Michele Davidson of Modern Celebrant™ was the first professional Celebrant in BC
A gifted ceremonial storyteller, Michele is inspired by the people she meets and the interplay of their personal stories with universal human experiences. In her path as a ceremony maker, Michele inspires people to find hope and peace by commemorating the milestones of their lives well and thoughtfully. She believes that authentically crafted ceremonies have the power to connect us in ways we rarely experience nowadays.
Deeply connected to Life, Love, and Loss
A practicing Buddhist since 1990, Michele is keenly aware of the immense beauty of our human lives. She skips when she is happy. She is also deeply tuned into sorrow, having experienced tremendous loss in her own life. When people see her so joyously performing weddings or child blessings, they sometimes forget that she brings that same loving human spirit to her work with the dying and their families. (Michele is a trained Palliative Care and Hospice volunteer.) She is married to Dan and they say, “Our vows mean everything to us. In the last few years, we were called to support each other through some pretty thin times. Sadly, we have experienced a great deal of loss. But this has actually helped us discover how much we really love each other and to experience what an emotionally intimate marriage can be.”
Michele’s Vision and Expertise
Michele is an avid student of rites of passage and the ceremonies we use to mark them. She visions, crafts, and leads our most creative and complex ceremonies – Adoption and Baby Namings, Weddings, Divorce Ceremonies, and Ceremonies of Remembrance including Memorials, Ash Scatterings, Burials. Michele is an expert in different cultural and faith customs around birth, marriage, and death. She is highly regarded for her ability to blend multifaith and multicultural traditions in a respectful knowledgeable way. CBC Radio and CBC TV have featured Michele in documentaries, most recently she appeared in the nationally broadcast Thoroughly Modern Marriage.
Celebrant Michele is also in demand as a Speaker. She loves sharing with groups, counselors, and entrepreneurs about personal narrative and the power of storytelling, and of course about how to integrate vibrant heartfelt ritual and ceremony into the events of our lives. Michele is very honoured to be speaking at an upcoming gathering of Canadian Military Families about the role of ritual and ceremony beyond the military funeral. She is a graduate from the highly regarded Celebrant Foundation & Institute in the US, with a dual certification in Weddings + Ceremonies of Healing.
Creating Emotionally Expansive Ceremonial Experiences
The tremendous benefit of working with Michele is that she cares about what happens to you before, during, and after your ceremony. Her work is NOT limited to the ceremony day. She is a catalyst for transformation, guiding and collaborating with you well before your ceremony.
Simply put: Michele lives ceremony. She is guided by the Buddhist principle of Right Livelihood and uses Ceremony as her path of service.
