—Alice Walker. The Colour Purple.
Introduction to a Workshop
It is June 1989. A Saturday morning at 8.30. Christa and I have arrived for the beginning of our workshop. We want to meditate in the room we have been allocated, the Beech Tree Room — best workshop space in Cluny — to clear out the old energy and make everything fresh. However, the focalisers of the previous week's Experience programme are vacuuming it. We can't get in, so we wait.
Experience week is the 'way in' for guests at the Findhorn Foundation. Another version was tried at the Park as well, called 'Living the Life We Choose', but it reverted to 'Experience Week' . Once you have done Experience week, you can go on to the other programmes or into workshops. Only as a conference guest or short-term visitor can you come without doing an Experience week. Even then you have to do it if you want to stay on. Christa and I have focalised Experience weeks together, the German language ones. There are always two focalisers for programmes in the Foundation, to give mutual support. It reduces projections from guests with 'authority stuff'.
This time we aren't doing an Experience week, but starting a two-week workshop. We meet Dianne, Guest Department focaliser at Cluny. "Didn't you know, we have registration on Saturday morning in the Beech Tree Room now. You'll have to wait till lunch time for your meditation. Your registration will be up there too." "We Parkies don't know what you're doing here, changing things around!" There's time to snatch a quick cup of tea. Soon we're up in the Beech Tree Room with all the others. As always when I first go in, I notice Harley Miller's beautiful picture of the granddad beech tree in front of the building. How many of us have sat under that tree and asked for a healing, or surreptitiously hugged it when no one was looking. We are never refused.
I have to go a couple of times to the toilet. Why do I still get nervous at the beginning of a workshop? I'm supposed to be experienced now. God is running this show, not my personality! At one side of the Beech Tree Room is Susan, the 'finance person', with her money box. We'll send our guests to her as they arrive so payment is out of the way. Some people will pay less than the full amount for the workshop, making use of our bursary scheme. We don't have anything to do with that, though; the Accommodations Department organises it. At the other side are Anne and Sandy. They're focalising an Experience week, so the real newcomers will go to them. They'll be in the Sycamore Room, the second largest room for programmes. For the kind of work I do it only takes 15 comfortably, but if you're sitting in a circle it'll take twenty. Christa and I sit down at our coffee table, already set up for us with chairs by Guest Department members. Several of our workshop guests are waiting. We look at each other. Maybe we should have speeded up the tea break a bit!
The guests come mainly from northern Europe, the United States and Australia, with a sprinkling from other areas. Most are white and middle class. We have never done a survey, but my sociologically trained eye reads that the majority are between 30 and 45, in various kinds of caring professions, already concerned with the environment and their own identity. Many will have explored some kind of therapy as a means of self-development. For their age groups, there are more than average single and divorced people. People who want to come are asked to write a letter of application. This screens out a small number who would not benefit from being here. The energy can be too strong for mentally unstable people. Three or four times a year we have to help visitors who are not ready to be here to get back home.
Accommodations has prepared lists of guests, using their computer. Computerising Accommodations took quite a time. Our Accommodations focaliser didn't think it was necessary; she had her own wall chart system and did a very efficient job on her typewriter. But her understudy, a logical-minded Frenchman, couldn't type well. He was excited by the idea of creating a system model for the computer. There was something of a clash of wills. At one point, a guest let water overflow in the bathroom upstairs, and the ceiling fell on the computer. Was this a divine message? Anyway, the previous focaliser has now moved to Reception, and Accommodations has moved to a room without a bathroom above it. Now there is talk of putting a new, computerised switchboard in Reception!
Accommodations allocates everyone to a bedroom shared by three or four people. Sexes are segregated, of course, and smokers put together where possible — otherwise they can't smoke in their rooms. Some people are surprised that we don't ban smoking, but prohibitions don't really help people to give it up. There is even a cigarette machine. But there's only one public room in the building where you can smoke. It is the old bar of the hotel, with no windows, furnished in deep red. You really know you're going into hell when you go in there to smoke! However, it is rumoured that the best conversations take place in the bar. I wouldn't know. We don't ban alcohol either, but are rather aware that it is incompatible with advanced spiritual development (it suppresses higher brain function).
