Hello everyone,

How are you? I hope you are all well. The weekend in Harwich was great. We had a lot of fun and it was really nice to be by the sea for sunrise and sunset.

Would you like to come to another retreat during the holidays? It is still only a possibility at the moment, but if we want to have another one then there’s no reason why we can’t have one. We could even hold this one at my house which my family would be very happy with. That would mean it would be ridiculously cheap, all you’d have to pay for was the travel to Winchester and the cost of the food.

Lots of the people who organised the last one aren’t able to help with this one. I can’t do it alone so if we want another one to happen then we are going to need some people to plan this one. Saying that, it doesn’t actually take very much. We just need a group of people who can share ideas about it with each other over email so it can get moving and so it isn’t one person’s responsibility or one person’s idea of what makes a good retreatDon’t worry if you don’t want to commit to anything, or don’t feel you have any experience to contribute. Whatever you can give will move the whole thing forwards and just having another person who responds to emails is really useful for the whole thing.

To move all of it forward it’d be great if you could answer me three questions.

1. I’m going to propose 2 dates to make it simple:

(a) 2-4th January

(b) 9-11th January

(c) Can’t do either of those, tell me a weekend you could do instead.

2. Where do you want it?

(a) Harwich (by the sea, in a town, 1 hour and a half from London, £300 for the centre for a weekend )

(b) My house, Winchester (an hour south of London, on the outskirts so we could go for walks, almost all the practicalities would be easier, free!, maybe a bit further away for some of you and doesn’t have the sea on its doorstep!)

(c) You want to try and find another venue

3. Can you come, do you want to help?

(a) You can come but you can’t help

(b) You can come and you can help

(c) You can’t come

Apart from that it’d be great to know what you want from this retreat, what you want to see in it etc.

Also if any of you have been practicing meditation, or in this tradition specifically for a while then it’d be great to talk about facilitating or leading some of it.

We now have a facebook group only for the Wake Up movement in the UK. Search ‘Wake Up UK’ on facebook, go through my profile ‘Patrick McKearney’ or click on this link and hopefully one of those will work.

I hope that all makes sense! As ever email me if you’ve got any questions.

Enjoy your breathing,

Patrick