A year with a group in Australia

It started with a doctor. On a visit to Australia in 2024 I stopped at a small medical clinic near the retreat centre at Wilton, in New South Wales, and got talking with the doctor there — a Sudanese woman looking after a large group of families who had left Sudan during the war. Many of her patients were women raising children alone, a long way from the lives they had trained for. I offered to spend a day with them.

That was September 2025. The day turned into a year.

We began with a mix of things — meditation, but also gentle movement, music, some drawing. A room that has been through a lot does not always want to sit still straight away. Over a few months the group asked for less around the edges and more of the quiet itself, and an hour of sitting became a well-used half hour. A smaller group carried on with me online, most mornings, with a few lines to reflect on each day.

You do not have to share someone's language or history to sit quietly in the same room and arrive at the same stillness.

I did not go in wanting to teach anyone anything. My only intention was to give them love — to build enough trust that the practice could do its own work, and never to point at anyone's weak points. If I want to serve people well, my own practice has to be steady; there is no way around that. It turns out to be a good way of looking after yourself too.

The changes people described were small and ordinary, which is how I know they were real. Being slower to anger. Sleeping through the night. Catching themselves before snapping at a child — breathing, carrying on. One person said the sessions felt like watching clouds pass across the sky, each thought appearing and going again without needing her attention.

What stayed with me most were the children who came along: no self-consciousness at all, eyes closed, sitting straight, then opening them and grinning. Adults negotiate with stillness. Children just try it.

A few things I brought home:

• Preparation is most of the work. The months of ordinary online sessions mattered more than any single day.
• A calm room is a shared achievement, not something one person hands to another.
• Play matters as much as stillness for a group carrying grief.

A programme like this can be arranged more or less anywhere — online, in person, or a mix of the two. If your group would like to begin something together, get in touch.