What does it actually mean to live a rich life? For some, it’s a marble-floored villa in Manila with a fleet of chauffeurs. For others, it’s a simple trailer in a Scottish eco-village. For Dorota Owen, it took having everything on the outside—and feeling utterly impoverished on the inside—to discover the difference.
In this deeply moving episode, Dorota shares her magical journey from the heights of expat opulence and suicidal depression to the transformative power of the Findhorn community. This isn’t just a story about walking away from money; it’s a masterclass in resilience, creativity under constraint, and the courage to follow your heart when Plan A fails. From substitute teaching in war zone schools to teaching forgiveness through the Miracle Choice game in the heart of China, Dorota’s life is a testament to the belief that “Everything you need is an arm’s length away.”
Are you ready to stop living for the perks and start living for the purpose? Dive into Dorota’s story and learn the three-word mantra that can catalyze your own creative transformation: constraints, catalyze, creativity.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
From Manila Mansions To Findhorn Trailers: Redefining A “Rich Life” With Dorota Owen
We have an interview with Dorota Owen. I am so happy that you are here. Her story is magical. She went from a very dire situation that was all about the money to changing her life and changing it again and again and improving her life time and again, and helping so many other people along the way, changing systems. She is really an inspiring person. Please stand by. Welcome to the show.
We have with us Dorota Owen, who is absolutely living a rich life, and she has her share of wounds of wealth. I am happy to have her on the show to share her story, which I find touching and inspiring. Thank you, Dorota, for being with us. Where are you? Please share with the audience, where are you now?
I am in quite a remote part of the northeast of Scotland, and I am a member of the Findhorn community. It is a spiritual community living in an eco-village, but I live just in the town nearby, which is called Forres, which is charming and delightful, and I love it.
Thank you. I have asked you to join us because we have known each other for years, and years ago, you told me part of your story of how you took charge of your life, and now you are in Findhorn, and that was very different years ago. I found it very powerful. I would appreciate it if you would tell your story to share with the audience, because I find it magical.
The Internal Logic Of Wealth
Thank you. It is a magical story. One of the reasons I am in Findhorn is that when I was a child, my mother had a book on the shelf, and it was called The Magic of Findhorn. From a very early age, I was really attracted to this place that was magical, but I did not get a chance to go there until I was much older. When I got here, I realized it was magical.
Before I tell you anything about the story of my life, I want to explain to you a little bit about why it is the way that it is. It is because of an experience that I had when I was a child, very young. I was about three years old, and my parents are Polish, and they had come here to Scotland just after the war. They really did not have anything. We did not have any family. We did not have any money, and we lived in a house that was very simple, just white walls and no furniture.
Where was that?
It was in Glasgow. It was in Scotland. My father was demobilized there after the war. My mother came a bit later. I remember my first memory was just such a dazzling one in all ways, because what happened was I pulled myself up from a sitting position onto a standing position onto this little stool. The light from the window just dazzled me, and there were no curtains, you see, so it was just really bright. I had this incredible sensation of being warm and full of light and full of this golden light.
The imprint that it gave me was that I felt rich. The curious thing about it was that it was the opposite of the outside experience. Technically, we were poor, but on the inside, I felt rich. Very strangely, it came to pass that when I got married, I married an oil executive, and we went to live as expats in different countries, but we ended up in Manila, the Philippines. We had a life that, on the outside, was materially very wealthy.
This time, I felt the opposite. I felt impoverished on the inside because I was just so very unhappy. On the outside, it was extraordinary. We had a beautiful villa with marble floors and a swimming pool, and several cars with chauffeurs, and we used to laugh about it. Hot and cold running servants. The servants wanted to do absolutely everything. I felt utterly disempowered. Famously, I told you about the time I wanted to make myself a cup of tea.
We call them helpers, actually. One of my helpers said, “No, I shall be the one.” I said, “No, I shall be the one.” We had this tussle over this cup. Finally, I thought, “Fine, you just do your thing.” It was not a life that was wealthy, but it was actually a life that was in every respect quite disempowered. I could not do what I really wanted to do. That is why, on the inside, I felt utterly impoverished.
When did that last?
Choosing “Plan B”
I was married for ten years, and there were certainly very good things about the marriage. We had the most delightful children. The problem for me was that everything depended on my husband’s job. I could not just do what I wanted to do. When I was in Manila, I just got very depressed at first for a variety of reasons. The usual cocktail.
