Editor’s Note: The following post is the result of a conversation facilitated by Lora Wedge between Cally Fulton and Dorota Owen which was recorded during the Your Community Your Story Economy Module on 6th Aug 2026.
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Cally: I was involved with the land sales committee of the Titleholders Association here in the Ecovillage for three years. As part of that, I conducted the interviews for new people moving in. I witnessed first hand the fear surrounding that much money. It’s very interesting. It’s not a lack of trust. It’s just scary … scary to play with large amounts of money that often you have to borrow in order to buy a house.
For many people it’s the most expensive thing they’ve ever bought. It’s not just fear of the money, it’s fear of death basically, of not having your needs taken care of. So if they put all their money into something then they might…
Really, fear is the root of all evil. And fear is not real. It is like walking into the room and switching the light on and the light comes. And that’s the same with switching consciousness, that’s all we need to do. Fear will then disappear like the darkness.
I think it is essential that you don’t feed the fear. I have applied that in my life in various ways, having had three daughters, and running my own real estate company for about twenty-five years, where we’ve dealt with green homes and communities. I think it is important that you don’t listen to their problems over and over and over. Yes, you hear them and then you shed the light by asking “Have you thought of this?” “Have you thought of that?” “This is what could happen…” And it’s just that little tweak.
Dorota: I remember when I was buying a house in Forres and I genuinely had no money but I had a really good investment broker in Forres who had an office there at the time and he came to see me. I wasn’t afraid, so I just said; “Look, I want to buy this house. It costs a quarter of a million pounds. Clearly I don’t have that, nor do I have an income, right?”
We came up with a cunning plan. I managed to scrape together 50,000 pounds from my husband. We had shared a house and got divorced so he bought me out and gave me 50,000 pounds. And then my investment broker managed to get me a mortgage. Now listen to this, it was an interest-only mortgage and it was what was called at that time a self-certified interest-only mortgage so it was only me that was certifying myself. I was able to self-certify that I was a writer, which I was, and that I had published many books, which I had, and that my projected sales in the future would be, you know, fictitious. So my broker managed to put that with a number of other mortgage applications in a bundle which he sent off to a mortgage company and I got the mortgage.
As a result I got this interest-only mortgage at a time when the interest was 350 pounds a month. I then got a lodger who received housing benefit of 350 pounds a month so the money he got from the government was enough to pay my mortgage. So essentially I had a free house, and it was a big house.
At the time I had three children and a lodger and then I got another lodger. Over time the house went up in value so I started to sell tranches of equity and from that I paid for my kids to go to public school in Gordonstoun. I ended up living in a five-bedroom house with a garden the size of a football field, and my three children went to Gordonstoun … that’s abundance.
Then I came up with this great idea of running workshops in Greece. This meant that we’d go to Greece every summer and the kids would help out in the workshop, which covered their expenses, and I rented out the house over the summer which paid for our flights. So then we had a five-bedroom house, the garden the size of a football field, all children at a top private school, all of us went to Greece every summer for six weeks and I still had no money, but we had a really great life. The children are still very grateful.
Just to add the icing on the cake, my daughter is having her honeymoon right now with her husband and their children at that place in Greece, twenty years later!
Cally: So how do we work with the fear, how do we deal with people’s trauma? As part of my sustainable green real estate business I addressed the business side and I also ran women’s circles. We would meet up, go around the circle and share. In that context we would just hold the person, and then we would all meditate together and we would listen to the different messages coming in. There were some revealing answers.
I have a very good friend who lived at Findhorn in the eighties – her husband was the focaliser of the The Park at that time. I knew her then and still work with her now. I witnessed that she basically got ‘downloads’ from her guides. My work later was similar to that. It wasn’t just that the group would hold people in love and light, but what made the difference was the download of love and messages that came through. Sometimes messages wouldn’t come in. It’s not an immediate thing. It’s something that you just feel and then perhaps in two months you realise “Look at this, oh wow, where’d this come from?”
It is all about support and holding, but on more than just the human level.
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Photo Credits: top – Thank you to Roman Synkevych from Unsplash free
Cally and Dorota – photo Lora Wedge
Cally is an entrepreneur, community builder and lifelong seeker. Rooted in the spirit of Findhorn, she creates beautiful, welcoming spaces that inspire connection, reflection, creativity and meaning.
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