Letting Sandy Soil Become Fertile
How Inayatiyya Healing is alive
in Caduceus Centre, Germany
Interview with Sarfaraz Karin Püscher‑Findeisen
and Kabir Peter Findeisen.
Little wooden huts for retreats in a forest of pines and birch trees. A main house with a beautiful round meditation room. A special revivifying atmosphere... Caduceus Centre is run by Sarfaraz Karin Püscher‑Findeisen and Kabir Peter Findeisen, who started a body‑mind clinic in March 1996 with the special quality of integrated medicine connecting psychotherapy and retreats towards healing and transformation. After a time as a twin project ‑ Caduceus Clinic and Caduceus Centre ‑ they are now concentrating on Caduceus Centre as a place for healing retreats, courses, and training. The first healing workshop with Pir Vilayat, Sarida (UK) and Himayat (USA) took place here around half a year after these two Sufi guides started their work in this forested area of Northern Germany´s little town, Bad Bevensen, (South of Hamburg). Kabir Peter Findeisen has also served as Shefayat for Germany since 1989, and he coordinates the Inayatiyya Healing Activity from this place of beauty and healing energy.
On a warm summer day in the centre, Fereshta Heidelind Bechtloff (F) and Khair‑un‑nisa Kerstin Veigt (K‑u‑n) talked with Sarfaraz Karin Püscher‑Findeisen (S) and Kabir Peter Findeisen (K).
A peaceful atmosphere
K‑u‑n: For many friends in Inayatiyya Healing who come to this place for courses, meetings, and retreats, we all feel blessed by the way healing is taking place in Caduceus Centre on many levels and aspects. For me it starts with being in such a special atmosphere.
S: For me it is also a very special place with beautiful energy. Maybe we have contributed to creating this atmosphere. That was always important for us, and being with the Sufis: creating with beauty and love.
K: The quality in relationships has an important effect, also in the clinic.
F: When I come here, it is beautiful to see how atmosphere is created and cared for ‑ in a spiritual and material way. In a psychological and spiritual sense there is a flowing connection between Heaven and Earth. What is the secret of this land for you?.
S: There are so many different and diverse places inside this area of 8 ½ ha. It‘s all magical.
K: When the medicine man Malidomo Somé was here, we walked at night without light. Leaving behind our personal identity. It was totally dark. I felt I was floating. I could not see anything but did not stumble or fall. I wonder how I walked through the darkness. That was magical.
S: There are some special things in the forest such as a little altar. There are statues and symbols from all religions on it. It used to be a snowplow, and we painted it and stood it upright. The atmosphere is also created by the many meditation courses and individual retreats taking place in the centre and its forest huts.
K: As human beings we contribute to make places more beautiful. I am sure it has also helped to shape the atmosphere that it has always been a holy place. Pir‑O‑Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan wrote about it in his book, Cosmic Language: we humans impress our energy on the land. It is like the grooves of a record. Here, it is in its history of a holy place with hilltop tombs dating back 3000 and even 5000 years. This atmosphere of peace is still here. There are a lot of power places on this land. It was beautiful for us to hear different healers confirming that for us. We have marked some of the power places, and many are still to be found. We have even created a spiral.
K‑u‑n: How do you sense the beautiful nature here?
S: Walking through the forest, I perceive so many different energies; some are so sweet that I start imagining elves dancing. It is the interweaving of trees and Earth. For 16 years we have walked the area with Sufi wazaif practices by full moon, sensing the vital energies radiating, starting here and expanding to town and beyond. A shaman from Nepal who was here taught us something that we adapted to our tradition: first thing in the morning after the full moon, we walk with holy mantric recitations from our Sufi traditions.
From a forest of monoculture to diversity
S: The forest here used to be a pine monoculture. We have planted many deciduous trees. Retreat guests always stress that nature is so healing for them.