It was not a happy marriage, and I was not doing what I wanted to do, what my heart wanted to do. Also, I just had a baby, so I was quite depressed. I had postnatal depression. That whole cocktail made me quite suicidal, actually. I just did not want to live. I woke up every morning and, excuse me, I am just going to swear, I said, “I have f*** up my life.”
I take full responsibility for the choices that I made that got me there, but I could not figure out a way of getting out of it. It seemed to me the only way to get out of it would be to end my life. Again, it was not as easy as one would imagine because I did not want to upset the family, nor did I want my children to find something shocking in the house. One day, I found a solution to my problem.
I heard about a woman who had jumped from a multi-story building in the center of Manila. I thought, “Terrific, great idea. I would do fine.” I got my driver to take me there, and we were too late because the police had already formed a security cordon around the building. I remember feeling quite deflated because I thought, “I can’t even end my life.”
It did make me choose. I had to choose, and I understood that Plan A to kill myself had failed, and therefore, there was only one choice left, and that was Plan B, which was to live the life that I really wanted to live, and that was the moment. I just flicked a switch, and I started bit by bit to transform my life. That has led to the path that I am living now, which is, as you say, a very rich life.
I know you as living a very rich life, and we will get to that. I look forward to your unpacking what that means to you. Of course, your story is fascinating. When you say you made little changes, there you are, you’re living in a mansion with marble floors and countless servants in Manila, and it is very opulent. You are extremely depressed and suicidal, and you are ready. You make this switch, and you decide, “No, that didn’t work. I got to go to the next plan.” You say bit by bit. Please share with us what that is? What were some of the steps?
Once you make that decision, you take that step forward. I believe that life moves with us. Once you take that movement into what your authentic life is, the forces gather to support you. I know it sounds magical, but many people have said that once you take that step in that direction, the path will unfold. The first thing I decided to do was to look at my health and wanted to eat properly. I heard there was an organic food market in the center of Manila. I went there, and I met a wonderful woman called Mara Pardo de Tavera.
Life moves with us. Once you align that movement with your authentic life, the forces gather to support you. Share on XShe listened to my story with tremendous sympathy. She said, “I think I can help you, and I know somebody who can help you.” She introduced me to a quite famous newspaper columnist in the Manila Times. His name was Jaime Licauco. He was a medium or a psychic. He listened to my story, and he said, “You’re on the right track, and you actually have a purpose, quite an important purpose.” I thought, “Great. What is it then?” He said, “You have to work it out for yourself.” I thought, “Darn.” He was right. I did have to work it out.
You want that roadmap, of course.
Creating “Findhorn” Wherever You Are
They would introduce me to different people, and it was like following the yellow brick road. Eventually, I was meeting the people that I needed to meet to create the life that I needed to create in Manila. I was still very interested in what was happening in Findhorn in Scotland, and I would regularly go back to Findhorn and do courses there. In a way, I became like a suitcase.
I would fill myself up with what I was learning in Findhorn, and then I would return to Manila, and I would offer that as a course or a lesson. I started doing a counseling course at a place called In Touch in Manila, and I started offering these courses, and then ultimately I was invited to be the executive director of that place. That felt great. It was the right thing.
I want to make sure I caught that right. You are taking courses at a personal growth institute in Manila, and you just took courses until you were teaching those courses at that institute in Manila. Did I catch that correctly?
Sort of. I would bring people from Findhorn, actually, to run courses, not just there. In a way, what I was doing is I could not get to Findhorn. I could not go and live there. I started bringing Findhorn to me. That happened on a number of occasions, wherever I was living, I would attract people from Findhorn. We would create a little Findhorn. That grew. I started running courses, and the courses I was running were called Express Yourself, a course in confidence building.
I will tell you a funny story about that that you do not know. I really did not have anything. I did not have a mobile phone, but I heard there was a very nice restaurant called Le Soufflé, and I did not really like Filipino food, but this restaurant served very lovely food. I got talking to the owner, who was called Billy, and I said, “Look, you’re not using the restaurant in the morning, but I can bring lots of people there.
I could run a course in the restaurant in the morning, and then all these ladies will stay for lunch. You will make a bit of money.” He said, “Good idea.” To my surprise, when I got there on a Saturday morning and invited people around, he had given me the most beautiful room in the whole restaurant. There were the most beautiful white tablecloths and gigantic flowers, bird of paradise flowers, and the waiters with their white cloths on their arms, and everybody was welcomed in like VIPs. It was really fabulous. That course went really very well. There were a number of those.