We ask our workshop members their names and tell them their room numbers. These people are all 'old hands'— they've done an Experience week some time or other. We don't have to show them round the building, as Sandy and Anne at the next table must — a survival tour, so the new arrivals know where the sanctuary is, where to eat and where to find the toilets. Everything else they can discover later. Our guests are a little more confident. They have all gone through it before. They know where things are. We even know some of them already, or rather they know us. If you see a guest once or twice during their first week, they soon become a face in the crowd. There are always crowds at the Findhorn Foundation. Cluny has two special guest-free weeks a year, so that members can take a breath and experience the building to themselves. It always seems very empty and large.
"You came in and talked to my Experience week in 1985. That's why I signed up for your workshop." "Oh, yes, I remember your face but not your name." Actually it's not a lie; there is a faint familiarity about the face. After two weeks' intense work together, we will be very close, like old friends.
Of course, some people can't stand sharing a room. They are lucky — Cluny is not quite full this week, as it will certainly be during July and August. One of us goes and pleads with Accommodations. "You have to talk to Terry in Homecare," says Ian. "They don't like having to clean rooms for one person. If it's all right with him it's all right with me." Where's Terry? Everywhere. It's his busy morning. He's the star of the building, organising, directing. Every room has to be cleaned between 8.45 when the old guests are supposed to leave, and 12.00, when all the new ones should be safely 'at home'. He is coming out of the little-room-under-the-stairs, where Homecare lives. Yes, it's OK with him. He sighs. It's always the same. Who can say no when there are empty rooms? And the guests always have the best of reasons.
During the morning our 18 guests arrive, sit and chat and go off to settle in. For this workshop we have set a limit of 18, because that's a very comfortable number to work with and get to know well. Since they have all arrived, from the States, Canada, Australia, England, France, Holland, Switzerland, Israel and Germany, we have to ring Newbold and tell a man there he can't do the workshop after all. The building is the usual Saturday morning hive of activity. Homecarers, members and guests who are staying on scuttle everywhere, dangling vacuums, old laundry, tooth glasses and vinegar sprays for cleaning mirrors. 'Work is love in action.' Saturday morning tests it out! In the kitchen, the lunch shift is preparing a soup and salad meal. The dining room crew are cleaning up after breakfast. Lucia is doing a superb job on Reception, handling phone calls and six enquiries at the same time. The entry hall is full of cases and rucksacks. One of our buses comes back from the railway station, disgorging a new group of wide-eyed newcomers. Taxis come and go. There is a faint flavour of an Indian railway station in Cluny on a Saturday morning in summer. You can let yourself go to it, riding on the energy. Or, if you have somehow escaped homecare, you can run away up to your room and hide.
Christa and I at last clear the tables away and close the door. We have the big room to ourselves. We make a circle of twenty chairs and put the candle in the centre, ringed with flowers from the garden — only the gardeners can pick them. I put Sai Baba's picture on the mantelpiece. Since I am focalising the workshop and He is my teacher, He has a right to be there for the two weeks. We light the candle, close our eyes. The bustle and business of the morning fade away into beautiful silence. I ask for blessing on the workshop; that everything should come from the highest; that the qualities of love and joy should be with us for the two weeks. Then we are silent together for a quarter of an hour. It is all going to be fine; I love to work with Christa . . . . There is still some lunch left when we go down. Saturday morning is over and another workshop has begun.
Learning What the Findhorn Foundation is About — The Experience Week
The summer 1989 brochure, running from April to November, lists Experience weeks for all except four weeks, two of them during conferences when everything else stops. In the summer there are often three Experience weeks at a time, two at Cluny and one at the Park. There are Experience weeks in Dutch, German, French Japanese, Spanish and Italian. There are Family Experience weeks, organised for parents and children. In addition 48 different workshops are listed in the brochure, with another 17 or so at Newbold. As well as workshops there are the Departmental Guest programmes and the Living in Community programme for those who want to experience our life on a longer-term basis, while for guests who want to be quieter there are four Retreat weeks. Each Experience week and workshop needs two focalisers. Accommodation has to be organised, letters answered, meals cooked, cleaning and renovation done, vegetables and flowers grown.. . and … and. . . and! When I write it all out, it really seems a little miracle that everything works. And we are a spiritual community. Or rather that is the secret. Guests come here to share what we do. What we do, largely, is to look after them. They learn to care for themselves in a new way. It is a divine economy!
