interviews

A Conversation with Michael Lindfield on:

Life, Meaning, Findhorn, and Transformation

Michael Lindfield is a senior consultant with a major aerospace company where he works with innovative approaches to large-scale change of business and "people" systems. He is author of "The Dance of Change," in addition to numerous articles on individual and organizational development, and has presented at business, education and psychology conferences around the world.

Michael was a 14-year resident of the Findhorn Foundation - a spiritual community in the northeast of Scotland dedicated to exploring new and viable ways of living together. During his time at Findhorn, he worked as a gardener, Director of Education and member of the Leadership Group. He finds renewal and enjoyment in long-distance running and the piano works of Chopin, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Haydn."

Tammie: You’ve been very busy I understand.

Michael Lindfield: Yes, but I’m not complaining.

Tammie: Oh, good.

Michael Lindfield: Ha (Laughs)

Tammie: Great. Busy can be a very good thing. So Michael, what inspired you to write the Dance of Change?

Michael Lindfield: It was a number of things. When I was at Findhorn, I developed a passion for education. Originally, I came to Findhorn as a gardener. After working in the garden for about a year, I discovered there was another part of myself wanting to be born - more of an "educational" aspect. These two streams of gardening and education came together to create powerful images about the world around me and inside me. I began to receive insights about how things hung together- the interdependency of Life. I had also studied many of the theosophical writings, the writings of Alice A. Bailey, and some of Rudolph Steiner’s philosophy.

All of these things were sort of mulling around in my being. They were coming together and coalescing into my own world picture. During those early years at Findhorn, I developed a number of workshops that attempted to put the Ancient Wisdom into a context that was accessible and relevant for today. These courses were offered internally for the members and also as part of the guest program. I used a fairly simple approach.

What I started to do was actually draw pictures. I would draw little cartoon pictures of daily situations in the life of an aspiring soul, such as confronting and embracing one’s own shadow. Or what it means to be a world server. Or what it means to be in relationship with the living earth. Or what personal disarmament means – creating inner peace as a prelude to outer peace.

I thought in images and scenarios and would come up with these little cartoons. I put together about 300 of these drawings with colored pens on acetate sheets, or view-foils. Then I realized that each of these images probably had at least 1000 words of story behind them. Over the course of conducting the workshops, I received a number of requests from people asking whether the cartoons were available. Have you published anything and do you intend to? I said "NO". I said "NO" for a number of years. And then finally, several years later, I got a sense of right timing about responding to those requests.

And that is one thing that I learned in the garden, that everything has a season, has a timing built into it. I could feel that things were coming to a head, it was like something ripening on the vine. I had a sense that it was time to write a book. Time to put my thoughts down on paper. And so, that’s what I did. It took me four months of early morning sessions in my garden shed with a typewriter to complete the manuscript. The book was published just as I was about to leave Findhorn and make the move out here to the United States. And so after all those years of not responding, the timing now seemed to work all the way around.

And it was my way of bringing together everything that was going on inside of me. It was really for two reasons. One, was to finally put everything down on paper, so it would be made visible and I could articulate my world-view. The other reason was so that I could actually bring closure to this phase of my life, leave it behind and move on.

Tammie: To put it in perspective.

Michael Lindfield:: Yes, and I know it seems kind of selfish to say that the book was a way to deposit my philosophical droppings - the remains of my thought process – so I could move onto something else. It wasn’t that I discarded or disowned anything - it was just that I wanted to be free to explore what was next.

Tammie: Absolutely.

Michael Lindfield: One ritual of completion at Findhon was to actually write the book. For me it was a rite of passage, literally a "write" of passage. It felt "right to write," if you will pardon the pun! So that’s what it took to put the book together and get it published. That’s how it came about. I’m not sure what else I can say about it.

Tammie: Michael, you mentioned that you believe there is a time for everything and I'm curious about how you knew it was time to leave Findhorn?

Michael Lindfield: Well, the same reason I knew it was time to come to Findhorn. In 1971 and 1972, I was working on a farm in Sweden and I was having some very deep experiences in nature. And these experiences were such that it was difficult for me to share them with my friends and colleagues. The farming community was more of a back to nature green wave expression, more socially and politically oriented than religious or spiritual.

When I tried to share some of these deep inner experiences I was having with the natural world, it was sort of frowned upon as not being appropriate. And so I took a month off during the summer and traveled down to Denmark. I went to stay at a summer camp, arranged by a spiritual group founded upon the teachings of a Dane called Martinus, who'd written a lot of material about "spiritual science" as it was called.

There was somebody attending the camp at the same time who had recently come from Scotland. This person had visited a spiritual community called Findhorn and had some photographs, books and a slide show. He showed the slide show in the evening and talked about the experiment at Findhorn around cooperation with nature – how humans were consciously working with the angels and the nature spirits. And I went, "Oh my goodness, this is what I’ve been experiencing. This is it. I have to go there. This is my next move".

I had also been reading in Alice Bailey’s "Letters on Occult Meditation" about certain preparatory and advanced schools where people will be brought together to be trained in "world service". And it was indicated that the preparatory school in Britain would either be in Wales or Scotland. I wasn’t sure if Findhorn was really the place mentioned, but it had all the hallmarks.

In the book, it was suggested that the preparatory school would be surrounded by water on three sides and a few miles from the nearest town. That’s exactly where Findhorn was located – on a peninsular with the purifying elements of wind and water.

So with this information and the impact of the slide-show, I resolved that I would return to the farm and finish the harvest, go to Stockholm to earn some money and then leave for Scotland. And that’s what happened. I arrived at Findhorn on Valentine’s Day of 1973. It was a conscious choice because I thought it was an appropriate gift of love to myself in starting a new phase. And when I walked through the doors late that evening and when I sat in the sanctuary and met the community the next morning, I felt that I had come home. It was an amazing feeling.

Tammie: I bet.

Michael Lindfield: All of me felt accepted by the community. People came from varying backgrounds. Some of them I would probably not have said hi to, or believed that we had anything in common, if I had accidentally bumped into them on the street. But what we had in common was a deep inner link - we were there for the same reason. It felt absolutely right to be there. I thought at that time that I’d be at Findhorn maybe a year or two at the most. I ended up staying nearly fourteen years.

Tammie: Wow! I had no idea you'd been there so long!

Michael Lindfield: Yes. And I noticed that there were different cycles within cycles. Every now and again, I got the sense that it was time to move on, but invariably something would happen whereby the community seemed to expand its possibilities and begin exploring further aspects of itself. The need to move on that I was sensing was, in fact, something that happened in place - I didn’t actually have to move somewhere else.

Tammie: Right.

Michael Lindfield: So the "in-place" move was a chance to explore more of myself and more of what Findhorn held as a promise. For fourteen years Findhorn’s rhythms and my rhythms were in sync. It was like our biorhythms were pulsing together.

Tammie: Hmm.

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