MY TIME IN FINDHORN Mike Scott writes


The picture behind this text shows Findhorn Bay, in north-east Scotland. I lived there on and off for several years at the Findhorn Foundation, a spiritual community begun in 1962. I still have strong connections with the Foundation and love playing in their fabulous theatre Universal Hall with The Waterboys or by myself. The Findhorn community is many things - a sacred place, a community of people working to find new ways of living together on the earth, a spiritual educational centre, an ecological village, a centre of the arts, an adventure, a passion play, a challenge, an incredible family, a creative hothouse, and much more besides. The community's life is based on the experience that God is inside, and that there is a perennial and ageless wisdom behind all the world's major religions. I was drawn there after seeing a video featuring Eileen Caddy, one of the community's founders. She was talking about the power of gratitude and unconditional love and everything she said rang a loud and profound bell inside me. I knew I had to go and check out this "Findhorn" place.


I turned up on a cold dark October night in 1992 and checked into a B & B owned by people connected to The Foundation. They were polite but not particularly friendly. One of my hosts took me across the road to the Foundation that evening and showed me Universal Hall, their theatre. Next day I explored the place more fully - saw its ecological houses, its gardens, and drank deep of its peaceful, purposeful atmosphere. But it was a lonely experience. Everyone in the community seemed involved with their own day and work. I'd naively expected smiling faced sunbeam pilgrims at every turn welcoming me and sacred monk-ish music drifting out of windows. In fact the music playing when I passed the Community Centre kitchens was The Rolling Stones ! I went into the various community Sanctuaries (meditation rooms), walked into neighbouring Findhorn village, roamed the beach, ate a lonesome meal in my B & B at night. I wasn't disillusioned - I could tell this was a special and powerful place, and that it worked, but I didn't feel part of it.


The next day, before I left to catch my plane I went to lunchtime "Sanctuary". I'd noticed the community meditation times on the main Sanctuary noticeboard. I went in and there were thirty or forty people sitting in the Sanctuary chairs, many with eyes already closed. Nobody paid any notice to me. I sat down in an empty seat and closed my eyes too. A woman began to speak, to lead the meditation. She asked us to see the community as a centre of healing Light (I did). Then she asked us to visualise this Light radiating out into the local area (I did). Then to visualise it spreading to the sacred centres of Iona and Glastonbury, and beyond to all Scotland and Britain (I did ! ). Then to see the Light radiate to Europe and finally across the whole world and out across the Universe. And as everyone in the room did this I felt the power of the meditation. Wave upon wave of electrifying inspiration passed through me. I felt awed and humbled and truly that I had been looking for this moment and this Place all my life. At the meditation's end, twenty minutes later, I walked out of the Sanctuary dazed and thrilled. Everyone else looked completely normal, like they did this kind of thing every day. And so they did ! I knew then I would be back and that I would come and live in this community.


Two months later, like thousands of people before me I returned to Findhorn to take part in an "Experience Week" (an introduction program to the Foundation's work and life). I stayed at the Foundation's magical Cluny Hill College; a former hotel in the neighbouring town of Forres where many of the guest programs take place. And during the week, inter-acting with the community and moved by the power of the place and the deeply honest quality of the life lived there, I had a heart-opening experience. I found what that well-worn phrase really means. I could feel my heart "coming on" inside me like a great fire and for all seven days and several after was enveloped in a powerful magnificent and urgent emotion, like every love affair I've ever had rolled into one. I've tried to write about this experience in several songs ("Nectar", "Big Lover", half of the "Still Burning" album). It changed the way I look at life and other people forever. I realised everyone really is the same deep underneath, with the same longing to love and be loved. Behind all our appearances, as one writer says "There is only one of us here". And at my best moments now I can feel and know it inside, not just think it intellectually with my mind.


I went back to Findhorn over the next year for several other guest programs and eventually stayed there for 3 months as a long-term guest, working in the community kitchens, cooking for upwards of a hundred people. When that finished I moved into the local area where I stayed for another year or so, keeping up my many connections with the community.


When word had leaked out that I was some kind of professional musician cum rock star, I got asked to play with many of the community's musicians. People come to Findhorn from all over the world and I found myself doing some unexpected things. I've been a member of the community's wedding band, ceilidh band and jazz band. (One of the most surreal experiences of my life was playing the "Monty Python" theme with the Findhorn Ceilidh band at a Burns Supper in the Community Centre while people from five continents danced the Gay Gordons). I also played back-up to several singers of different nationalities, tried out my new songs at Friday night Community concerts and eventually did several of my own one man shows at Universal Hall. These were the beginnings of the one-man show I did all round the world at the time of my "Bring 'Em All In" album.


This album was recorded in a beautiful little studio built in the 1970's underneath Universal Hall. The recording sessions took place in September 1994. My friend the recording engineer Niko Bolas came from New York to produce the album with me. It was my dream to record the album in the same special Findhorn atmosphere that had inspired so many of the songs.


Every day Niko and I would cycle along the shores of Findhorn Bay to the Foundation for our recording session. Some mornings (if we got up early) we sat with the community at the morning meditation in the Sanctuary. Then when the community members headed off to their work shifts we'd head off to ours too - in the studio. When I was having problems getting a definitive performance of the song "Bring 'Em All In" we booked some time in the Sanctuary and snuck in there one morning with our microphones and DAT recorder. I sang the song there and then in the charged Sanctuary atmosphere. Then we overdubbed the other instruments back at the studio.


I left Findhorn in 1995 and moved back to London, but I still return regularly, most recently in January 2002 to play two shows at Universal Hall with The Waterboys. I've come to regard the place as home, and over the years I've got to know beautiful Findhorn village and the great no-nonsense nearby town of Forres into the bargain.


People often ask me about my life at the Findhorn Community and I can say it's given me some of the best times and experiences of my life. I've learned and grown there, met and leapt through my challenges, had my heart opened, met some of my best friends, belonged, laughed, discovered the truth of who and what I am, and been able to take what I've received back out into the world with me. I love the place and its people, and I'm honoured to be associated with it.


Photographs by Mike Scott. "Leap" by Jeff Mitchell. "Cluny" by Findhorn Fdn.