Part of the function of Experience week is to introduce people to the community. But that doesn't merely mean showing people around. The best way for people to understand what is going on at the Findhorn Foundation is to experience it in their own group. Guests begin the Experience programme with varying degrees of caution, shyness and defensiveness, but by the end of the week a group has formed, characterised by mutual trust, acceptance and love; it almost always works. My friend Anna was just invited for a holiday in Greece for the third reunion of an Experience week she focalised. It is this transformation that is important, not learning who lives where and who does what, for, as hopefully I have already made clear, learning to find love in ourselves and express it in our daily actions is the community's raison d'être.
Experience week is quite intense. Typically, the guests and the focalisers meet on Saturday afternoon, introduce themselves and learn how to attune. They have the evening free to get used to the place. On Sunday morning the group starts with Sacred Dance. I love Sacred Dance, although my head and my feet have not yet found bliss together. In circles, usually holding hands, we learn simple adaptations of folk dances from all over the world, each expressing some different quality appropriate to a fulfilling life. It is innocent and joyful. Jesus pointed out that the development of childlike qualities is a key to the kingdom of heaven. That kingdom is available on earth, now, if you have the keys to get in.
On Sunday afternoon, there is the chance to get to know the 'other side' of the community through a tour of either Cluny or the Park, and then, in the evening, there is a time for sharing feelings and experiences with one another, a process that is repeated every evening of the week, with a final, long session of completion on Friday afternoon. Each evening there is also a presentation by members about various aspects of community life, but sometimes, if the sharing becomes intense, the presentation is dropped. All the members who are due to come in to the group know that they may, as they wait in the lounge, be visited by one of the focalisers
saying, "I'm afraid we really can't stop at this point." Wednesday, the evening when members share about their personal experiences, is most often 'crisis' night as guests begin to trust each other enough to go a little deeper into what they are really feeling. In these sharings, and at the other times when the group is interacting, the guests begin to learn the difference between relating to someone with love rather than with judgement, with support rather than criticism. How the same process unfolds in the community, the guests experience through their focalisers and in the departments where they work for four mornings of the week.
Each week, departments send in a note of how many guests they can work with the following week; then the Experience week group meditates to attune to which person goes to which job, another practical example of how we do things. In work departments guests experience a new attitude to work. They sample how members and longer-term guests deal with day-to-day problems as they arise. We can call it 'learning love on the job'.
The rest of the time — apart from a Thursday afternoon off, to gasp for breath — is spent with the group in new age cooperative games, a group work project and a nature outing. It is an intense, but not pressured, programme. The focalisers are there to support everyone through the week, deal with their problems, if need be, and to take responsibility for the energy of the 'Angel of Findhorn' as it works with the group. The Friday afternoon sharing is special. It starts with a guided meditation, recalling the events of the week. There is a largish stone in the middle of the circle, next to the candle. Following the meditation, in a practice based on a Native American tradition, someone takes the stone and begins to speak. While they have it, everyone else gives them total attention. No one must interrupt until that person has finished their sharing. Often people are moved by the experience of love and attention they have received during the week, and even more by the way their own hearts have opened. They have begun to see people and work in a new light. After the completion session the group stays together for the evening meal, often sharing a bottle of wine (or two) to celebrate the week. We do sell wine and beer for the Friday night dinner, which is also the one meal when fish is available as well as vegetarian food. In Cluny the proceeds from the sale of drinks have gone to renovate the lounge.
The Experience week is just that, an experience of our life in microcosm. The guests represent Foundation members, and the time spent together represents the way we live and discover how to get in touch with some of the unconditional love that is humanity's real essence. Just like members, guests can choose whether to go to the sanctuary for the various daily meditations or to meditate alone. It is a week spent saying halo to spirit in very practical ways. Although the time is short, for many it is very moving and for some it may be life-changing. On Saturday morning, the majority of the guests return home to see how they can integrate what they have discovered into the lives from which they came. Sometimes they may return to the Foundation years later. Other guests stay on, deepening their connection with spirit by living longer with us or going into one of the many and varied workshops offered by members.
