What Mo Gave Me

There was a version of me in my twenties who never slept on sleep-in shifts at work.

I was working at an all women’s homeless hostel locally to me at the time, work that asked a lot of you and rarely gave much back in the moment — the kind you either burn out on or throw yourself into completely. I chose the second one. And on the nights Mo was working alongside me, sleep genuinely wasn't an option. Officially the sleep-in was time to rest before the next shift. In practice, it was hours of conversation I didn't want to end.

We'd talk about purpose, meaning, the wildly different worlds we'd each grown up in. Religion, culture — nothing was off the table. We just clicked, the way you do with certain people, where a conversation that should have wound down after twenty minutes is still going at three in the morning and neither of you has noticed.

It was Mo who first told me about the Brahma Kumaris. She said they ran retreats for frontline workers, people like us, at a property in Oxford. She said I should go to the next one.

I did. I signed up, and I took my mum with me who was also working in youth work.

It turned out to be one of the most beautiful weekends — an afternoon of total silence, meals eaten at long tables without a word spoken, a phrase of greeting that meant something like ‘I recognise the light in you’. I came home changed by it in a way that's stayed with me since. I bought their artwork in the gift shop. I kept up the meditation for months afterward, and honestly, I still do versions of it now.

But underneath all of that is the part I keep coming back to: Mo knew.

She'd been to the BK retreats herself. She'd felt whatever it was I ended up feeling in Oxford, and she recognised, somewhere in all those overnight conversations, that I needed it too — before I had any idea I needed it. That's not a small thing to notice about another person. It takes real attention. The kind you don't get from small talk, only from hours and hours of actually listening to someone.

I'd had a taste of this kind of thing before. I studied Reiki at fifteen, with a couple named Ian and Mavis, and something about those sessions taught me early what tranquillity could actually feel like, underneath everything else. But Reiki was the start of something. The BK weekend was where it properly opened up. Since then I've gone looking for that feeling deliberately — some of it found with shamans across the other side of the world, some of it wandered into alone in the woods, some of it happening quietly by a fire with nobody around but a frog for company.

Mo gave me the beginning of that. And she knew what she was giving me, because she'd walked the same path first.

I think that's the thing about spiritual paths, in the end. Some of them find you completely unannounced. Some you wander into yourself, half by accident. And some — the rarest kind — are handed to you by someone who already knows exactly what's waiting on the other side, and cares for you enough to point the way.