This is a really funny story. Remember, I really did not have anything. It was my husband who had the money and the power. These things started to happen, where I had a bit of a reputation. Anyway, it was a building in Manila. It was a tall skyscraper with a glass pyramid on the top. It was like something you would see in the film Batman. In that glass pyramid, it was the Financial Times. They had the executive suite and the manager of the company, the CEO, he said, “Look, Dorota, we’re never using it. Why don’t you just have that suit to match your courses?”
It was amazing. It was like Gotham City. I remember being in one of these swivelly armchairs with the beige leather, just swinging around as if I were the queen. That is how I ran these courses. Ultimately, I got invited to be the executive director of In Touch. I had written a book at that time. The book was really the story of my journey. The title of it was quite interesting because the traffic in Manila is horrific.
It is like trying to drive through treacle, very slow, and people would be driving but chatting and so on. Somebody called that experience of driving a mad moment. I was thinking, “You could really do with meditating.” I thought, “Here’s the title, Meditations for Mad Moments.” It was a series of meditations about getting through difficult experiences. Also, I did a lot of research about the things that were difficult. I asked a lot of people to tell me their stories, to tell me their biography, and also the moment when things turned for them the way they had turned for me.
I know those people. Some of them were celebrities, but I did not know that because, obviously, I was not brought up in the Philippines, and I did not know who was famous and who was not. That book did quite well. As the executive director of In Touch, I gave the book to In Touch to be sold so that all the profits would support those charities. Before I had written that book, I really wanted to go and live in Findhorn. It was just also impossible. I had seen a house for sale that was affordable.
By the way, what year did the book come out, please?
It came out in 2003. It is a good 22 years ago.
It is giving us some context. This was Manila.
This was 22 years ago.
You donate the book to In Touch so that the proceeds of the book can support the Institute.
That is right. It was quite a sweet little book. It was interesting because I got to know a lot of people on the way. Before I published the book, before I wrote the book, I really had been dreaming of going to Findhorn, and I had seen a house for sale that was very cheap in UK prices. It was the cheapest house in Britain. It was £50,000. I had made that money. I knew I could buy it. I tried to buy it online, and I failed. It was very disappointing.
The day that I did not get it, I went into deep meditation. In my imagination, I saw handwriting on the beach, and it said, “Be here now.” I thought, “That’s really what I have to do.” I devoted myself to the book and to my life, getting to know people, and working with In Touch. It was all wrapped up. There was one day when I was deleting all the emails associated with the book.
What was wrapped up? You mean the book was completed?
The Move To The Eco-Village
The book was launched. It was quite a fun party. They had all these like rock stars and everything. Anyway, I thought, “I’m done. I’ve done what I came here to do.” I started deleting the emails, and then I saw this email from the estate agent who had been involved in the process of buying and selling the house. I thought, “I wonder if that’s possible.”
I wrote, and I said, “Look, if there’s any other house similar to that house that comes up for sale, please will you let me know?” Immediately, I got a reply saying, “It’s still for sale. The sale fell through. You can have it if you like. Actually, it’s cheaper than it was before.” That was how I bought my house in Scotland. I said to my husband, “Look, I don’t hate you, but I don’t love you, and I cannot live this life anymore.”
He said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “There’s only one thing that will make me happy, and that is to go and live in Findhorn.” That is what I did. In 2003, that summer, I came with the children to Findhorn, and it was amazing. I said to them, “Look, life is going to change. We will not be living in a big house. There’ll be no more servants, no swimming pool. It’ll be cold. They will never be able to afford to go to a restaurant.” They were like, “Okay.” My son was three years old.
How many kids did you have?
I had three children.
What were their ages at that time?
Michael was three, and the girls were 7 and 8 years old.
You got two girls.
We were living in a caravan because Findhorn was based on a caravan site.
For the audience, a lot of people know a caravan is what we would call a trailer.
We were in a trailer park.
Going from a mansion in Manila to a trailer in a trailer park.
The kids just loved it. It was like a doll’s house. Unbelievably, the weather was sensational. I had actually brought my Philippine nanny with me because I knew I needed to go to work. She was really angry with me. She said, “This is worse than Manila. It’s so hot.” I actually had to buy a car with air conditioning. The reason I had to work is that I left my husband. He was not a bad guy, and he was very attached to his money.
