How Gill Lysons trained with AMC to create inclusive ceremonies for neurodivergent couples

Gill Lysons trained with the Academy of Modern Celebrancy after a moment at her own wedding stayed with her. As The Curly Celebrant, based in Newton-le-Willows and working across the North West, she has built her practice around one specific promise. This is her AMC student spotlight.

AMC graduate Gill Lysons trained as a celebrant because she could not stop thinking about a moment at her own wedding, when her autistic husband was corrected by the registrar in front of every one of their guests. That memory is why The Curly Celebrant now exists to create inclusive ceremonies for nervous and neurodivergent couples and their families.

A year into her celebrancy career, sitting in her car outside a venue after her first client meeting, Gill rang her husband. “I think I was born to do this job,” she told him. “Because I just love people. I love hearing people’s stories.”

Why Gill Lysons trained as a celebrant

Gill trained as a celebrant after 26 years in learning and development, prompted by two celebrant-led funerals that showed her how different a ceremony could be from anything she had experienced before.

Her career until then had been almost entirely in the voluntary and public sectors, delivering training for large national charities and for the NHS. She had loved much of it. She had also, quietly, started to notice that her working life had a finite horizon. “As much as I’ve loved it, I feel like I’m in the last 10 years of my working life,” she says.

The first funeral that changed her mind was for a family friend, some years ago. Gill had only been to religious services led by vicars before, and did not hold any religion herself. A humanist celebrant led the ceremony. The tone caught her off guard.

“I went to a family friend’s funeral with a humanist celebrant, and it was joyous. Which I didn’t think a funeral could be.”

Friends spoke. There was music. There was laughter. She walked out and told her husband, “You can do that for me.”

The second funeral was her own mother’s. Her sister had almost not come, so nervous was she about being publicly upset. The officiant was someone the family met only on the morning. “My sister makes farting jokes when she’s most nervous,” Gill says. “If we’d had a celebrant who knew that about her, she could have relaxed a bit.” The question she kept coming back to was straightforward: why wouldn’t I want to give that to people?

Creating inclusive ceremonies for nervous and neurodivergent couples and families

The Curly Celebrant exists to give neurodivergent couples and their families a ceremony that fits them, rather than one they have to fit themselves around. The reason it exists is Gill’s own wedding.

Her husband is autistic. On their wedding day, he was so nervous about speaking out loud that he asked for the vows in advance and memorised them. In the run-up, Gill had asked the registrar whether they could add one line: “I promise you’ll never walk alone.” Her husband is a lifelong Liverpool supporter, and the line matters to him. The registrar pulled a face, agreed reluctantly, and asked where to slot it in.

On the day, the registrar changed the wording slightly. Her husband was thrown, because he was nervous. He said what he had memorised. The registrar corrected him in front of everyone.

“He just went red from the neck up. I would hate for anybody else to have that experience.”

That memory shapes how Gill works with every couple who comes to her nervous. She is quick to widen the frame beyond neurodivergence. “You don’t have to be neurodivergent to be nervous about speaking in front of a lot of people,” she says. When a couple worries about the spoken parts of their ceremony, she offers an alternative: the celebrant says the vows aloud, and the couple simply agrees.

“You don’t have to say the words,” she tells them. “How about I say them, and you just agree with me? Just say yes, or no. In Liverpool they might go ‘yeah, alright, Gill.’ I’ve had somebody ask, and I said, absolutely, if that’s what you want.”

Her husband, she is clear, is the reason she saw the gap. The work she does now is filling it.

Why Gill chose to train with AMC

Gill chose to train with the Academy of Modern Celebrancy after sitting in on an introductory webinar and recognising, before she had even spoken to a member of the team, that these were people she could work with.

She had done some Googling first, and had started to see AMC adverts in her feed. She kept screenshotting them. When she eventually attended a live webinar, she was away in a hotel delivering training of her own. Two things sold her. The first was the tone of the presentation itself: colourful, cheerful, welcoming. The second was more specific. “I immediately felt welcome,” she says. “I thought, okay, these are probably people I can work with.” She signed up within the week.

The training runs across a self-directed programme of video modules and workbooks, with 1-1 mentor support through the practical stages. Gill has had three mentors: Miranda Ash for weddings, Ros for namings, and Sonal Dave for funerals. “The relentless positivity and support has been immense,” she says. Kickoff calls were followed by clear emails setting out what she had discussed with her mentor and what to do next. Her honest confession, laughing at herself: the only time she missed a milestone was when she skimmed one of those emails. “I thought, I know what I’m doing now. I should have read it properly.”

