Sarah’s Life & Love Community Care

Holistic Celebrant | Sacred Deathcare Practitioner | Marriage Therapist | Relationship & Emotional Wellbeing Coach

Doing LOVE’s work — at every threshold.

Sarah Tolmie is a guide through the most meaningful, emotional, and transformational moments of life. As a holistic celebrant, therapist, coach, and end-of-life consultant, Sarah offers deep and compassionate support to individuals, couples, families, and communities as they navigate life’s profound thresholds — from celebration and commitment to grief and farewell.

Her integrated practice supports growth and connection across three core areas:

  • Love, Marriage & Family Relationships

  • Wellbeing, Lifestyle & Emotional Resilience

  • Grief, Loss, Dying & Death

A highly skilled Marriage Therapist and Relationship Coach, Sarah specialises in helping couples build emotional literacy, repair conflict, and foster deep connection. Her work is grounded in the Gottman Method, a gold standard in relationship science with over 40 years of research.

Sarah’s signature relationship program, Creating a Miracle Marriage, offers a conscious and sustainable path to long-lasting love and intimacy.

In her work as an Emotional Wellbeing Coach, Sarah supports individuals seeking greater presence, balance, and self-awareness in everyday life. Her transformative course, How Do You Feel?, helps people expand their emotional vocabulary, understand the signals of their inner world, and develop resilience through feeling — not just functioning.

As a Life & Love Holistic Celebrant, Sarah creates meaningful ceremonies across life’s seasons — weddings, commitments, namings, motherhood rituals, funerals, and memorials — tailored to honour each person’s unique story, values, and beliefs. Her Pre-Marriage Coaching Workshops provide couples with a grounded, joyful, and insightful start to their married life.

In her sacred work around end-of-life, Sarah is a Holistic Funeral Director, Deathcare Practitioner, and End-of-Life Consultant. She offers soul-centred care and guidance to individuals and families journeying through illness, dying, and death. Her work is supported by years of experience as a non-religious hospital chaplain, along with training in clinical pastoral care, grief and bereavement therapy, death doula work, and after-death care rituals.

Through her free video series, Landscapes of Life, Love & Loss, Sarah invites people into safe, open-hearted conversations about death, grief, and healing — conversations that bring dignity, depth, and meaning to our shared human experience.

At every stage of the journey — from first breaths to final goodbyes — Sarah walks with others in love, presence, and deep respect.

This is life and love work.
Soulful. Sacred. Human.

Professional History, Therapeutic & Academic Qualifications – BA. MA. CMC

Sarah Tolmie is a trusted and respected practitioner in the field of holistic community care, bringing together almost two decades of experience across therapy, celebrancy, coaching, end-of-life care, and funeral directing. Her work has evolved into a unique offering that supports people across the full spectrum of life’s most significant thresholds—love, loss, and everything in between.

Beginning her career as a Commonwealth-registered Marriage Celebrant in 2005, Sarah soon expanded into therapeutic work, training as a Marriage & Relationship Therapist in the Gottman Method, and as an Emotional Wellbeing Coach. This powerful blend of skills allows her to support individuals, couples, and families as they navigate major transitions, crises, and celebrations—whether it’s the joy of marriage or the challenge of grief.

Since 2016, Sarah has also worked as a Holistic Funeral Director, End-of-Life Consultant, Death Doula, and Sacred Deathcare Practitioner—offering a full suite of heart-led, personalised death and grief care services. She has trained as a Grief Educator (David Kessler), volunteered for four years as a non-religious ward chaplain at Gosford Hospital, and partners with Picaluna Funerals, a progressive and transparent funeral model in Australia that champions meaning-making and bespoke ceremonies.

Sarah’s academic foundation in Social Anthropology and Psychology underpins her work, with her practice now reflecting a modern, grounded form of “fieldwork” in human relationships and rites of passage. Her approach to ceremony, therapy, and healing offers profound and meaningful experiences that help people reconnect with love, ritual, purpose, and presence.

