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The so-called magic of Findhorn was tempting… but I couldn’t get past the image of a bunch of hippies sitting in a circle singing Kumbaya.
A friend based there spent years trying to convince me to visit. Why go from sunny Cape Town to chilly Scotland, to hold hands and eat lentils with some crazy, earnest strangers?
I caved in the year I turned 50, choosing Experience Week as a way to mark the milestone. On the morning it was to start, I remember feeling a hard, cold dread. Like I was standing on a threshold and there would be no turning back from this change. I absolutely didn’t want to take the step.
Surprisingly, my group was full of pretty standard people from all around the world – not a hippy in sight, and most with similar misgivings: ‘Please don’t make us dance the colour red or something,’ muttered the London barrister.
A remarkable change happened that week. From a fairly stiff and disparate collection of strangers, we evolved into a gentle and loving family of sorts, however cliched that sounds. Our hearts opened – to each other and to ourselves.
Findhorn is a place of accelerated growth and understanding. It’s a social experiment, really. Is there another way to live in the world, where thoughtfulness – to self and others – is central? Findhorn is transforming the world, one heart at a time.
Everyone has a wildly different experience here. It’s a crucible of people from all over, and what’s on offer is spectacularly diverse. But common to each person’s experience, I believe, is change.
Every visitor feels some kind of shift. From what I’ve seen, it’s a shift towards gentleness, acceptance, and listening to your heart.
Back in Cape Town after Experience Week, I realised it was entirely unthinkable to continue in my job as I was. Endless meetings with clients and advertising agencies, egos and bluster. From being of the utmost importance, it now seemed so removed from what’s actually important in our lives, in the world. Suddenly I could see all that posturing for what it was… a little silly!
I shared this dilemma with my managing director, Bridget, and I’ll always be grateful for her typically inspired response: ‘Well then, design the job you want.’ That was the first step on a slow journey of change – exploring new kinds of content creation and new skills such as facilitation within my job, and finding more purpose.
About two years later I did the Permaculture Design Certificate Course through Findhorn College. It’s a two- week programme that mixes theory with hands-on, nicely grubby practical work. As a design model, permaculture applies nature’s principles of logic and efficiency to design – whether it be for a garden or farm, or even life. It’s changed the way I look at systems of any kind – I find myself asking, how would nature design this differently?
It also fuelled the questions I was continuing to ask: is my own life designed the way it could be?
Findhorn has a retreat house on Iona, one of the Western Isles in the Inner Hebrides. There are different themed retreats each week and I gratefully accepted the chance to co-focalise two of them. For the last few years that’s meant taking unpaid leave from my job and flying to Scotland, but the shift in direction has felt so right.
There’s a particular energy on Iona, a kind of heightened awareness. It’s been said that the veil between heaven and earth is at its thinnest on Iona, and many people have felt that. So spending time there, in Findhorn’s beautiful house right on the beach, or exploring the island that’s both wild and gentle, is an absolute blessing. The pace is slow – there’s time to stop, listen and remember who you are, and how our beings are intertwined with nature and its rhythms.
The process of personal change that started with Experience Week has ended with me finally leaving full-time corporate life – to go volunteering on Iona! But, Covid-19 happened instead. As I write the whole world is on pause, holding its breath and waiting to see how we can co-create a brand-new normal. A new journey of change is starting and I have no idea where the shift will take me, but I know this much: we all have an incredible, unique and magnificent opportunity to press reset.
Update: Adelle now works at the Foundation in the Communications Department.
Adelle Horler
Journalist + facilitator + expedition guide
from South Africa
First Findhorn visit » 2015
Dell, from SA, lives in The Park. She’s an author and facilitator, holding retreats on Iona and elsewhere. Now freelance, she worked in Marketing and Education at the Foundation for close to 3 years.
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