Not everyone who visits us registers for an Experience week. In the summer, particularly, many people drop in just for a day, or wish to stay just a night or two in caravans in the Park. Through the Short-Term Guest Programme they can learn a little about the community. There are guided tours and an audiovisual in the Visitors' Centre in the Hall, and it is even possible to spend a morning or afternoon working with us in the gardens. But this is still really just observing the community. To explore the transformation of identity that so many visitors undergo requires the closer contact given by the Experience week.
Living and Working with the Findhorn Community
Undoubtedly the best way of experiencing what the Findhorn Community has to offer is to live with us over a period of time, working and attuning with a work department, sharing the ups and downs, the discoveries and resistances of a contemporary Western spiritual lifestyle. If you say you are going to spend a month or more working at the Findhorn Foundation, people may raise their eyebrows, particularly if you are in a well-paid job. "How can you pay money to go and work?" they say. "You must be crazy." Actually, the amount we ask for the programme, which provides full board and lodging, is less than the weekly cost of bed and breakfast plus evening meal locally, but your friends have a point. Why should anyone pay money to work?
For us, it is because the cost of maintaining and developing everything we are doing is very high. Guests are prepared to pay because spending time in the Findhorn Community is deeply transformative. It challenges you in your relationship to work, companionship, leisure and, above all, to yourself. Through day-to-day practical experiences the question 'Who am I?' and its companion 'Why do I live my life the way I do?' come alive. It is very hard to leave the same as you arrived. Sometimes the greatest challenges come afterwards, when from a new perspective the world you return to might seem artificial and meaningless. You have become, just a little bit, a creator. Can you change things? A former Living in Community guest ('LCG') telephoned me. His wife had fallen in love with someone else, but couldn't decide whether to leave. "It's a hard time," he said ruefully, "but I'm learning a lot — about myself. We've decided to split for six months, and then see if we can come together again. I can't imagine how I'd have got through it without the inner work I've done."
The structure of the programme is simple. An 'LCG' works in a department like members, joins them in their attunement and has the opportunity to take part in almost all community activities except a few members' meetings. The LCG group also has a focaliser and meets once a week — on Tuesday morning — for a sharing. It also spends Thursday evenings together. Perhaps one of the members presents his or her views; perhaps one of the LCGs with a creative skill shares it with the group. The LCG programme lasts a minimum of a month.
I remember my own days as an LCG, in 1983, with great affection. I knew inwardly that the Findhorn Foundation was the right place for me, and that I should become a member. But it was June and there was no Orientation programme to train for membership till November. After my Experience week, my Departmental Guest week, 'cooling down' before joining the LCG programme, was in Cluny garden. I had heard of the community through The Findhorn Garden and was fresh from an intensive course in herbalism at the California School of Herbal Studies, where we also meditated with plants and learned to communicate with them. Cluny garden was perfect for me. I worked, full of enthusiasm, with Brian, the vegetable garden focaliser. At last the weather turned hot; the summer promised to be gorgeous and the garden was beautiful, with curving rows of vegetable beds around a central point. Brian was full of energy but seemed to be making an effort to concentrate. At the end of the week he said to me, "Carol, my inner guidance is telling me to go down to London to fund raise for the purchase of the caravan park. I've been waiting for God to send me a replacement, and I think you're it!"
In my work in America I had learned never to look a spiritual gift horse in the mouth. "OK," I said, "but I don't really know anything about gardening. I'll have to learn as I go." Brian seemed to find that acceptable — perhaps he had no alternative. We went to the garden group attunement that afternoon, and I was properly introduced to the other members. Brian had made a six-month commitment, which he was breaking right in the middle of the season. In one sense, he was really letting everyone down; not only that, he was asking them to accept me, in my second week at the Foundation, with virtually no gardening experience, as his replacement. I would have to take responsibility for guests straight away, as there was much too much work for me alone.
