Co-Creating with Spirit

Co-Creating with Spirit: The Birth of the Findhorn Spirit Oracle Cards

by Swan Treasure, creator of Findhorn Spirit Oracle Cards

Just after the Co-Creative Spirituality Conference in 2018, intuitive artist Deborah Koff-Chapin offered a touch-drawing workshop at Findhorn. As I walked towards the building named “Legacy” that morning, eager to start painting, the autumn harvest festival was in preparation. I remember the fine crispy air filling up my lungs as I drew a deep breath just before stepping into the studio, a place that for the next five days would become like home and a spiritual portal at the same time. 

To be able to be there I had to move mountains. I already took the previous week off from my role as a co-worker of the Findhorn Foundation to attend the conference and so my colleagues were expecting me back, ready to rock. Yet, the call to be in that one workshop was so strong that I managed to find a friend who would take up my work responsibility for another week. That had to happen overnight and it did!

In my experience when we are fully committed to a result everything aligns to make that possible. This awareness and our totality (nothing held back) are essential when co-creating our life with spirit so that the signals we are sending out to the universe are clear. 

However, I surely didn’t know about the scope of the plan that spirit had in store for me this time. I just knew I had to be there, at that place, at that time, and that my answer was “Yes,” a full-hearted, fully-embodied “Yes”! I trusted that. 

After a brief introduction to touch-drawing I began to paint using my hands and fingernails instead of brushes. This was all new to me, but the images kept flowing onto the paper one after the other as if a stream of energy was passing through my body and moving it. After a while I began to paint with my eyes closed; I no longer needed to know what the image on paper looked like as I was connected to an intelligence that encompassed everything and was directing my touch. That connection was all that really mattered to me, moment by moment. 

We were blessed to have the studio available at night time too and that was mostly when the energy that you now see visually expressed in the cards came through. I went to the studio in the early hours, at 3 or 4 am, and in the silence I opened to a deep communion with forces that still didn’t have a name to me. My answer to their calling was still a “Yes”, despite the fact that by then my fingernails were almost worn out and it started being quite painful to keep painting in that way. But I kept moving my hands on paper for five days because something wanted to be expressed and at the end of the workshop I felt a sense of great fulfilment as I carried a bundle of pictures back to my bungalow next to the Original Garden. 

In the following days I showed the drawings to some friends and it became apparent that some of the pictures stood out as particularly alive. My next step was to sit with some of them in meditation, in the sanctuaries and in the gardens of the Findhorn community; it was then that I began to clearly hear the voices of the spirit guides who introduced themselves as an alliance of spirit beings that forms the “Oracle of Findhorn”. 

I sensed that there are many more spirit guides who are part of this alliance but the ones who have made themselves available for this deck are the ones we most need to connect with at this evolutionary moment in our human history. 

One of the friends I showed my paintings to had the insight to make them into cards. Of course, it was a wonderful suggestion but I didn’t follow through, I was so engaged with the Findhorn Foundation and various other creative projects that I totally forgot about that possibility. In a way, I feel that this was part of the journey of letting go of any personal attachment or personal ambition. 

A year or so later, Covid struck and I was then visiting my mother in Italy, which meant I couldn’t leave the country nor indeed the house and therefore I had plenty of time at my disposal. So Spirit sent me a gentle reminder in the form of my publisher friend’s e-mail asking, “what happened with that idea of sharing these paintings in the form of a card deck? Now would be a good time….” And indeed, it was “perfect timing”, as Peter Caddy, one of the founders of the Findhorn Foundation would have said. 

And again, a fully flowering “Yes” resounded from my soul, which brought me back to Findhorn as soon as I could and saw me writing through the lockdowns, being so uplifted by the light of the Findhorn spirit oracle alliance that I experienced this introspective time as a great blessing. The sanctuaries were closed by then and so I walked the land and sat with all weather, recording all those messages that wanted to be heard. 

Each spirit guide depicted in the cards had a lot to say, somehow in its own language, so it took patience to distill the essential words exactly as you can now read them in the booklet accompanying the cards. Each picture you see in the cards is actually a blueprint of a vibrational being of light who was able to transmit its essence in a way as close to our human understanding as possible.

GENEROSITY Be gentle with yourself. Life is a gift.	INITIATION Attend to the light in your eyes and the fire in your spirit.	REJUVENATION Your fire is on, cherish it, tend to it.	WONDER Spiritual discovery is a love affair with life

By tuning in to them you can intentionally open a channel of communication with the spirit beings of the Findhorn Oracle and over time establish a relationship with them fostering a beneficial energetic alignment. Every card also comes with a suggested spiritual practice to facilitate the grounding of its energy. I have learned over the years that when working with powerful energetic fields it is important to let my spirit fly while keeping my feet firmly on the Earth. 

The structure of the deck follows the universal movements of the shamanic medicine wheel to invite a spiritual practice that honours the interconnectedness of life where everything – the seen and the unseen worlds – has its place and unique value in a harmonious system. My intention in co-creating the Findhorn spirit oracle has been and still is that these cards would facilitate an inner connection with each of the depicted spirit beings and the human embodiment of the qualities or spiritual values they bring through, in service to a kinder and more balanced society. 

This deck is also my offer of love to thank the wonderful people of the Findhorn community who are walking the spiritual path day in day out, and particularly Dorothy Maclean, pioneer and co-founder of this place, who began consciously communicating with nature spirits all those years ago. And if you have read this far, most probably the Findhorn Spirit Oracle Cards have also been co-created for you.