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Growing up in Zimbabwe and South Africa has had a profound impact on my life and career. I was deeply affected by the system of apartheid or separation thinking and ached to be part of something more connected and lifegiving, which I knew existed from my experiences in the wild and nature.
Keen to be part of building something ‘new’, I joined an American consumer goods company freshly re-entering post- apartheid South Africa and began a career building global brands based on products that improved peoples lives. A bit of early success and synchronicity gave me some excellent business grounding, worldly travel, and exposure to the creativity and power of people, business, and how we shape the world.
My success should have felt good, but an unsettledness grew in me. I couldn’t shake the consumer data showing that Chinese women were more concerned about signs of ageing after we’d successfully launched a major beauty brand there. Or the financial reality that making diapers accessible to low-income families in African countries through smaller pack sizes with lower cash outlays, meant charging more per item to them than top earners. And so on.
I was starting to realise that however much we were good people intending positive things for the world, we were working in a more subtle version of the separation thinking system that I’d grown up in.
It was around then, in 2001, that I came to Findhorn to visit a friend for the weekend, which turned out to be quite eventful! A wildfire in the gorse came right up to the settlement of wooden houses, and I felt humbled by people’s calm, measured response to having their homes threatened in that way. The wind turned at just the right moment in front of a line of meditators letting life know it really mattered to them that the fire came no further!
And I vividly recall a sense of awe and wonder seeing the northern lights for the first time.
But it was simply sitting in the Phoenix Café having a cup of tea that was pivotal. I had a powerful heart-opening I had a powerful heart-opening experience and a sense of falling in love with the place, which was really falling in love with life in a new way. I had found something I’d always longed for, without fully knowing it. The experience quietly changed my life, though I didn’t
know it at the time.
And I vividly recall a sense of awe and wonder seeing the northern lights for the first time.
At the end of 2003 I decided to spend a few months here to get clear about my next life chapter, and found myself called to a deeper experience of the transformational work of this centre. I’ve been living here ever since.
Today I run a business supporting people and organisations to listen to and act on their innate wisdom, and make the positive contribution they are here to make. This has grown directly out of 15 years living and working in the Findhorn Foundation – an incredible training ground to learn, experiment with, teach and then lead, in the field of transformational change.
It’s hard to point to one thing about the Findhorn experience. It’s not the meditation and inner listening or attunement practices, or the communication and group consciousness awarenesses, or connection with nature, intention to see work as love in action and so on – it’s so about the whole thing! I would say that the immersion over time here has been like going through an operating system upgrade. From the separation thinking that is our main mode of functioning in today’s world with its competition, lack, disconnect with nature and each other, and all of those consequences, to a living-system orientation, inherently interconnected, generative and life-giving.
I am so grateful to now be more able to access my own living intelligence and the fresh insight, lifeforce, co-creative possibility that comes from that, which is a very rewarding way to live.
My work leading groups and the Findhorn Foundation itself through processes of transformational change showed me profound possibilities for people and organisations when we relate as intelligent, living systems. This inspired me to create a business helping people and organisations to do this, and experience the sense of purpose, insight, natural energy and collaborative, ecological relationship with life that follows. Whether it’s shaping our lives, or creating structure and strategy, we discover new meaning, and the fulfilment of contributing what we’re here to do and be.
Learning to live from our generative nature has the potential to transform the way we see and engage with everything. Findhorn is filled with practical examples of new possibilities emerging through this, from the personal to ecological, social, and political.
The work of those who came before me to enable this place to be fertile ground for connecting within, and for experimenting within this context of goodwill, is a real inspiration.
Adele Napier
Business coach + ordained minister + spiritual counsellor
from Zimbabwe & South Africa
First Findhorn visit » 2001
An author, writer, and spiritual and ecological activist
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