The group's response was a huge lesson for me. Instead of the furious reaction that I expected, everyone respected Brian's attunement. He was leaving to do higher work for the community, not because of some personal evasion. They looked quizzically at me, brash and a little self-important, but when we meditated, the 'Angel of Findhorn' didn't say 'no' — and who else was there? I spent the weekend really getting to know the garden, and frantically reading up on organic vegetable gardening. Basically, I had quite a lot of confidence. I was supposed to be here. The events were an outer confirmation of that. Alan, who now focalised the whole garden and had looked after the vegetable garden for several previous seasons, promised his advice and support. On Monday morning, my first work day as an LCG, the last piece of the jigsaw fell into place: Olive wanted to work with me. Olive had just started Essence, a twelve-week workshop. She would be working half-time. She had been growing an organic garden in New Zealand for eight years and really knew her stuff. But she wasn't confident with people. From my training in California, I knew how to lead meditations and to connect spiritually with the plant devas. We made a perfect team.
The next eight weeks were blissful. The sun shone. I made friends with my roommate, an American woman called Tera who lived on an island military base somewhere west of Hawaii. I had a romantic friendship with someone else in the Essence programme. I went watering the plants at six in the morning — the only time the water pressure was reasonable — and late in the evening. Olive and I meditated a lot in the vegetable garden with the plants. The other guests loved it — it was like the old Findhorn Community. I began to respect Alan, of whom I was a little afraid. His photographs of nature, particularly of trees, seemed to me to
be deva messages in another form.
I was also rather afraid of Angela, who focalised Cluny dining room. So that I could get to know the community better, I was asked to do two shifts in the dining room. Angela seemed unsmiling, severe. Everything had to be done exactly right. This perfectionism I had read about, but I had difficulty with it, because I tended to be slightly disorderly. I felt she considered me hopeless and incompetent. After a few weeks, however, she was the first member of the Foundation to trust me enough to ask me to do a clairvoyant reading for her. I had projected my own insecurities onto her. Instead of criticising her identity I learned how to examine my reaction to it. That helped me to work with aspects of myself that held me back. It was a new way of thinking about people.
I took a two-week holiday at the beginning of August, and then the going got tough. I was asked to share a room with Gisela, a German member. Gisela had had the room to herself for five months. She was really upset to have to share with someone else. I found her crying and resentful at the invasion of her space. The room was spotless, in perfect order. The next three months were hard work. Gisela complained constantly of my untidiness; I found her sullen and unhappy. Very slowly we learned to tolerate, and then actually to like, each other, in a fragile, shy sort of way. I learned to be tidy and to clean up after me, German style. I had some reggae tapes with me, and discovered that under the stimulus of this music, Gisela became vital and vivacious. She was having a hard time in Homecare, where she worked. I supported her through it. Gradually I realised that through these situations and experiences I was being changed little by little, learning to love more unconditionally.
Bert, the LCG focaliser, was a Canadian who lived at Drumduan House, where LCG meetings were held. He was a great David Spangler fan. The meetings consisted of, to me, interminable readings from and discussions of Spangler's works. Influenced by my years as a radical feminist, I found Spangler's rather authoritarian guidance irritating. I went to very few of the meetings. This was cheeky, as I was hoping to become a member. I expected a reaction from Bert, yet he did not seem to hold it against me. It was another Findhorn Community lesson: there was I, all squared up, prepared for a fight — actually reproducing my relationship with my parents — but there was no one to fight me. Again I was forced to examine my own reactions, to notice the times I created conflicts without realising it, by acting out old, unresolved frustrations.
For me, the path from the LCG programme led to membership. For others there is a return to the life back home. Everyone has their own experience, their own gentle or more dramatic story. People leave calmer, more self-aware, more distanced from their problems, better equipped for a more positive life in the world. There is no guru. We teach each other, through situations provided for us by 'coincidence' which is no coincidence. The wonder of God's love unfolding in us starts to melt the 'objective world'. Through the lessons we learn we are prepared to embrace more love; it is an ascending spiral.
Giving Workshops
Many members come to the community with skills or talents. Others learn new skills while they are here. As members gain an inward self-confidence through their life in the community, they want to blend it with these skills and share the result with guests. Professional 'new age' workshop leaders frequently visit us, but they come more for love than money, as they can usually command much higher prices outside than we can pay. It is not the Findhorn Foundation's role to become a professional workshop centre. Nor can we be a therapy centre, concentrating on workshops in therapeutically oriented personal growth. Other places, less remote from the major urban areas are better located and organised to do such work. The high costs of travelling to the Foundation and the need for residential accommodation make such ideas unrealistic in any case. Our job is to share a lifestyle with people. It is a more important job, though we do not see it as being in conflict with therapeutic work.