I knew that if I tried to take him through the divorce courts, at the end of the day, the lawyers would get all the money, and I would have a very bad relationship with him. I decided that I would just leave in a very clean way. My lawyer was horrified. She said, “Look, how are you going to live?” I said, “I’ll get a job, and it’s going to be fine.” She said, “It’s okay now you’re a young woman, but what about when you’re old?”
Sorry to interrupt you, but when you say “I’m going to leave in a very clean way,” for the audience, please explain what that means to you.
I had seen people get divorced, and they spent a lot of time in the courts wrangling about finances and custody. I had an arrangement with my husband where I really did not want any money for myself. There was a small amount of money that supported the children, but I knew that when I got back to the UK, I would have to get a job and that I would be supporting the family.
I want to clarify. You left a marriage with an oil executive with all of these benefits. The mansion. Presumably, the company was financing the lifestyle as perks, but he had whatever income he had. You guys had the lifestyle that you had. You chose to leave, you wanted custody of the children, and you chose not to ask for money as part of the new arrangement.
There are a lot of stipulations, but that’s what happened. I was going to fight half of what we’ve had because I knew exactly what it would entail. It would entail a very bitter fight. The thing that mattered to me more was to have a good relationship with the father of my children. That was the thing that I wanted. Richard, that is the thing that I have got. I have a really good relationship with my father.
Because we’ve talked, I know that you’re overlooking something, and I want to clarify. It is not only that you wanted a good relationship with the father of your children, but you told me you wanted the children to have a good relationship with their father.
They do. They have a really good relationship with him. I remember my lawyer said to me, “This is crazy what you’re doing.” I said, “I want to allow my husband to be generous.” She said, “He might never take that opportunity.” I said, “Yes, that’s true. He might not.” Actually, he did. Later on, he came to live in the area as well. He is a really good father. A very good father. They have tremendous respect and love for him.
When it came to sending the children to a private school, a very good private school in our area, he was super supportive. Great things happened. Financially, I was supporting the children. I had all sorts of support with that from various fundraising opportunities that came my way. The kids had a really great education. They often say that to me.
They say that if they had stayed in Manila as expat children, they would have been brats. Instead, they came here, and they had to work quite hard, and they all had jobs after school. They have really had experiences that have grown their character as people. It was beneficial. The important thing was that I believed I could do that. I had a lot of faith in myself.
I did not know how I would do it. It felt very important to me to follow my heart. What my heart was saying is, “You need to come to live in Findhorn. This is the right place for you.” That meant giving up everything else, and nothing felt valuable in the way that it felt valuable to follow what my heart was telling me to do. I guess the message is to tell people this. You have only got this one life for now. Do the thing that brings you joy above all.
You only have this one life, for now. Do the thing that brings you joy above all else. Share on XI have heard people saying they are doing jobs that they do not like because they want to wait until they get a pension, or they are in a relationship that does not make them happy, but it gives them financial and material benefits. That is worth nothing to me. The only thing that is worth following is the experiences that make me feel fulfilled. I did that. I came to Findhorn, and it was a wonderful experience. I had to work for a living, and I started working in local schools as a supply teacher. It was really challenging.
When you say a supply teacher, we know that as a substitute teacher. That means that you are on however many days and however many days you are not, and you are going to different schools and replacing a teacher in their classroom. That teacher is sick. It is always different kids. Is that correct?
Yeah, that is exactly right. I tell you, you really build up a skillset of having to make a positive impact on a group of strangers. Try to get them all on your side. It has built a skillset for me as a public speaker and as a workshop leader. I have always really enjoyed it. It has been very challenging, but I have been doing this for 22 years now, and it has led to some really interesting things.
You have been working as a substitute teacher for 22 years. Your kids now, what are their ages?
Michael is 25, and the girls are 30 and 31. I am a grandmother. One of my daughters has two delightful children.
Grandma Dorota.
Granny Dot is what I call it.
How old is your grandchild?
Lily is absolutely beautiful, clever, and full of energy. She is five, and Mirren is now eight months, and she is my real joy. Every single Tuesday, I go to Aberdeen, where my daughter lives, and I babysit for Mirren, which is lovely. That is one of the greatest things about living long enough to experience the harvest of your life. It feels to me that all the things that I invested in and all the things that were important to me by executing the plan to do the things that I wanted to do have actually ended up with a very rich and happy life.
