Something in your working life is ending. Something else is trying to begin. Between those two states, most people find nowhere to go that takes the moment seriously. Newgrounds is that place — the spiritual renewal layer of the Away arc.
+68%HRV improvement — highest of any Away modality
8Spiritual experiences across every tradition
91%Report a fundamental shift in life understanding
+12.1 yrsHealthy life — full arc vs. status quo
The Away arc
Three movements. One complete transformation.
Away was always a journey in three acts. Newgrounds is the act that makes the other two permanent.
I
Ground
The Working Stay
Physical work on real land. Your body encounters a different kind of life before your mind decides what to do with it. HRV rises. Sleep deepens. Something shifts that couldn't shift at a desk.
Silence. Ceremony. Ancient practice in living landscape. The interior work that physical labour begins but cannot complete alone. Where you grieve what is ending, and discover what wants to emerge.
Renewed purpose. Practical architecture for what comes next. A person who has moved through Ground and Newgrounds is ready for transition in a way they weren't before the journey started.
Not a retreat centre. Not wellness tourism. Something older.
Newgrounds is Away's spiritual renewal layer — structured experiences for people who have begun to sense that their career transition is actually something larger: a question about who they are, what they value, and what kind of human being they want to become.
It is rooted in what the world's wisdom traditions have always understood: that genuine transformation requires ritual, community, silence, and contact with something larger than the self. Not any particular religion. Not spirituality as lifestyle product. Something more serious and more honest than either.
Newgrounds takes place on land — always. Because land is the oldest classroom, the oldest healer, and the oldest mirror. What you discover when you sit in true silence on the earth, with no agenda and no screen, is irreducibly different from anything an office or an app can offer.
Away's biometric data confirms what ancient cultures always knew: silence retreats, ceremonial practice, and forest immersion produce the most dramatic physiological recovery in our entire dataset. The spiritual is not separate from the physical. It is its deepest expression.
"The soul needs wilderness the way the body needs food. Not occasionally — regularly."
Away Newgrounds practitioner
The experiences
Eight doorways. One threshold.
Newgrounds is spiritually agnostic but spiritually serious. Every experience is rooted in land, silence, and the guidance of a practitioner who has lived what they share.
The Silence Stay
5 days · Noble silence · Full land immersion
Five days on a Newgrounds property in noble silence. No speaking, no screens, no agenda. Guided dawn walks, daily journalling prompts, shared meals held in communal stillness. The most confronting — and most consistently transformative — experience in the Newgrounds range.
All traditionsSoloBiometrically tracked
Guide: Ruth Calloway — silence practitioner, Snowy Mountains NSW. Former corporate lawyer. 12 years holding silence retreats on working land.
01
Forest Bathing
3 days · Shinrin-yoku · Evidence-based
The Japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku is the most rigorously evidence-based nature therapy in existence. Three days of slow, guided immersion in old-growth forest or deep bushland. Away's forest bathing cohort shows HRV improvement of 55–80% — the highest of any Newgrounds modality.
SecularEvidence-basedSmall groups
Guide: Dr Mia Chen — nature therapy researcher, Blue Mountains NSW. Three published papers on forest immersion and autonomic recovery.
02
Fire & Ceremony
4 days · Cross-traditional · Threshold ritual
Ancient cultures used fire and ceremony to mark endings and beginnings. This experience draws on cross-traditional ceremonial wisdom — not one religion, but the universal human technology of ritual. You name what is ending. You create space for what wants to emerge.
Non-denominationalSmall group4 days
Guide: Marco Aurelio — ceremony holder trained across multiple traditions. 18 years leading threshold rituals across Australia and South America.
03
The Dawn Practice
7 days · Sunrise discipline · Ancient rhythms
Seven mornings rising before light. Meeting the day in its first silence. Breathwork, movement, meditation and land work woven into the structure of light itself. A different relationship to time — one that most people have never experienced as adults.
BreathworkMovement7 daysAll levels
Guide: Anita Walsh — Wim Hof instructor and yoga teacher. Former strategy consultant, pivoted to dawn practice facilitation in 2022.
04
Grief & Transition
5 days · Facilitated · Psychologically supported
The end of a career identity — especially one held for decades — is a genuine loss and deserves to be treated as one. This experience holds space for the grief that most professional transitions ask people to skip over. You are not asked to be positive. You are asked only to be honest.
FacilitatedPsychologically supported5 days
Guide: Dr Lena Park — clinical psychologist and grief facilitator. Integrates somatic practice with psychological depth work in natural settings.
05
Country & Songlines
4 days · First Nations · On sacred land
In partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander custodians, this experience offers a guided encounter with the world's oldest continuous relationship between people and land. Not tourism. A genuine exchange: the custodian who holds the knowledge, the visitor who arrives ready to receive it.
First Nations partnershipOn country4 days
Guide: Partnered with Gamilaraay, Wiradjuri and Bundjalung custodians. All experiences co-designed and led by community members.