Our workshops, therefore, are really ways of relating to our lifestyle in a thematic way. The best-attended workshops are those directly concerned with spiritual development. Typical titles are: 'Bringing more love into your life', 'In search for the God within', 'Wholeness — our challenge', 'Healing the cause', 'Breaking in — to the Divine self within'. But even workshops with more specialised themes — such as Sacred Dance, primal painting and 'Fool of spirit' (a clowning workshop) — have a spiritual emphasis. They link guests to our lifestyle and approach. Visitors find here a unique blend of theme and spirituality. Up to now, Newbold's workshops, with some exceptions such as the Meditation Intensives, have been slightly more personal-growth centred. Yet in Newbold also there is a special spiritual flavour, which has given that centre an individual style. Many guests return there again and again. The trend in Newbold was to increase the amount of meditation centred work.
Two workshops at the Findhorn Foundation at the time of writing are worthy of special mention. One of them is Essence, a 12-week experience of the community in workshop form. Its sharing of community life is much more structured than that of the LCG programme and it involves participants in an intense relationship with the same group over a long period of time. Essence resembles an extended Experience week. Often I am invited to talk in the 'Personal and Planetary Transformation' sessions of the Experience week. Working with the Essence group I have a chance to develop similar work over a day or two, with practical exercises.
The other experience — it is hard to call it a workshop — which has been very special to the Findhorn Community is the Game of Transformation. The Game, as we call it, was the inspiration of community member Joy Drake in the seventies. She and her friend, Kathy Tyler, developed it into an extremely sophisticated tool for spiritual self-discovery, which continually provides powerful experiences for both members and guests. In the 'classical' version, five players meet with a game guide and a scribe, whose job is to chronicle the progress of play. They seek through meditation and discussion to find individual purposes for the game. These involve both what the players want to receive and what they are able to give — the latter usually in terms of qualities. Then, with these purposes in mind, they begin a complicated board game lasting for a day and a half. In it they may re-examine patterns in their lives that block them, strengths which they can develop, and their relationship to intuition, inner attunement and spiritual empowerment. Finally there is a summing up session in which all the players, the game guide and the scribe offer each other insight and feedback. Each player is given a tape recording to take away of feedback relevant to them.
There is a gigantic version of this game, the 'Planetary Game', which can be played with up to a hundred people. A couple of years ago the whole community played it to gain collective insight into our situation. Joy and Kathy. now living in Washington State, have also developed a self-guided version of the Game, The Transformation Game' or, as we have nicknamed it, the 'Game in the Box', a way of blending fun and personal spiritual awareness that can take something of the Findhorn Community spirit out to many thousands in their own homes. Whoever wants to improve their 'game of life' has an excellent teacher in the 'Game of Transformation'.
Conference Time
It has become usual to hold conferences twice a year, in the spring and autumn. For conferences everything stops. Normal working rhythms are suspended. Everyone goes on rotas for 20-24 hours during the week to make sure that the conference guests are provided for. The rotas allow members and LCGs to participate in what's going on. During the conference there are no other workshops and no Experience week. We become totally focused on the event.
At least a year before the conference, somebody has an idea for a theme. Management Committee attunes to it. If the idea feels appropriate, it is put out at a community meeting to see if there is support. A co-focaliser emerges. Gradually, a conference group forms. Their job is to do all the organising and to invite speakers. Every now and again they report at community meetings for further feedback and support. As the conference approaches, pressure and excitement mounts in the conference group. Will the speakers show up? Are guests registering to come? What has been forgotten? How could so-and-so get ill just now! Over the years, a detailed manual has been developed, a checklist of things that need to be done to ensure everything works smoothly. The actual structure of the conference is up to the conference group. Sometimes we have been so full that guests have stayed in local hotels. We run extra Experience weeks prior to a conference so that guests can understand us better, but anyone can come to a conference without having done a week first. Whatever the conference is actually called, its implicit title begins: 'The relationship of Spirit with....'
