I want to tell you about the year I stopped.
Not intentionally. Not as a conscious sabbatical or a deliberate reset or any of the other tidy framings I have since considered applying to it. I just stopped. The candles stayed unlit. The journal stayed closed. The rituals I had built so carefully over the previous years simply fell away, one by one, until there was nothing left but the vague, uncomfortable awareness that something was missing.
This was not a crisis year, which is the part that still surprises me when I think about it. Nothing dramatic happened. No bereavement, no breakdown, no identifiable reason. Life was ordinarily difficult in the way that life tends to be: busy, pressured, occasionally joyless, and somewhere in the middle of managing it, my practice became one more thing I did not have the energy for.
I have spoken to enough people now to know that this is not unusual. That the gap between “I have a practice” and “I am actively practising” is one that most of us fall into at some point, often more than once. But at the time it felt like a particular kind of failure; the kind that is hard to name because you are not sure you are allowed to call it a loss.
What I thought a practice was supposed to be
Looking back, I think part of the problem was the version of practice I had been trying to maintain.
It was, if I am honest, quite effortful. Full moon rituals that took real preparation. Sabbat observances that required planning. A journaling practice that demanded a level of articulation I did not always have. A correspondence system I had built meticulously, and felt obligated to use correctly. An altar that needed tending.
None of this was wrong, exactly. These things had all meant something to me when I built them. But somewhere along the way the practice had become a standard I was holding myself to rather than a resource I was drawing from, and when life got heavy enough, maintaining that standard was simply not available to me.
What I let go of, I realise now, was not my practice. It was a particular performance of my practice. The elaborate version. The one that looked like something.
What I found in the gap
The interesting thing about stopping is what you notice in the absence.
I noticed, after a few weeks, that I had not stopped talking to the moon. I was still glancing up at it on the way to the car, still registering what phase it was in, still feeling the particular restlessness of a full moon even when I was doing nothing intentional about it. The observational layer of my practice (the simple act of paying attention to natural rhythms) had not gone anywhere. It was just happening quietly, without ceremony.
I noticed that I was still reaching for certain herbs instinctively. Still making the same tea when I needed calm, still choosing the same scent when I needed grounding, without thinking of it as practice at all.
I noticed that the things I had written in my journal during the years of active practice were more alive to me than ever; not because I was revisiting them deliberately, but because they kept surfacing, uninvited, when I needed them.
The practice had not disappeared. It had gone underground. And underground, stripped of all the apparatus I had built around it, I could see what it actually was: a set of relationships. With the natural world, with my own body and its rhythms, with the version of myself I had been slowly, carefully paying attention to for years.
Those relationships did not require maintenance in the way I had thought they did. They required honesty. And sometimes honesty looks like admitting that you cannot show up in the way you intended, and showing up in whatever way you actually can instead.
What I rebuilt, and how
I came back to practice the way you come back to most things after a long absence: tentatively, with lowered expectations, slightly embarrassed by the gap.
The first thing I did was light a candle. Just that. No intention spoken, no ritual structure, no journaling. I lit a candle and sat in front of it for five minutes and let that be enough.
The second thing I did was stop trying to rebuild what I had before. The elaborate version of my practice had served me well for a season, and that season was over. What I needed now was something smaller, more flexible, and significantly more forgiving of imperfect execution.
I built what I now think of as a minimum practice: the irreducible version, the two or three things that actually move the needle for me regardless of how much time or energy I have. For me, that is a morning moment of stillness, a monthly moon observation, and an irregular but honest journal. Everything else is an addition, not a foundation.
The addition comes and goes with the season and the capacity. The foundation stays.
What I want you to take from this
If your practice has gaps in it (weeks or months or years where nothing formal happened) that is not a failure. It is evidence that you are human, and that your life has seasons, and that a practice worth having is one that can survive periods of dormancy without disappearing entirely.
The practices that survive are the ones rooted deeply enough to wait.
And if you are in a gap right now, you are not starting over. You are just finding out what stayed.
