The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived - Thomas Merton

New Year is a good time of the year to take stock and contemplate our moment-to-moment, here-and-now reality in all its fullness. It’s a traditional time for clarifying our motivations, and for starting afresh with new intentions. A time, in other words, to reboot the system. Give yourself the gift of time over this New Year period to focus on gratitude and contentment, to reflect on the past year, and resolve how you can best live your life in the coming year. This will be a loosely structured personal retreat with qigong, daily meditation practice, walks, rest and stillness, culminating with a New Year lantern-lit perambulation around the Buddha to ring out the old year with an ancient Chinese temple gong and welcome the New Year with a Tibetan bell.