Yes – there is a Life after Findhorn

It has been nearly 20 years since I left Findhorn (in 2003).  My wife, Laura – an American clinical psychologist, body psychotherapist and dance/performer, had married me and come to live with me in Findhorn, moving from Houston, TX in 1998: quite a transition from the 5th largest city in USA, with a 6-lane highway ring-road, good coffee shops, and a very different climate.  After a couple of years, we realised she was suffering from culture shock and it also took her a few years to get her clinical psychology qualifications accepted by the British Psychological Society (who seemed to have broomsticks up their backsides).  She then realised that the Findhorn Community wasn’t really her community.  By this time, my daughter Rhiannon had moved away to go to university and (see my earlier post) my commitment to stay at Findhorn to be around for her had thus diminished.  There was a difficult hiatus.

The deal Laura and I had was that if she came to live with me in Findhorn, the next move was her choice – where and when: and, in December 2002, she got a job as a clinical psychologist in the Pain Service in Edinburgh.  So, I said, “Can I come too?”  It took me a very painful and difficult 6 months to wrap everything up; sell the house and the business and move myself: tearing up all the roots I had made.

Things were also not working out quite so well for me in Findhorn.  Living in ‘Meridian’, our house in Bag End was good: I had helped to build it!  And I was still doing the Health & Safety work (part-time) and working as a psychotherapist (part-time).  I had also been General Secretary of the European Association of Body Psychotherapy for 7 years, building up the organisation, and – in 2000, had become President of EABP.  But that meant quite a drop in part-time income, and – with a bit of overspending – my finances were beginning to look a bit dire.

We rented a house in Liberton, one of the suburbs of Edinburgh, and I set about looking for work.  After a few months, I got a locum position working in the NHS as a psychological therapist in Lanark & Carluke, based at Hartwood Hill Hospital: talk about a culture shock!  Working with people in south Clydesdale was like working in the Land of Mordor, 40 years after the Fall of the Dark Tower.  The coalfields had been closed; the land itself was green again; but the people were still devastated.  It is now called “transgenerational trauma”.  I was also working (supposedly) with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy; wearing a suit and tie; and trying to get my head around “proper” clinical practice, even though I had been working (sort-of) professionally on and off for 20 years.  To cap it all, my first wife, Heather’s youngest son Curdie (now 17) suddenly died and my ‘other’ family (ex-wife and 3 children) was totally devastated.

This was not a very auspicious start to my “Life After Findhorn”, but this short section – difficult to write -bridges my earlier post to a (sort of) work-blog that covers most of my professional (and some personal) activities from then on.  But you will have to go here to read that.