HEALING and healing activities have always played a significant – though sometimes intangible – role at Findhorn. Healing groups of different kinds have formed and dis­solved and formed and dissolved again. At times the community is full of people offering a broad range of healing therapies; at other times the ‘healing’ impulse is not focused through any particular group or approach but expresses – as it always does – through the whole range of community life.

How much and what kind of healing is done has always depended on who is here, with what skills and talents. Many healers were drawn to visit Findhorn in its early years. They worked mostly through the laying on of hands, prayer and meditation, and many were sensitives, come to see and support a community which acknow­ledged and followed the guidance from inner realms that came through Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean. The daily meditations together were a strong focus for the small community, but not much in the way of healing activities orig­inated from the group here, who were busy long hours with the physical work that needed doing. It was mostly the visitors who led healing services in the Sanctuary, which was always open.

A lot of healing work was done in those early days, but Findhorn did not identify itself as a healing community. Peter Caddy tells of a time when for a while it did, to find that increasing numbers of people were coming not so much to contribute to the building and co-creation of a light centre, but rather to receive healing for themselves. The group here realised the focus was being put in the wrong place and thereafter identified themselves as a centre of wholeness. Of course, healing was happening in the work being done-particularly a healing of humanity’s relationship with the nature kingdoms – but it was healing on a far wider scale than the purely personal. “Give and it shall be given unto you” became the perhaps unspoken maxim, and it was within the context of identification with and creation of wholeness that any healing of the individual was seen as taking place.

This may explain why for many years ‘healing’ work was a spare-time activity. It is only in the last couple of years that a few community members have had this recognised as part of their ‘official’ work programme. But people interested and skilled in approaches to health and wholeness have continued to be drawn here, and as the community has grown, so too has the range of therapies offered become more diverse, including, at different times, massage, Touch for Health, scanning of the energy body, herbalism, homeopathy, radionics and rebirthing.

Efforts to organise and coordinate healing on a community level have never really worked. The most ambitious attempt was in 1977 when a house in the Findhorn village was set up as a health and wholeness centre, but the group working with it found it difficult to define their vision and area of responsibility, and after seven months they dis­banded. Perhaps also the time was not ripe, and the community not yet ready to support a multi­-purpose or multi-technique centre. There are some who feel that when a critical size in the community is reached then such a centre will evolve organically, when it is more of a real need.

Today there is no formal group promoting health and wholeness, although there is a small group which serves in an advisory capacity to Personnel and the Education Branch. Coordinat­ing functions seem to take care of themselves, and a kind of ‘tribal medicine’ system operates, with several practitioners skilled in different areas (three of them, Edward Bickford, Sara Marriott and Barbara D’Arcy Thompson talk in this issue about their own particular approaches to healing), and people go to those who most suit them. There is an apothecary, serving as a largely first aid dispensary of herbal and homeopathic remedies, flower essences, tinctures. teas and various well waters. It is also a resource centre where those interested can learn more about natural healing, and books and tapes are available on just about everything from diet to esoteric healing and gem therapy.

Part of the challenge facing any group trying to organise health and wholeness activities within the community is in defining where the area begins and ends. As Edward Bickford says, “In the end we come right back to the understanding that we are all healers. There is often as much healing work being done in the work place and in the group as there is in seeing an individual therapist or going to a healing session or medi­tation. And healing work itself tends to lose its emphasis on technique and to focus instead on consciousness, both of the practitioner and the ‘patient’. The meaning of giving and receiving healing changes; it becomes clear that all healing is essentially self healing, facilitated by a therapist or practitioner. Healing becomes less mysterious, and much more a natural process.”