K: Recently, someone told me about the woodpecker reminding him to pause. People reconnect with nature ‑ inside themselves as well as outside. The deer started to give birth on our land. It was so beautiful with the mother standing outside our living room and the two fawns playing nearby. And there were no flowers left... We have planted even more flowers and plants and let them grow, as is done in permaculture. That way, animals may eat and there are still plenty of flowers blooming. Also the young rabbits, play and jump so joyfully. It is beautiful to observe! They stop and look at you. What a blessing for people in retreat.
K‑u‑n: Especially now in summer there is an incredible concert of birds.
S: We have made a list of every bird seen, and there are 40 kinds of birds living here. Yes, nature and beauty are so healing. Recently, someone in retreat here saw a short‑toed treecreeper, and said it is 20 years since he has seen that species of bird.
K: When we were running the nearby clinic, patients gave us feedback on the positive effects of community building and nature, and they often mentioned the chickens. The chickens are also very healing with all the sounds they make. There are always a lot of guests in our centre, and people enjoy the chickens strolling by. They are associated with health, their shining feathers, their peaceful walking, how they scrabble and pick.
Permaculture gardening
K‑u‑n: You are also cultivating a sustainable, regenerative way of living in loving relationship with nature. Are some of the salads and vegetables we eat in the centre from your own garden?
S: My first task when we came here was to build a garden together with my mother, with compost and vegetables. It is important for us to live with nature and care for her health, to live without using any poisons and not to intervene too much, leaving parts wild, and not disturbing the animals with too many paths. In 2019, I became passionate about permaculture. Apart from nourishing us, we also want to set an example to others and show what is possible. As our soils here are sandy, these are good conditions for applying permaculture. After we started, new plants found the place by themselves. plants that I had tried to cultivate for decades. There is more fruit than we have ever had before. With the water and flowers, there are many more insects, and then more birds spreading the seeds. So much life is increasing. It is wonderful. When the plum trees were in blossom, I was suddenly walking in a forest of butterflies.
K‑u‑n: I am curious to know more about permaculture...
S: Permaculture was developed by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren to bring desert developments back to life, to regenerate edible forest gardens. We are supporting the living circulation of nature with permacultural practices. There is so much more happening if I do not intervene.
F: When I listen to you, I see it is the same that is happening in humans: healing is coming alive again, a revivifying of life energy. Illness is absence of aliveness, missing life force, and especially in these times of climate crisis it is good to hear what may happen if we support and let grow. Nature is carrying the same self‑healing powers if we let her recover and give a little support. It gives so much hope!
S: Once a psychologist working in a heart clinic 1 km from here said, A good energy from Caduceus is radiating also to us.
F: It is all about a Ziraat project here, isn´t it? about seeding, collecting, nourishing...with the Earth on all levels. The inner and outer seeds are connected in a wonderful way.
K: Yes, it is about the healing of the Earth, and connecting us with Ziraat ‑ another one of the seven Inayatiyya Activities.
S: When I got to know permaculture, I said: Yes, I want to heal the Earth. Before, I would never have dared to talk like this. It is possible, and I will try everything to make it possible.
The Inayatiyya Healing Activity
K‑u‑n: It is very special that you are coordinating the Inayatiyya Healing Activity in Germany from this healing place, that it is grounded locally in this way. Could you share about the Healing Activity in Germany that you are coordinating, Kabir?
K: There is an increasing interest in the Healing Activity as there is such a need for healing in the world. In Germany, we are approximately 30 active conductors leading the healing service. At the last Inayatiyya Healing meeting in June we were 36 people participating. From the International 2‑year Inayatiyya Healing course (2019 to 2021) an initiative arose for a conductor´s retreat in August 2021, which I was happy to take up. And in 2024, we started a conductors training.
Distant healing and the Healing Service were the focus of our activities in the times of Covid. They also give us ways in which we may attune and work with people who are present: it is a good opportunity for people to experience how healing energy is working on them, and for the healers, working directly with people, it is a powerful experience, holding the inner concentration on the person. We attune with the divine names Ya Shafi ‑ Ya Kafi. It is also possible on Zoom, when we are concentrating together on someone. I was astonished how it worked on me: a pain disappeared.
