Snowy Mountains, NSW · 200-acre property · 8 years holding silence practice
Ruth Calloway was a corporate lawyer for fifteen years. She left a partnership track in 2017 to study silence practices — Quaker, Vipassana, Zen and secular traditions — spending three years in extended retreat before returning to Australia to hold what she'd learned.
She bought 200 acres in the Snowy Mountains in 2019. The property was the right kind of remote — accessible enough for participants to reach, far enough that the silence was real. She has held six retreats per year since 2020, never with more than eight participants at a time.
Ruth does not teach a technique or belong to a tradition. She creates the conditions — the structure, the meals, the space, the fire at dusk — and then gets out of the way. What happens in the silence belongs to the person who entered it.