Insights and Setbacks: mysteries of the

Transformation Game cards

I’ve thinking about the power of the Transformation Game these days as our
online Global Transformation Game is going to start soon. Apart from remembering my
personal experience of being a player in our Community Online Game (which I wrote
about in an earlier blog), I also thought of how we use the Insight and Setback cards in
our daily lives here at the Findhorn Foundation.

When we are about to embark on a new adventure we often use the next step cards
from the Game to receive insights about our new endeavours. In this process we create
a purpose for our next steps (a new job, a new home or whatever next steps we are
planning to take in our lives at this point). Then we pick cards from the deck that can
support us along the way and help us see things to be aware of. We take one Insight,
one Setback, another Insight (to support us with the challenge we received in the
Setback) and an angelic quality. For me it is AMAZING to see how spot on these cards
are! I might not always understand their meaning when I first see them, but in my
experience their messages have always made sense to me in hindsight.

In the pictures are the cards I picked when I went on my half-year sabbatical in summer
2018. I created a purpose that was about how I would like to feel during my sabbatical.
I’d dreamed this up in a wonderful way so I was happily expecting some nice, gentle,
supportive cards. But when I picked my first Insight card, it read: ‘Tough assignments
are only given to the best students.’
 The Setback card

I can still feel how it felt in my body when I read this card. I felt a contraction in the pit of
my stomach: I was ANGRY! For me this was not an insight, but a setback. I actually
refused to take it and asked Ursula (who was holding this exercise for me) for another
card. (This is why I have three Insights in this picture and not two! You might have
wondered about this already.) I just felt that it was SO UNFAIR after all the hard work I
had done to manifest the perfect life I had been dreaming of, to give me another ‘tough
assignment’.