I met Cornelia Fellner (now Featherstone) during a Findhorn Foundation programme, a massage course in June 1990, which she co-focalised with Dorothy Noble.

It was a life-changing experience. Swedish massage was liberating and creative. Becoming comfortable with touch and bodies was healing and the flowing movements appealed to the dancer in me. The precision of Dorothy’s techniques – informed by osteopathy – appealed to my meticulous (at times) nature.

Peer support and inspiration

After the course, Cornelia offered a peer-support group for new masseurs/masseuses. Here, she spoke of her vision for holistic health in the Findhorn community and I was immediately interested to read her ideas.

With a background in editing and publishing, as well as marketing, I felt the need to “normalise” her wonderfully eclectic English. Her writing style was fluent and clear, but retained quite a lot of German word order and was peppered with Findhorn-speak words such as attune, energy, focalise, sharing, etc. I set about helping her words be accessible to a wider audience, which might include health professionals in the NHS and potential funders.

Vision and innovation

I discovered with Cornelia that I am a natural innovator, especially when working in a team with a powerful visionary at the helm. Although I don’t have visions as such, I am wired to bring things into form, and this is how I helped to shape the HHC.

Community Health Scheme

In 1991 we cooked up the Community Health Scheme together. This comprised an annual health check, a free monthly massage and a voucher towards the costs of holistic health workshop per year.

My role was to deliver the Holistic Health Education programme and I supported the health centre reception and volunteered on the rota of monthly free massages, as well as co-writing and printing a regular newsletter.

Holistic Health conference September 1992 and Medical Marriage conference May 1994

Medical Marriage announcer Katie Lloyd

Medical Marriage announcer photo HHC

One of our great accomplishments was organising international conferences, in the long-held tradition of the Findhorn Foundation.

Here, I learned to work with finance and money, including marginalised folk, bursary places, administration, designing the conference timetable, engaging and looking after the speakers and then holding the space alongside Cornelia and Dürten Lau and many volunteers.

After the 1994 conference we pulled all the findings together – from reports by participants or presenters – shaped it into a coherent form and produced a detailed but hopefully readable document.

Living in Meridian 1991-1995

Being a part-owner of Meridian was wonderful. I was able to choose some of the layout of the upstairs and the simple, Ikea style décor was full of light. For more about the story of Meridian please click here.

Having been abroad in USA from 1980-1990, I hadn’t owned a home before and as Findhorn was so right for me, it was perfect.

I am pretty adaptable so I could work around the challenge of having the kitchen downstairs in the middle of the Holistic Health Centre (HHC), but by the time I left in 1995, I was ready for a different lifestyle.

Interestingly, the Isle of Erraid called me and there it was full-on community with no privacy at all and certainly not fresh, contemporary Swedish furnishings!

When it came time in due course to move HHC into Forres and to re-purpose the house in 1998, it was nice that Courtenay Young, who initiated the original building of the eco-house but had to release it in 1991, could come home to roost.

How HHC shaped my future

I left the Park in May 1995 to live on the Isle of Erraid, which was an amazing experience on every level, completely different from the more administrative work at HHC, but the confidence and belonging I gained in The Park very much supported my life on Erraid . (See my article Growing People edited by Kay Kay.)

After the best part of five years on Erraid, I moved in February 2000 to SW England with my then partner and fellow Erraidian, Andrew Trussell. In March 2000, we completed a Permaculture Design course with the legendary Patrick Whitefield at Ragmans Lane Farm, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. Before the course ended, the owner of the farm Matt Dunwell spotted our combined skill set and invited us to be “woofers” (Workers on Organic Farms) which, as we were without a home, we gladly accepted. We proceeded to put into practice many of the skills we had developed on Erraid – apart from boat and tide craft, as we were comprehensively inland!

Andrew’s expertise with growing plants, maintenance – anything from plumbing to combustion engines, carpentry and his genius for “mending things” were invaluable.

My love of working outdoors, growing food, health & wellbeing, education, communication, and general graft went into the various enterprises at the farm.

We missed the almost formal style of Findhorn communities, but nevertheless enjoyed working alongside 4-5 other residents on the 60-acre farm. Our tasks were to host courses in the 12-bed bunkhouse, keep it clean and maintained, to make and sell products for the emerging farmers markets in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, manage the Willow Bank, and develop awareness of Ragmans through local press. It was a very fulfilling and wonderfully challenging time.

Moving to Stroud

We also drove 40 minutes to Stroud each week for a singing class in Indian raga and began to make friends on the other side of the county, including, as it turned out my future husband and true love, osteopath Jonathan Nunn.