We also started investigating collective healing together in the presence of people who are in need of healing. Pir‑o‑Murshid‑Hazrat Inayat Khan gave the foundation of Inayatiyya healing, and invited us to make our experiences with it, to investigate and observe our self‑healing. His teachings are not to limit but to open the elements of healing power: consciousness, belief ‑ ´I am a soul´‑ and the purity of life, the warmth of the heart that determines the power of healing. Sympathy, love, and attention are essential. In 1920 Murshid taught us these things; we fill them out and apply them in our contemporary life, and develop them further.
K‑u‑n: What is important for you, applying Murshid´s spiritual healing in these times?
K: We consider healing as a service. It is a basic principle not to take money when it comes to healing. Due to capitalism, there is a certain perspective on health and healing. And people are very affected by it. We represent the contrary to the economisation taking place in the health system. Murshid also designed how societies may look in future. It is about a planetary consciousness, a cosmic conciousness and transcendence. How do we make it alive today ‑ one humankind, one Earth? It is about inquiring and investigating: how are we with one another? how may healing happen? These questions are important not only individually but in regard to the collective dimensions, worldwide. Healing is also required for tensions, when conflict regulation is needed. The task of the Healing Activity may be as expressed in the words of the Nayaz prayer: ´Purify and revivify us!´.
F: As we refer to Pir‑o‑Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan as our ´grandfather´, I am interested in new developments: how do we unfold new things, not as ´extra´ and personalized to the one who develops it but as ´inside´ our tradition?
K: Yes, and my central question that arose in my work in Caduceus Clinic as a kind of translation from sacred to secular spheres is: How can we transmit self healing experiences of our context ‑ meditation or breath practices ‑ to other people in need without a faith being necessary. To create an open space of consciousness without insider language. I would like to consider this freedom that people need. How can we define healing in retreats? That is a good question to become aware of in our retreat guide trainings. There is a healing aspect in every retreat. Due to the body‑mind clinic we ran, many experiences about people in crisis have arisen. If someone wished to experience a spiritual retreat, we have always found a way to realize it, finding an adequate setting.
The conventional perspective about retreats is that one needs to have a powerful ´I´ to engage in the retreat, and then to transform it. Our experience is different and shows us that people considered to be ´weak in structure´ may also benefit from a retreat adapted to their situation. It may strengthen the ´I´: strengthen their self‑consciousness immensely, deepen their connecton with nature. That is what we have evaluated in the clinic work. People come for retreats and may benefit from our special experiences and competences as retreat guides in the context of trauma. As Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan originally developed retreats, their aim was to support spiritual development in the frame of daily problems. Here, we are applying it concretely to healing. Sometimes in body‑mind medicine, there is a lack of the spiritual dimension. To take the potential into account is so important ‑ not only as part of humanistic psychotherapy but a crisis may become a stepping stone.
K‑u‑n: Besides individual spirituality you have stressed your interest in the collective dimension, the global crisis.
K: Since 2007, conferences of the ´Spiritual Emergence Network´ (SEN) have taken place here in Caduceus Centre every two years. I am chairman of the board of SEN, and we just held a meeting about ´spiritual crisis in these times of climate chaos‘. How may we realize this subject in Inayatiyya Healing? Here is a first statement on it.
K‑u‑n: I suppose you are working towards healing our relationship with the Earth at all levels.
S: Yes, it is possible to stop climate change by simple means. We are trying to manifest all that is possible, e.g. compost toilets. Water is so important. It is astonishing how healthy the forest is. I think as the trees are living on sand, they are not endangered by heat. At the same time I guess that all our meditation and spiritual energy is doing well.
F: Yes, it is a mutual giving ‑ not only inside the tree species but within the whole living interspecies community.
K‑u‑n: It makes a difference how people in retreat here are living as part of the forest for a while, are perceiving and contacting the trees, even communing with them.