Before her transition to full-time caring services, Sarah spent over 20 years working in media, corporate communications, and PR, including senior roles at IBM Australia. This background lends her professional and communication expertise that enhances all aspects of her practice.

Training & Qualifications

  • Trained Marriage Therapist – Gottman Method Level 1 & 2, Trauma & Infidelity

  • Couples Therapy: REAL Life Therapy (Terry Real) and Esther Perel Training

  • Certified Grief Educator – David Kessler

  • Clinical Pastoral Care Practitioner – College of Clinical Pastoral Education (Gosford Hospital)

  • Certified Funeral and Marriage Celebrant – Diploma of Celebrancy

  • Death Doula and After-Death Body Care training

  • NLP Master Practitioner & Coach, Hypnosis, Timeline Therapy®

  • Bachelor of Arts (Anthropology, Psychology, Linguistics – University of Sydney)

  • Masters in Communication Management – UTS

  • Laughter Yoga Leader & Primary Ethics Volunteer Teacher

Our fifth ‘wedding’ renewing our vows at Pearl Beach

Beloved ‘fur-child’ Harvey

Behind the Practice

Sarah truly walks her talk — and often her dog — on the beaches of the NSW Central Coast, where she’s lived since 2001. What began as a sea change quickly became a soul shift: a life filled with more love, presence, purpose, and laughter.

She’s been married to the love of her life, Andrew, for over 28 years. And they marry recommit and marry each other every 7 years – happily celebrating their fifth wedding in Feb 2025.  They are the proud parents of two wonderful man-children, Finn and Rory. Alnd also deeply devoted to their four-legged sidekick, Harvey — a beloved fur-child and beach companion.

Originally trained in Social Anthropology and Psychology, Sarah has always been fascinated by the way we love, live, grieve, and grow. After stepping away from a corporate career, she returned to what she truly loved: ceremony, relationships, healing, and transformation. That journey — with all its twists, turns, and scenic detours — led her to become a Celebrant, Therapist, Coach, and Sacred Deathcare Practitioner.

Her Central Coast life has been marked by close encounters with birth and death, love and loss, joy and surrender, and she brings every ounce of that lived experience into her work.

Sarah grounds herself in meditation, prayer, and saltwater therapy — daily visits to the ocean are her ritual of choice. She thrives on deep chats with dear friends, wise words from her beautiful mum, and the soul-filling sisterhood of women around her. And her gorgeous gaggle of neurodiverse menfolk She proudly owns her title of “undomestic goddess” and chooses laughter over laundry any day.

She’s enchanted by hiking, ocean swimming, and maintains a playfully complicated relationship with yoga. She dabbles in laughter yoga, bad singing, and binge-meditating (preferably from a hammock or her secret rock at a sacred coastal spot).

And yes — Sarah is always up for dancing, singing, and champagne… preferably all at once.

Umina Precinct Park

Community Roots & Service Ethic

Sarah has always been driven by a strong sense of service and community care. When her children were in primary school, she volunteered as a Primary Ethics teacher, supporting young minds in developing critical thinking, empathy, and ethical reasoning.

She also served as President of the Peninsula Families Action Group, a passionate community collective advocating for improved parks and public spaces for families on the Central Coast Peninsula. Through this work, Sarah became a committee member on the Gosford Regional Playground Strategy Committee with Gosford City Council — playing a key role in delivering what became the largest single playground investment on the Central Coast.

The result? An extraordinary, all-abilities playground at Umina Beach, featuring the biggest rope climbing structure in the Southern Hemisphere. After five years of advocacy, planning, and collaboration, the playground officially opened in December 2010 — and remains a cherished community asset. (Go on… check it out for a climb or a swing!)

Sarah has also been active in surf lifesaving and spent four years as a volunteer ward chaplain at Gosford Hospital, offering non-religious emotional and spiritual care to patients, families, and hospital staff.