After 2 years, however, Andrew felt the need to return to the Hebrides and I reluctantly went back to Iona and Mull alongside. But the magnetism of Stroud had captured my imagination and we went our separate ways, with me gravitating back to Gloucestershire and Andrew eventually moving across to Tiree. (He later moved to Wrexham, North Wales to be near his son Ben and sadly died in October 2017. I am so grateful for our six years together, which were full of learning and adventure.)

Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking

Not knowing how I would make a living in Stroud, I was preparing to buy a black polyester trouser suit and apply for a job at the District Council when I spotted a 4-day per week newly created job at Hawkwood. I had visited the alternative adult education centre in 1998 to attend a truly life-changing retreat in yoga and Indian raga singing (that’s another tale!), so I was already aware of the place and its ethos, which had its roots in Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science of anthroposophy.

The previous ten years, with a combination of having a spiritual practice, working on the land plus the marketing, organisational and communication skills that I had developed at HHC and then Ragmans gave me the opportunity for an exciting new role at Hawkwood – Development Coordinator. I got the job and started in March 2003! (Meanwhile, I fell in love with Jonathan and we married in July 2004.)

Once again, my work was full of variety with lots of scope for bringing new ideas into form, to make positive things happen in a beautiful, sustainable environment and enhance well-being for people and planet.

I was promoted to Programme Manager in 2011, with arrival of CEO Alicia Carey.

Joining up Hawkwood and Findhorn

In October 2014, The New Story Summit conference at Findhorn was live streamed for the first time. With fantastic support from Robin Alfred among others, I jumped at the chance to use this new technology and at short notice created one of a handful of global Hubs, in Stroud. About 25 people attended and a little Findhorn portal was opened at Hawkwood, which somehow helped me to breathe more easily, as Findhorn is my spiritual home, as it is for thousands of others around the globe.

The following January 2015, I was invited to join a group called Living the New Story to keep the energy moving forward into 2015 and beyond. It was headed by the co-initiators of the New Story conference, Findhorn Fellow Richard Olivier and Findhorn Trustee Janice Dolley.

Ecology and Leadership

The natural affinity between Hawkwood and Findhorn revealed itself in a series of trainings with Olivier Mythodrama held at Hawkwood, as well as online and in person courses on Theory U with Otto Scharmer and the team at MIT. We also supported Mattie Porte’s initiative of Living the New Story online courses over several years.

Another key event at Hawkwood was SEED Festival: Planting Big Ideas, brainchild of Devon-based Victoria Whelan, that ran between 2013-2019. This brought top ecologists and artists together and put Hawkwood on the green map, internationally. Speakers included Tim Smit, Mike Berner-Lee, Charles Eisenstein, Polly Higgins, Satish Kumar, Vandana Shiva, Jon Young, Rob Hopkins, Claire Dubois and many more.

Curating and attending leadership courses was incredibly rewarding for me and allowed the college to change its identity from Hawkwood College to Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking in 2018.

Weathering changes

In 2017, the team increased in size and decreased in average age! I learned so much from working with young people in their 20s. I felt they pulled the future from me, and they appreciated what they called my youthful eldership.

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, we reeled – £450,000 of projected income was wiped out in an afternoon. We picked ourselves up off the floor, finding we were small and nimble enough (12 core team members and a hugely supportive board of Trustees) to be able to pivot as many courses as we possibly could onto the Zoom platform.

We thus succeeded in keeping our brand not only alive but flourishing in myriad new ways. Hawkwood CFT survived lockdown and has come out the other side with exciting initiatives in international educational partnerships, a fully funded artist residency programme and an innovative Research Fellows platform.

Personally, lockdown served me well. I found my poetic voice with Mary Reynolds Thompson’s Wild Scribe and have been writing ever since – the first time since my first year on Erraid when poems flowed.

I officially retired from Hawkwood CFT in June 2020 but continued hosting zoom courses until late autumn. Then, I was invited back in January 2021 and finally left in April 2022.

Never idle

Currently I volunteer in support of Stroud’s annual Sacred Music Festival and St Laurence’s Church: Stroud Centre for Peace and the Arts. I curate and produce events and am part of a programme and hospitality team that is gently and steadily working to reframe what church can be. St Laurence’s is the town centre church and our pioneer vicar Rev Simon Howell is flinging open the doors to welcome people of all faiths and none and to include marginalised people.

It’s a great joy to create spiritual events which are in the mode of inclusive, contemplative Christianity. I am enjoying giving my time to more specifically spiritual things for the first time in a good few years.

It has been a great pleasure to harvest the fruits of my years since I met Cornelia in 1990 – 34 years – nearly half my life. Thank you for reading.

Katie Lloyd-Nunn, Stroud March 2024