Personally, I must confess that I was not a conference fan. Often I did workshop tours at conference time. Otherwise I buried myself in my beloved Phoenix shop, where I could meet the guests in small numbers, and ate at home to avoid the buzzy atmosphere of the community centre. Perhaps I peep out shyly to attend some particularly interesting session. But I am the exception; most of us really enjoy the adrenalin-provoking atmosphere of the conferences, with discussions going on late into the night, and baggy-eyed participants dragging themselves to morning sessions. It is a change of routine, a chance to demonstrate how efficient we are at providing a stimulating and supportive conference atmosphere. There are quite a number of regular conference attendees, who come as much for the high experience as for the theme itself. There are main speakers, mini-workshops and small sharing groups led by members, so everyone gets a chance to participate. Members introduce main sessions with dances or music. During the week some kind of concert or event takes place.
In 1988 we explored the relationship between spirituality and politics in a conference entitled 'The Individual and the Collective'. The conference group invited a large number of speakers at great expense. But bookings were late. The community began to get nervous. Perhaps for the first time it wouldn't be a success. Gradually the numbers began to rise, passing the point at which we could cover our costs. The community relaxed, but in the conference group there was dissension. Were there too many speakers? There wouldn't be any time for small groups. It would be a talking shop! Somebody loaned us large quantities of video equipment. Stand-mounted cameras and cables took over the Hall. Would there be any room for seats? Every session would be videoed, and there would be tapes for sale within 24 hours. A daily conference newspaper was set up, so everybody could express themselves. A contingent came from the then Soviet Union and a special fund was organised to support them, as they had no foreign currency
As the week sped by, we excelled ourselves. Exhausted amateur camera crews forced themselves to film yet another session. At night they duplicated videos and sound cassettes into the small hours. A conference critique group set itself up and it began to publish statements criticising conference structure.
A superb Russian pop singer arrived. He began rehearsing frenetically with a new-age rock band from the south of England. On Wednesday night he opened the concert with a solo set of Russian folk songs, so beautifully performed that there was hardly a dry eye in the house! Then the band came on; the guitars roared. The whole Hall became a sea of dancers, tripping over cables and twisting among the musicians, chanting the refrain of his song: "This time it's real; this time it's now, this time, believe in Perestroika!"
Two experiences from the conference remain particularly in my mind — my nuclear physicist friend leading three hundred people to the far reaches of the universe and back in a guided meditation, and a wonderful Japanese speaker, a senior business executive who had changed his life and healed himself of cancer, introducing a very critical discussion of Japanese society by playing an exquisite Bach piece on his cello. We all called him Mr Shin and he was much loved.
At the end of it all, we paused for breath. The post-mortem showed that the conference had only just broken even, and the conference group received much criticism for abandoning the usual small group structure. There were too many speakers, too much big talk. Yet the conference was a success. It woke us up, challenged us, brought the whole world and its problems into our community, gave us a mirror to see how relevant we are when the talking is finished. For years I kept a tape of the concert with Sasha Malenin, the Russian singer.
Beyond the Findhorn Community
The main way that the Findhorn Foundation reaches the 'world outside' is through the experiences of the guests, shared on their return home. We, and they, are part of the 'big change' that is trying to take place in humanity, quietly, 'from the inside out'. In the Communications Centre in the Park we keep a card index of our visitors, by country and town, and a computerised mailing list. The Communications Centre also connects with a network of 'Resource People' in many cities across the world. They support us in various ways, from meditating to organising workshops for touring members.
For many years Eileen Caddy went on extensive speaking tours, addressing large audiences. She personifies the energy of the Findhorn Community; a powerhouse of activity and love right through her seventies. As she became older, she had videos made, so even though she can't travel so much, her message can still reach people. More members are being invited to speak or give workshops abroad. To support this work an Outreach section of Education Branch has been started.
I have found it very valuable to travel outside the Foundation. It has given me confidence in what we are doing, in our significance in world transformation. Such an awareness can sometimes fade if one is always involved in the day-to-day activity and challenges of the small community. With only this latter perspective, it is tempting to measure one's spiritual progress against perfection and feel disheartened. By observing life outside it is easier to see what a radiant gem has been created here, how it shines through the gloom and stress of materialist civilisation. Members who go out take a little of the gem's lustre with them. The world badly needs the Findhorn Community