06
Stars & Cosmology
4 nights · Dark sky · Ancient orientation
Four nights on a dark-sky property with no light pollution. Aboriginal star lore, Western astronomical tradition, and the simple embodied experience of sleeping under the Milky Way. Something about vast scale and deep time reorients the personal crisis. Your problems remain real — but the universe is very large, and very old.
CosmologyStar loreOutback4 nights
Guide: Tom Nguyen — astronomer and Aboriginal star lore student. Working with Euahlayi elder to offer a dual-knowledge experience of the southern sky.
07
The Solo Sojourn
3–7 days · Alone · Fully supported
Time alone on land, with shelter, food and safety support provided — but no programme, no guide, no agenda. You are given the most radical gift the modern world almost never allows: unstructured time, in nature, by yourself. What comes up is yours. What resolves is yours.
SoloSelf-directed3–7 daysFully supported
Supported by: Away's safety network with daily check-in. Preparation briefing with a Newgrounds facilitator before departure.
08
First Nations partnerships
The oldest relationship between people and land is still alive.
Australia's First Nations people hold the world's oldest continuous living culture — over 65,000 years of relationship with Country that is fundamentally spiritual, ecological and embodied simultaneously.
Away Newgrounds' Country and Songlines experiences are built in genuine partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. They are co-designed by community members, led by cultural custodians, and structured around protocols of consent, reciprocity and respect.
This is not cultural tourism. It is a genuine exchange between equals — one bringing deep land knowledge, the other bringing genuine curiosity and humility.
Our protocol: All First Nations experiences are approved and led by community members. Away pays fair fees directly to communities. Participants are briefed on cultural protocols before arrival. Sacred knowledge is not shared beyond the experience context. Communities retain full creative and cultural authority over what is offered.
The complete journey
What it looks like to go all the way through.
Before
Baseline signal
30 days of biometric monitoring in your working environment. The data that makes everything that follows measurable.
You now
Burnt out, or questioning
The signal captures where you actually are. Not where you think you should be.
Movement I
The Working Stay
4 nights on real land. The body begins its reset. HRV +41%. Sleep deepens. Something physical shifts first.
Ground
The first change
The biometric arc begins. The interior work has not yet happened — but the ground has been prepared.
Movement II
Newgrounds
Silence, ceremony, forest immersion or one of eight doorways. The grief for what is ending. The first true silence many people have experienced as adults.
Newgrounds
The deepest change
HRV peaks at +68%. 91% report a fundamental shift. The crisis becomes a threshold. The ending becomes a beginning.
Movement III
Rise
The Deeper Programme. Practical architecture for what comes next. Extended land placements, mentorship, and career transition support.
After everything
You as you choose to be
Renewed purpose. +12.1 years projected healthy life versus staying on the pre-pivot path. The data supports this.
From participants
What it actually feels like.
"I expected the working stay to be interesting. I did not expect the silence retreat to take apart everything I thought I knew about myself — and put something better back in its place."
Eleanor Watts
Former Senior Partner, McKinsey Sydney · Completed Silence Stay 2025
"The ceremony on the third evening was the most important three hours of my adult life. Some grief about who I'd become and who I'd left behind finally had somewhere to go."
David Okafor
Former Chief Risk Officer, ANZ · Now enrolled in Deeper Programme
"I am not a spiritual person — I want to be clear about that. I went as a sceptic. I came back changed. Not converted to anything. Just genuinely changed. Five days of silence did something two years of therapy had not."
Priya Anand
Former Data Science Lead, Atlassian · Now establishing biodynamic market garden, Blue Mountains
Newgrounds programmes
Begin where you are. Go as deep as you need.
Every Newgrounds programme includes full biometric monitoring. Can be entered independently or as part of the complete Away arc.
Entry
Single Experience
A$1,800
3–5 days · one doorway
Choice of one Newgrounds modality
Full biometric monitoring — before, during and after
Former corporate lawyer who left a partnership track in 2018 to study silence practices across multiple traditions — Quaker, Vipassana, Zen and secular. Holds six silence retreats per year on her 200-acre property. The most-requested Newgrounds guide in the network.
Nature Therapy Researcher · Blue Mountains, NSW
PhD in environmental psychology from the University of Melbourne. Three peer-reviewed papers on forest immersion and autonomic nervous system recovery. Brings scientific rigour to an ancient practice — and the data confirms what the ancients already understood.
Ceremony Holder · Multiple traditions
Trained in fire ceremony, sweat lodge, shamanic breathwork and Indigenous threshold practices across Australia, South America and West Africa over 18 years. Non-denominational in approach and deeply serious in practice. Understands the difference between ceremony as performance and ceremony as transformation.
There is Away. There is Newgrounds.
What's ending is making room for something better.
The future does not require you to become someone else. It requires you to become more fully yourself. Newgrounds holds that process with seriousness, care and extraordinary land.
