"I didn't know I'd been carrying that."

I found the new moon ceremony guide on Away on a Tuesday evening in October. I wasn't looking for it — I'd been browsing after a colleague mentioned she'd tried something there. I downloaded it because it was free and I had nothing to lose.

I felt slightly silly for the first ten minutes. I'd cleared some space on the kitchen table, lit a candle, and was sitting there with an intention paper and a small bowl — the way the guide suggested — wondering what exactly I thought I was doing.

"By the end I was crying. Not from sadness — or not only from sadness. Something had shifted."

I didn't know I'd been carrying that. I had spent fourteen years teaching secondary school. I loved it — I genuinely loved it — but there was something I hadn't let myself feel about the pace of it, the accumulation of small losses and demands, the way the job had expanded to fill every space I'd left open.

What happened after

I did the ceremony again at the next new moon. And the one after that. By the third time I realised I was doing something I had never done before — setting aside forty minutes to be genuinely alone with my own mind, without a task attached to it.

In January I booked an online fire ceremony with Marco Aurelio. Two hours. I didn't tell anyone — it felt too strange to explain. Marco's approach is so non-dramatic that I found myself relaxing into it almost immediately.

In March I booked Ruth's silence retreat. The full five days. I drove up to the Snowy Mountains on a Sunday afternoon, entered silence that evening, and didn't speak again until Friday at noon.

What the silence showed me

By day three something settled. I don't have a better word for it. The low-level hum of anxiety that I'd lived with for so long I'd stopped noticing it — it quieted. Not forever. But long enough for me to see it clearly.

I came home and didn't immediately reach for my phone. That had never happened before. My partner noticed before I did.

"I barely recognise the person who was too embarrassed to try a ceremony in her kitchen eight months ago."

I'm booked again for August. I'm also doing the dawn practice guide every morning — twenty minutes before the kids wake up. It's the thing that changed everything else.

I'm not a different person. But I'm a more awake version of the person I've always been. That turns out to be enough.