Experience Week: From I to We - A Threshold Moment
Written by Christine Lines
After an absence of more than two years, a familiar friend has returned to the Park Ecovillage Findhorn. Experience Week is happening again, and it was a delight to welcome guests from around the world, including the USA, South Africa, the Netherlands, England and Scotland, as well as residents from both the Ecovillage and the Findhorn Village.
Our Experience Week group in front of the Guest Lodge, where they stayed at the heart of our community - some where camera shy.
One participant described the week as, ‘A gentle and nourishing coming together of a disparate group of seekers.’ With guests staying in the Guest Lodge and using a range of spaces across the Park now stewarded by Ecovillage Findhorn CBS, it marked another positive step in the growing partnership between EF and FF3. The feedback has been heartwarming, with participants describing the week as ‘nourishing’, ‘transformative’, and
“a chance to reconnect, with ourselves, each other, and the natural world.”
The programme draws on the deep legacy of the experience first held in 1974. For decades it welcomed guests into community life and a reflective way of being. Now, Experience Week is emerging again alongside an evolving Park Ecovillage and wider community ecosystem. One community member said, ‘I didn’t realise how much I’d missed Experience Weeks being held.’ This first week, which took place from 26 April to 1 May, felt like a threshold moment.
A personal living experience
Each participant came with their own questions, hopes and life experiences. After the welcome session held in the Nature Sanctuary, one of them shared:
“I got what I came for after two hours, from feeling guarded to being open.”
As the week unfolded, another said:
“My relationship to time, space and myself has changed.”
Moments that stay with you
Exploring Nature’s Intelligence with Judy McAllister in the Original Garden
A highlight for the group was exploring co-creation with the intelligence of nature guided by long term resident Judy McAllister, who taught alongside Dorothy Maclean for many years. The session opened something touching and profound. People spoke of a deeper listening, not just to nature, but to life itself, and asked for more time to listen and learn. One participant appreciated, ‘The energy in Judy’s transmissions.’
The simple rhythms of the week, shared meals, soulful conversations, group projects and evening sharings created a sense of trust and belonging. ‘An experience of caring in the community in action.’ Others enjoyed, ‘The many special encounters with people.’
Love in Action and Learning as we go
At the heart of the week is the founding practice of Love in Action. Through practical contributions in the gardens and around the community, participants stepped into service as a way of learning. As focalisers, Joern and I experienced the week as an insightful journey for future programmes. In the June week, we plan to offer a wider range of experiences and more exploration around what it means to bring awareness into action.
Walking towards our gardening project ,with Christine on the right.
A Programme that is evolving
This first week has shown us something important. Experience Week isn’t simply something we are restarting. Instead perhaps, it’s revealing itself again. The movement from I to We, from the individual to the group, and into a wider recognition of our interconnectedness with all life, both nature and spirit.
Love in Action in the Original Garden with ‘The Findhorn Garden’ Week focaliser and long term community member Yuko.
We are also recognising more clearly the experiential approach embedded within life at Park Ecovillage Findhorn.
Gaia Education’s four dimensions of sustainability offer a helpful framework for understanding this living, learning environment:
Social - community building, communication and active participation
Ecological - regenerative design, eco-homes and community supported agriculture
Economic - local, circular economy and collaborative social enterprise
Worldview - expressed through our three founding practices of inner listening, love in action and co-creation with the intelligence of nature.
Experience Week: From I to We brings these dimensions into lived experience through:
Personal - deepening self-awareness and inner listening
Relational - learning through connection, communication and shared experience
Planetary - reconnecting with nature, purpose and contribution
What the Inner Development Goals now describe conceptually, Findhorn has been practising experientially for decades.
There was a subtle sense of something held collectively, with the group Angel of Awakening, mirrored in the abundance of spring blossom all around us.
A sense of what’s possible
Perhaps what touched me most was a sense of remembering, for participants and the community too. A recognition of something that has been here for a long time, now finding its place again in a changing world. One participant captured it beautifully:
“The awareness that deeply nourishing togetherness from the heart can be found in simplicity.”
The programme also creates an opportunity for people to extend their stay and find their own ways of engaging in the community. One of our guests felt called to freshen the inside of the Original Caravan and dedicated two days of love in action to this. The windows are sparkling, the cushions are plumped up, and she became a welcoming presence for other visitors passing by, curious about the place!
One of our participants blessed the Original Caravan with a good spring clean, which made Jonathan Caddy very happy. It is the place where he and his two brothers grew up together with the co-founders of the Findhorn Ecovillage community: Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean.
Looking ahead
Future Experience Weeks are planned throughout the year as we continue refining the journey. If you feel drawn to explore what it means to move from I to We, you are warmly welcome to join us. And for the many thousands who joined the original programme over the decades, perhaps there is something here to rediscover, and something to share, as this experience finds its way to others in your life.
