This photo portrays Findhorn Foundation Cluny Hill Reception and myself during my time as Reception Focalizer, between 1999 and 2001.

For many years in my youth I had worked in large hotels for business people, as a Night Manager. Since the guests came for business purposes, the nights were generally quiet, which allowed me to dedicate time to both study and meditation.

However, at a certain point I stopped feeling integrity for this work, because I realized that it was an ever-increasing compromise. The answer I got, when I asked for internal guidance, was that it wasn’t the work that was wrong, but the context. I later received a vision that I was in charge of the Front Desk at a special hotel where guests came only for spiritual and healing purposes.

A few days later I handed in my resignation. A year later, in 1999, I moved to the spiritual community of the Findhorn Foundation, initially working as Seva in Homecare at Cluny Hill.

At one point, the Reception focaliser left the position to move to another department. There was no one in the Community who was willing to fill the post. The long shifts, the complexity of the work, the stress in managing guests and telephone calls, the difficulty in finding volunteers, in addition to the fact of working alone without a team, made this position very unpopular. This was a job traditionally reserved only for those who had lived in the community for a long time and required to be official resident members.

However, no staff member was willing to take on the job. Then, though I didn’t have the formal requirements, my name was proposed, even though no one knew of my past experience in the sector.

Initially I felt a lot of resistance and refused. Community members’ aversion to working at Reception had alarmed me. I thought I would no longer have time to offer shamanic sessions, write books, carry out practices. etc. Furthermore, I really didn’t feel like going back to the work I had done previously, which I thought I would definitively leave behind.

There were other reasons too. In the Community at Cluny Hill some members had reservations about my being able to run the reception, as I was not an official member of staff and had only lived in the community for a short time, and this caused me discomfort.

After a few weeks of indecision, the vision I had previously came back to me vividly, and then it was clear that I had to accept. Working at the Cluny Hill Reception was one of the most joyful and successful experiences of my life. It was also very easy to manage, allowing me to have abundant time for every other activity, laying the foundations for the manifestation of all my visions.