Her turning point on the wedding course was the recorded live ceremony assessment. No elaborate set: dining-room chairs, her sister and brother-in-law as the couple, her niece and husband as guests. She was sweating by the end. “It was the first time I thought, oh, I can do this.” Her sister, whose dry sense of humour makes her hard to please, looked, in Gill’s own words, “dead chuffed.” Gill offered to run it again to be safe. Her sister told her the first one was good.

Miranda Ash was Gill’s first mentor and the one she credits with the shift from practice to possible. Some weeks after Miranda’s formal mentorship had ended, Gill needed advice on a confidential matter she could not raise in any of AMC’s group forums. She messaged Miranda, who sent a voice note back within hours. “I couldn’t think of anybody else to ask. I was so grateful.”

Building a celebrant business while working part-time

Gill is a year into her celebrancy career and still works part-time in her previous field, because building a celebrant business is relationship-led and takes longer than she initially expected.

When she started, she assumed her old career and her new one would swap places once she qualified. “I thought I’d finish work and go straight into celebrancy full-time,” she says. “That’s not how it’s worked out. The celebrancy side has to build with relationships.”

What she did instead was leave her full-time role and take a part-time job in her original field, giving celebrancy space to grow around it. She discussed the move with her husband before making it. “I’m just going to do it,” she told him. “I would hate to get to a certain age and think, I wish I’d have done that.”

Her first wedding is behind her. So is her first vow renewal. She is laughing at the small stumbles from both. “In the wedding I forgot to tell people to stand up, and in the vow renewal I forgot to tell people to sit down. So I’ve got letters on my scripts now.” The couple from her first wedding, she notes, still don’t know it was her first. “I wanted to give myself the confidence of them thinking I’ve got it. Because I did have it.”

She has another wedding this year and five or six booked for next. She is around three-quarters of the way through her funeral certification and hoping to qualify before the end of the summer. Naming ceremonies will follow. She covers weddings, vow renewals and naming ceremonies across St Helens, Warrington, Cheshire and Merseyside from her base in Newton-le-Willows. The one-year goal she is willing to name out loud is a wedding at a stately home in Cheshire where her sister-in-law married. She has signed up for the venue’s wedding fair, even though it means catching a 6am train back from a London commitment the morning of. “It’s the opportunity I’ve got. So I’ve got to make that work.”

Related: How to build a full-time celebrant business

What Gill has learned about being a celebrant

The visible part of a ceremony, Gill says, is a fraction of the work. Her metaphor is a gateau.

“The ceremony is the last 10 per cent,” she says. “If you make it look easy in that last 10 per cent, it’s because you’ve worked so hard in the previous 90.” The gateau has layers, fillings, elements at different temperatures. “You place that very shiny little cherry on top. That cherry is the ceremony.”

She has learned to hold her prices. When couples have asked for discounts, she has learned to say no without apology. “They’re not buying a product like a DJ or stationery that can do four-for-three. They’re walking down the aisle to me. It’s that personal connection.”

She has also learned not to argue when someone tells her their friend, who is good at English, might just do the ceremony instead. “People are entitled to think what they think,” she says. The couples who have booked her are the ones with whom she has found a connection. That is the part of the work she came for.

Gill’s advice for anyone thinking about becoming a celebrant

Gill’s advice is not to wait until you feel ready, because you may not.

“Sometimes you’ve got to do something even though you don’t feel ready. I don’t know when I will ever feel properly ready, and if you wait forever, you’ll never do it. To make things happen, you’ve just got to do something. There’s an awful lot of work to be done. You’ll never feel ready. But if it’s what you want to do, just kind of do it. And if it goes wrong occasionally, learn the lesson, pick yourself up, and move on.”

AMC training: what the experience looks like

AMC training is entirely online and self-paced, which means students fit study around the lives they already have rather than the other way round. From enrolment, you have access to professionally recorded video modules, downloadable workbooks and a full library of ceremony scripts, templates, contracts and business paperwork.

When you reach the practical modules, you are paired with a working celebrant as your 1-1 mentor: nine weeks on the wedding and funeral courses, four weeks on the naming course, and 22 weeks on the master programme. Your mentor reviews your scripts, gives feedback on your delivery in a recorded live ceremony, and helps you develop your own voice rather than following a template. Alongside this, weekly live Q&A sessions bring you into contact with the wider AMC mentor team, and the AMC student community, more than 1,700 members strong, is where you meet the people who will still be around when you have your first booking on the books and your first case of last-minute nerves.

On graduation, you receive your AMC certification, and three months’ free membership of the Celebrant Guild, which includes professional insurance to get you properly started.

Frequently asked questions

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Gill trained because she could not stop thinking about a moment that could have been different. If something in her story sounds like a thought you have been having, that recognition is worth acting on.