It is not just about the children or the grandchildren, although that is a tremendous joy. The work that I do is very varied, and it is interesting. One of the things that happened was when I started working as a substitute teacher in 2003. At the end of 2003, it was horrific. The school that I worked in was like a war zone. It was difficult to persevere because I just got very stressed, but I thought, “I’ll do this until Easter, then I’ll give up.”
At Easter time, there was a really beautiful conference at Findhorn called Healing the Soul of Education. It was actually part of a larger thing, the healing conference. It was really amazing. I went to that, and I was really impressed by a wonderful practitioner called Jenny Mosley. I looked at what she did and how she did it. Apart from anything else, she was hilariously funny. That impressed me as well. Very inspiring. I looked at this methodology she had called Circle Time, and I thought, “That’s pretty good.”
A woman came to speak to me at the conference, and it turned out she was the mother of two of the worst pupils. She held my hand, and she said, “Promise me you’ll do this when you go back to school after the holidays.” I had not really intended to go back, but I did make that promise. The first day that I went back, it was quite strange because the entire senior management team was absent due to stress. In fact, they never came back.
I thought, “It looks like I’ve got permission here.” I had a class that was supposed to have an exam, and the exam was cancelled. They came stampeding into the room like a herd of elephants. I thought, “This is it. I’ve got to carry out this promise.” I arranged the class into a circle. I started playing these games that I had seen, and it was really extraordinary. Very quickly, you could hear a pin drop. Everybody was really motivated to win in these games, and they were very good fun.
At a certain point, we dropped the games, and we started sharing from the heart about what was important to us and any problems that people had. We started looking for solutions. It was a really extraordinary experience. I did not know exactly how to end the thing. When the bell rang, the kids did not want to leave the room. They were still talking. They were still engaged. That happened a couple of times.
Children would stop me in the school and say, “Please, would you do this thing that you did with my friend’s class?” I started doing that quite a lot because I was a substitute teacher. I was all over the school in different departments. I would say to them, “Your math teacher’s ill, let’s do a different kind of math today,” or “Your drama teacher’s ill, let’s do a different kind of drama.” A new headteacher came into the school, and she caught me one day, and she said, “Who are you? What are you doing?” I said, “Nothing much really.”
She said, “Come into my office. We need to talk.” We ended up creating a whole school transformation plan, and I brought in some experts from Findhorn. I decided to start a series of conferences about how you could make schools better. It was called the Northern Lights conference series because where we are, we can see the Northern Lights dancing in the winter. She brought the school, and they did this amazing performance like cheerleaders at an American baseball game.
It was really wonderful that she spoke about. I think she had a line from a Yeats poem, “Tread Softly because you tread upon my dreams.” She spoke about how her dream was to transform the school. I was very inspired by that. I started doing quite a lot of work in leading workshops and running conferences. I could never really join the Findhorn Foundation because I had to earn a living. I ended up creating my own parallel track so that the Findhorn Foundation held conferences and offered workshops.
What I would do is I would just rent the premises and put on my own workshops and conferences. I was asked to be a speaker. The Global Ecovillage Network was something that originated in Findhorn. It is an ecovillage. An ecological village. The president, who occasionally could not make a speech. They would say, “Dorota could go instead.” I started being an ambassador for that network and going to many conferences and speaking before Zoom was invented. I had to be there in person.
Global Ambassadorship & The “Miracle Choice” In China
You were speaking at the Global Ecovillage Network conferences.
Yes, in different countries. That really ended up with me being invited to China. When the kids left school and went to university, I also left. We all left home at the same time. I remember my son, and I flew down to Birmingham on the same day. He went to the university, and I went to China. That was that. I had a fantastic time in China. I had also previously studied to become what is called an interfaith minister. Interfaith, we talk about having spiritual, there are many paths, one truth.
There are many different ways of knowing a spiritual life. We study all the different world religions, and this is called interfaith because it joins them together. As an interfaith minister, I also had various roles. I could marry people and do baby blessings, and I have done funerals. One of the things also is I also work with is A Course in Miracles, which is a body of knowledge.
There are many paths and one truth, each offering a different way of knowing the spiritual life. Share on XIt is a complicated thing. We will come back to that another time. It meant that when I was in China, I was not just giving talks about ecological villages, but I ended up crisscrossing the country with a friend of mine teaching forgiveness and miracles. I know it does not sound like China is the place for it, but you would be amazed. Everybody loved it.
