran businesses. Everything I touched seemed to work. My peers and family saw me as a success story. But it wasn’t my story. I never cared for keeping up with the Joneses, yet somehow I’d boarded their train. It was lonely at the top. I wanted out.

So I left the UK with my then-wife and young family and moved to Portugal. We bought a villa with a pool, enrolled the kids in international school, and chased a new kind of freedom. But I wasn’t chasing wealth. I was chasing simplicity. What I truly longed for was a shack by the sea, quiet mornings, a slower life, something real.

Then everything collapsed. The financial crash hit. My businesses failed. We lost the house. My family returned to the UK. I stayed behind to untangle the mess. And in the silence that followed, something deeper unravelled. What began was my midlife awakening.

I picked up a book I’d bought months earlier, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.
It wasn’t the kind of book you read casually. It was bold, direct, unapologetic in its dismantling of religion, a sharp, intellectual argument against belief in God.

I hadn’t considered myself religious in years. But I’d grown up in a Roman Catholic household, with Portuguese parents who carried the faith through tradition as much as conviction. I’d gone to church, made the sign of the cross, followed the rituals. Even after I stopped practicing, something of God remained. He was a background presence. A quiet fallback I didn’t question.

That book shattered it.

Its arguments dismantled the silent scaffolding I hadn’t realised was still holding part of me up. What I’d thought was long gone turned out to be quietly intact, until that moment. And once it cracked, it all came down at once.

For a while, I lived in that collapse. The absence. The rawness of nothing to lean on.
But sometimes you have to let a structure fall before you understand what still lives beneath it.

It didn’t just challenge religion. It stripped away the ground I didn’t know I was still standing on. I was left spiritually bare. Emotionally naked. The quiet presence I had always relied on, without realising, was suddenly gone.

But once the shock settled, that silence made space.

Into that space came The Power of Now and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, books that didn’t argue for belief, but invited awareness. They spoke of presence rather than doctrine, of stillness rather than certainty. I wasn’t new to that language. I had already been living it in quiet ways, watching thoughts, noticing stillness, creating protective rituals. But now it had a name. And more than a name, it had shape.

The books didn’t fix me. But they recognised me.
They gave voice to what I had long felt, but couldn’t yet articulate.

Dyslexia still made reading slow. But slowness became my teacher. It gave each word time to settle. I read between the lines, in the pauses. Presence wasn’t something I learned. It was something I remembered.

From that point forward, I began a life of seeking. The path widened. I read across faiths, mystic lineages, and nature-rooted paths. I explored sacred traditions and embodied wisdom. I wasn’t searching for salvation, but for resonance. And what I found brought peace.

Eventually, I returned to the UK and rejoined my family. We lived with my parents. I had no income, no prospects. I was too unconventional to be hired. So I created something of my own. I called it It Might Never Happen. It was my way of giving back.

I helped people write their life stories, not for fame, but for their family. There’s an African proverb: ‘When a person dies, a whole library disappears.’ My task was to help keep those libraries open. I also supported people as they downsized after grief, illness, or major life transitions, sometimes from a large family home to a single room in a care home.

My process was gentle. I offered presence. I listened. I asked the kinds of questions that helped memory rise slowly to the surface. What mattered wasn’t just the facts, but the feeling behind them, the scent of a kitchen, the echo of a voice, the moment someone felt truly seen.

I began to notice something. People held on to objects not for their function, but for the story they carried. A scarf. A cassette. A cracked mug. And I saw that when the story was told, the object could be released. When the memory was honoured, the weight could lift.

That was the seed of The Ghosts Movement. I began to see that memory wasn’t just held. It was transmitted. And very few of us had ever been shown how.

The whispers of The Ghosts Manifesto had been with me for some time. But in the years leading up to pandemic, they began to take clearer shape. A rhythm formed in the background. And when the world slowed, I finally had space to meet it. Not from sorrow, but from stillness. A quiet readiness. The kind that comes after wounds begin to heal. The spin worms began to rest. I no longer feared the dark. It had already shaped me.

The Ghosts Manifesto didn’t arrive as instruction. It arrived as remembering. Around it, a trilogy of books began to form, one for the past, one for the present, and one for the echo still calling from the future. They weren’t written to teach. They were written to help people feel. To witness. To hold memory in presence. The weekly reflections followed. What had whispered began to hum. What had stirred began to settle.

Some parts of the movement came from long ago. Others only revealed themselves through the act of writing. But it has always walked beside me.

Today, Ghosts walks beside all ways of living, across beliefs, traditions, and quiet ways of knowing. It doesn’t aim to replace. It aims to accompany. It finds its place inside whatever life you’re already living, not by changing it, but by quietly threading presence through it. It honours memory. It honours grief. It honours love. It holds both light and shadow, not as opposites, but as co-guardians of what I call the dot, the origin point where memory and presence meet.

And maybe that’s why The Ghosts Movement moves the way it does. Slowly. Thoughtfully. In gaps and pauses. Like the way I learned to read, not fast, not efficiently, but with feeling. Because when you live in the space between words, you begin to notice what others miss.

Stillness takes many forms. It lives in the hush of ritual and the clatter of dishes. In the rush of school runs. In tired evenings and unspoken gestures. Ghosts is in the mess as much as the sacred. Memory and presence are everywhere.

Circles are forming. The community is growing. My role is to step aside and let Ghosts grow beyond me. This was never mine to own. I simply wrote down what we’ve always known, that memory leaves a trace, that presence asks nothing of us but to be here, as we are, and that sometimes, the quietest truths live inside us, even when the world around us is loud.

And it was Crystal, my now wife, along with our young, growing family and our three cats, who first encouraged me to give it shape. For years, the movement had lived in my head, unspoken, unwritten, circling in thought. She believed in the rhythm and message of the movement before either had a name. Her quiet knowing gave Ghosts its first breath. Without her, it might still be buried. Without her, I might never have put pen to paper.

This is The Ghosts Movement. Not as an idea, but as a rhythm. A return. A quiet remembering.

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