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It's now the morning after my surrender ritual, and I feel more at peace than I can remember being in a long time.

I undertook the ritual at Sydney's Bronte Beach, a beautiful place enclosed by a park, and cliffs. I started an hour before sunset when the beach was quiet, and the energies of the place were prone to change as night came in.

Alone among a few scattered groups I baptised myself in the ocean to help with my connection to the place, my skin and hair covered in salt water. The instructions for the ritual were easy to follow, and I sacrificed some shells, feathers, and sand I'd picked up from the beach a couple of days earlier - and my engagement and wedding rings from when I was married. That was . . . difficult. Even though I've been divorced for some time, there is a weight of emotion and connection in the rings, and to my ex who is still a close friend though there's no romantic entanglements there.

I expect the Surrender will be different for everybody. I'd recently gone through an emotional purging by taking Alchem, and though I had emotional stirrings in me during the Surrender I was surprisingly calm. The thunder of the surface, the feel and sound of the wind, the sand - all of it kind of scoured away the rough edges. The entire process was sedate, and I felt 'empty' afterwards and quite tired which surprised me; for some reason I'd expected to be quite manic. However it makes sense that given I'm a calm person by nature, the Surrender wouldn't leave turmoil in its place.

On returning home I stayed awake for a short while, then went to sleep. I expected lucid dreaming, wondered whether there would be any visitations, but I hit the pillow and other than waking up once in the night with a blurry sense of not being alone, I slept more soundly than I have in a long while.

So that was my experience. I hope anybody reading this sees that there are probably as many responses to this as there are people who do it, and no one size fits all.