The work that I was doing was translated. We had a little team of translators who were the most wonderful people to this day. We’re just good friends, and I really missed them. I was working with a game which my friends James Kelly and his wife had created at Findhorn, based on A Course in Miracles. That was translated into Mandarin, and that just became really successful.
What is the name of the game?
The name of the game is the Miracle Choice game. It is just life-changing. It really changed my life, becoming a person who played this game. It was invented about eleven years ago. In 2014, I started playing it and taking it around the world, but it really took off in China. In fact, there is an app now. Sometimes I just play the game on my phone. When we were in China, it was great because the people I played with were very excited by it.
They really saw it as something they could use in a communist country, where the language is very pristine. It does not talk about God or Jesus. The way it is described, it becomes really like common sense. The Miracle Choice game was really special for me. Being in China was also really amazing. I came back in 2020. Obviously, the world changed in 2020. I have not been back to China.
How long was this China portion?
It was about three years. I was not there for the whole time. I would go for three months at a time. The goal was to get my Chinese resident card so I could live there. Literally, the week I got it was the week that I left. I was very annoyed. I would love to go back to China at some point, but we will see how that pans out.
You were there for a couple of years.
I was there for a couple of years. I was based at an ecovillage just north of Beijing, just past the Great Wall of China. It was such an extraordinary experience because there is a vision of China in the West that does not really square with the way it is in China. All the Chinese people that I met were just utterly delightful people, and they are so open to learning new things and just generally a lot of fun to be with.
It can be quite hard depending on where you’re living in China. It is not like everyone has got a huge disposable income, but there is generally such a sense of being a we rather than just a singular I. There is a real sense of being a tribe when you’re out with people. It was great. I really loved it. The people that I met, they are friends to this day, and they’re very special to me.
You have to apply yourself. A solution-focused mindset, an appreciative outlook, and the habit of making a little go a long way become catalysts for creativity and problem-solving. Share on XSounds to me like you pick up friends along the way.
I do. Every single person I meet is my friend as far as I can see. Why would it not be? I do strike up friendships very easily, but I am an extrovert. I am an actual networker.
We are in this amazing story, and you leave China. COVID falls. It is, as I recall, March 2020, and you have returned to Forres?
Yes. I really lucked out. I lucked out big time because the weather was sensational and I had a bicycle, my brother, so we were cycling all over the countryside, down to the sea and the river and the forest and up the mountains. We could not believe our luck. I remember once I went to a castle called Brodie Castle, and the Duchess of Brodie Castle was working in the garden because they could not have any volunteers, and I asked her if I could buy some flowers.
She said, “You have to buy them online.” I was downloading the app on my phone, buying the flowers. The next day, she called me, and she said, “I have an order for flowers, but I can’t deliver them because you live more than five miles away.” I said, “It’s okay, it’s me. I saw you yesterday.” The penny dropped, and she realized they had come further than 5 miles to meet her. The reason is that there was really no policing in the countryside.
There were these laws at the time that you were not allowed to go more than 5 five miles from your house. Honestly, if you live 10 miles from a supermarket, it was hardly enforceable. We had a really nice time when we came. We were unusually lucky that just this combination of weather and freedom, especially coming back from China, it was wonderful to have clean air and lots of space. It was great that my brother stayed with me.
My house is unusual because it is down Lucky Star Lane. It is not the real name, but I live behind a Chinese takeaway called the Lucky Star. We had a sign made to call it Lucky Star Lane. Again, the laws at the time were unenforceable, really, because we could have parties down Lucky Star Lane and nobody cared because it was a private street. We had a New Year’s party. We had it on the day before New Year’s Day, the 30th of December, just to make sure.
It was a really lovely time for us. I know it was not for everybody, so I am aware that we were fortunate, but we were happy to see each other again. That was when I had to retire because I would not have had an income otherwise. I had to take my teaching pension, even though I have continued to work because of COVID. I had to officially retire so that I had some money to live on. It was a tiny little amount, but we had a really nice time.
My observation is that your stories have a pattern of a challenging situation, and you apply yourself, and it morphs into a really lovely situation. That is what I am observing.
“Constraints, Catalyze, Creativity”
I was attending a Zoom thing with a thought leader called Danielle McLeod recently. I was listening to what she was saying. I found it very interesting. Someone said to me, “What is it about?” and I thought, “I’m going to condense what she spoke about into three words.” The three words apply to what you have just noticed there.
