Have you ever had the pleasure of listening to Mike Scott’s Experience Week song? (Yes, Mike Scott from the Waterboys wrote a song about our core programme, Experience Week!) In our Experience Weeks we still play this song in the last session with our groups. Every time I hold a week and it gets to this time I giggle with joy even before we play this song as it is quite predictable what is going to happen… One participant after the other will start smiling or laughing at some point throughout the song, as most of us can find ourselves and our personal experiences throughout the week, reflected in it.

Just the other day I found out that Mike had actually written this song when he was on Experience Week himself, in December 1992 at Cluny. One of his fellow ‘Experience Weekers’, John Timson, got in contact with me via Facebook and offered to post some of the pictures from his time at the Findhorn Foundation. Looking through his photographs, I found Mike singing wholeheartedly in the Beech Tree Room at Cluny. So I got in touch with Mike and asked if he would be happy for me to share these pictures and if he could give me some background about them.

This is what he said:

I’m playing guitar in the Beech Tree room with my Experience Week focaliser, and members of the Experience Week group. The week was December 5-12 1992. We were based at Cluny, I worked in the dining room there, and my Experience Week song, which later became used as part of the Weeks, was written and sung to the group at our Friday sharing.

I had a heart-opening experience with powerful inner fire during the week, triggered by many things, but the final key being the Group Discovery Games on the Monday (specifically the compassion one where closed-eye group members hold hands and convey emotions including compassion regardless of who their partner is while not knowing who, and the final Planets game). I spent the rest of the week and some time after, in an altered state of consciousness.

I will never forget it, and I still use in my daily life many meditational tools, affirmations and techniques I learned at that point and in my later Findhorn times (sporadically 1992-2008). I’m still in contact with many Findhorn friends and colleagues from over the years, sometimes about community and FF archives, sometimes socially.’
Mike Scott

Thank you Mike for being such a big support for us! Thank you for your words and thank you John for the pictures and inspiration.

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This post is adapted from a post on the Findhorn Foundation Facebook page in May 2022. Text by Britta Schmitz, photographs by John Timson.