The Retreat is changing for the better!

Hello,

It was so lovely to kick off the year with so many of you in January’s retreat! I came out feeling much calmer and more energised for the year ahead. Thank you for being there with me.

I’m going to be making a few changes to the Retreat tier in March - hopefully all positive! But I wanted to let you know early in case you have any questions.

We will be switching to a new Substack account

Essentially, administering these retreats as a special ‘tier’ within my existing newsletter is a bit of a nightmare, so from March they will have a special account of their own.

Moving to a separate account will let everyone pay monthly if they prefer (although there will be a discount for annual subscribers and a very special gift that will come every year on renewal).

See below for the practicalities of this move.

We will be running more retreats, although they will be a little shorter

From March, we will run 10 retreats a year, on the third Saturday of each month except August and December. This will make things more predictable, and of course offer more chances to gather and rest. The first retreat in this new place will be on Saturday 21st March.

All future retreats will be two hours long. This is because I find the three-hour sessions quite tiring, and hard on my voice. But the new monthly format means I’ll be offering many more hours across the year, on a far more regular basis.

All retreats will still be available as a recording afterwards.

The cost will be the same if you keep an annual subscription

There’s no rise in cost for anyone here who continues to pay annually - but we are switching to pounds as the basic currency for charges. So it will be £120 per year from now on (which is probably a little less than you’ve been paying).

However, monthly subscribers will pay a slight premium of £15 per month. When we take a break in August and December, monthly subscriptions will be paused.

You don’t need to do anything - we’ll move you over!

We’ll move you over to the new account, and make sure that your subscription is transferred over too. Because of the way that Substack works, we’ll be issuing you gift subscriptions of either 6 months or 12 months, depending on how many months you have left. Most people will get a free month or two!

When your gift subscription expires, you’ll have the chance to subscribe again, but no pressure.

Existing Retreat members will still get a subscription to my newsletter

Because we’re moving to a separate account, people in the Retreat won’t automatically get the Clearing newsletter anymore. However, if you’re an existing member - i.e. if you’re reading this - we’re going to comp you with a lifetime subscription to The Clearing when we make the change. That’s to say thanks for your support so far, and for bearing with us while we make these changes.

Unfortunately, new signups to The Retreat won’t get this because it’s yet another administrative nightmare, and I am trying to learn to avoid these in the future!

There will be special guest hosts in the future

I’ll occasionally be booking an excellent guest to join me or take my place. But I’ll of course be leading the vast majority of the sessions because I love it!

Rececca will be supporting the retreats more visibly, too, appearing on screen with me instead of lurking in the chat. She assists me in all my real-life retreats, and I think she’ll add a lot to our gatherings. This means that, should I ever fall sick again at short notice as I did in December, Rebecca will be able to take over. This will hopefully be very rare! But I’m human, so it’s good to have a contingency plan for these things.

Most importantly: you don’t need to do anything yet! This is just advance information so that you can get to grips with the change early and ask any questions if you need to. We’ll write again in a few weeks’ time with more details, and to share the lovely new logo!

I’m massively looking forward to doing more retreats this year, and I hope this will feel good to you too.

Take care,

Katherine