This pattern, constraints, catalyze, and creativity. I will say again. Constraints, catalyze, and creativity. What you’re working with in a constraint, and you’re thinking, “What am I going to do about it?” You really have to apply yourself. If you are solution-focused, if you have an appreciative frame of mind, if you are used to trying to make a small amount go a long way, then you have a mindset that will be a catalyst for being creative and coming up with solutions.
I realized that possibly it is my mindset that I have been operating within constraints. It is like the story that if you have lemons, make lemonade. You’re working under these constraints. “How can I make this a good thing?” I do not think I go to any great lengths. It is my natural mindset to try to make the most of something, and it ends up better than before the constraints arrived. That is a mindset that’s possibly a teachable skill. I am going to start a new workshop. Thank you, Richard.
Your story is delightful and inspiring. I do not want to cut you off. You have covered so much ground. Becoming an interfaith minister, changing the school system. Going to China, teaching the miracle game, working with people so diverse, so interesting, and always so connected to people, and bringing out, it sounds to me, using various tools that you have accumulated along the way to bring out the best in yourself. What really brings you joy appears to me to be bringing out the best in others.
That is true, actually. That is the thing about being a teacher. The reason people like being teachers or they like being a coach is that it gives them so much pleasure when you see a child or a young adult finding their way, especially if they have been going in the wrong direction, if you can help them find what is in them. My children went to a really good school called Gordonstoun, and the motto of that school is Plus est en vous in French, There is more in you.
There is more in you than you know. There is more in you than you could imagine. About all the pupils who have come my way, I have really wanted to be someone to help them become their best selves, also, definitely with my own children, that has been the case. They have really turned out incredibly well, and now I see them doing the same with the people they meet, which is really a beautiful legacy.
It is very sweet. You talk about the way you meet people in China, and they are just so different than whatever the portrait is outside of China. Your actual lived experience, you were there for a couple of years, and you had relationships and personal experiences, and saw people in their homes and in their flow. You are finding them lovely.
I heard last night there was a thing on the BBC called the Reith Lectures. The speaker was the guy who wrote Humankind. His name is Rutger Bregman. In that talk, he spoke about the fact that humanity is going through all sorts of very complex and incredible problems. The bottom line is that we will constantly meet people who are kind, thoughtful, compassionate, and cooperative. A man stood up in the audience, quite a distinguished man, and he said that he had been traveling around the world with his wife on a yacht.
They were traveling to many different places, and the one thing that really stood out was that everywhere he met people who were kind, thoughtful, compassionate, and cooperative. The bulk of human beings are like that. They just do not hit the news because what’s the story, if it bleeds, it leads. It is only the bad news that has made us thankful. There is just so much kindness, and human beings are genuinely cooperative because if they were not, we would all be dead.
You have got a point there. You have shared so much about yourself and your life choices and the way you’ve changed and grown and reinvented yourself, really time and again. It is wonderful. Before we wrap up, do you have anything that you specifically want to say or summarize to the audience?
The “Arm’s Length” Rule
There is this one thing that I have found incredibly useful, and it is so simple. It was my friend, Mary Hollander, who said this to me at least twenty years ago. It was almost a throwaway remark, but it really stuck with me. What she said was, “Everything you need is an arm’s length away.” Right now I am thirsty and, lo and behold, I have some water. If I cannot find a pen, I might use a lipstick. Whatever I need, if I need it right in that moment, I am going to find something that is either the thing or a substitute for it.
Here is the interesting corollary. What that means is everything that’s an arm’s length away is what I need. This is a really comforting thought. You can sit there in any moment of your life, and if you want to turn the switch about how you’re feeling about your life, you can appreciate whatever is within arm’s length, and you will find everything you have is everything you need. Every moment, you can feel extraordinarily rich.
It’s very sweet. Living a rich life with Dorota Owen. Thank you very much for being with us. Dorota, I really appreciate it. I am sure the audience will find it inspiring and delightful. Thank you.
Thank you, Richard. It is always a pleasure to have a conversation with you. You’re such a good friend. Thank you.
Thank you, Dorota.
Important Links
- Dorota Owen on LinkedIn
- Dorota Owen on Facebook
- Humankind
- The Magic of Findhorn
- Meditations for Mad Moments
About Dorota Owen
Dorota Owen is a teacher, speaker, workshop leader and Interfaith Minister. She is a long term member of the Findhorn Community in Scotland and currently serves on the board of Ecovillage Findhorn.