S: And several young people have stayed here for a time to help with permaculture; two have even been here for a year. There was also a young artist who has created a room for people to come here to open a space for their arts. That is our wish: Diverse people co‑creating the place!
F: Your hospitality is so notable: that you like different impulses and energies to come and flourish.
K: ...being active together on that ground. Meditating together. For many years now, we have offered mediation for all people to come together. Many get to know meditation here. And in the courses we offer connecting psychotherapy and spirituality, recently, people named it “The last Gallic village“ and said: ´Just being here is such a big part of the thing´.
S: We are very happy for people to come for a period of time and co‑create with us.
Dear all who read that interview:
You are warmly invited to come to Caduceus Centre to enjoy the place and be active here!
You may contact Safaraz and Kabir here.
Fotos: Klaus Döhner‑Rotter, Zenith Camp 2022
How Inayatiyya Healing is alive
in Caduceus Centre, Germany
Interview with Sarfaraz Karin Püscher‑Findeisen
and Kabir Peter Findeisen.
Little wooden huts for retreats in a forest of pines and birch trees. A main house with a beautiful round meditation room. A special revivifying atmosphere... Caduceus Centre is run by Sarfaraz Karin Püscher‑Findeisen and Kabir Peter Findeisen, who started a body‑mind clinic in March 1996 with the special quality of integrated medicine connecting psychotherapy and retreats towards healing and transformation. After a time as a twin project ‑ Caduceus Clinic and Caduceus Centre ‑ they are now concentrating on Caduceus Centre as a place for healing retreats, courses, and training. The first healing workshop with Pir Vilayat, Sarida (UK) and Himayat (USA) took place here around half a year after these two Sufi guides started their work in this forested area of Northern Germany´s little town, Bad Bevensen, (South of Hamburg). Kabir Peter Findeisen has also served as Shefayat for Germany since 1989, and he coordinates the Inayatiyya Healing Activity from this place of beauty and healing energy.
On a warm summer day in the centre, Fereshta Heidelind Bechtloff (F) and Khair‑un‑nisa Kerstin Veigt (K‑u‑n) talked with Sarfaraz Karin Püscher‑Findeisen (S) and Kabir Peter Findeisen (K).
A peaceful atmosphere
K‑u‑n: For many friends in Inayatiyya Healing who come to this place for courses, meetings, and retreats, we all feel blessed by the way healing is taking place in Caduceus Centre on many levels and aspects. For me it starts with being in such a special atmosphere.
S: For me it is also a very special place with beautiful energy. Maybe we have contributed to creating this atmosphere. That was always important for us, and being with the Sufis: creating with beauty and love.
K: The quality in relationships has an important effect, also in the clinic.
F: When I come here, it is beautiful to see how atmosphere is created and cared for ‑ in a spiritual and material way. In a psychological and spiritual sense there is a flowing connection between Heaven and Earth. What is the secret of this land for you?.
S: There are so many different and diverse places inside this area of 8 ½ ha. It‘s all magical.
K: When the medicine man Malidomo Somé was here, we walked at night without light. Leaving behind our personal identity. It was totally dark. I felt I was floating. I could not see anything but did not stumble or fall. I wonder how I walked through the darkness. That was magical.
S: There are some special things in the forest such as a little altar. There are statues and symbols from all religions on it. It used to be a snowplow, and we painted it and stood it upright. The atmosphere is also created by the many meditation courses and individual retreats taking place in the centre and its forest huts.
K: As human beings we contribute to make places more beautiful. I am sure it has also helped to shape the atmosphere that it has always been a holy place. Pir‑O‑Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan wrote about it in his book, Cosmic Language: we humans impress our energy on the land. It is like the grooves of a record. Here, it is in its history of a holy place with hilltop tombs dating back 3000 and even 5000 years. This atmosphere of peace is still here. There are a lot of power places on this land. It was beautiful for us to hear different healers confirming that for us. We have marked some of the power places, and many are still to be found. We have even created a spiral.
K‑u‑n: How do you sense the beautiful nature here?
S: Walking through the forest, I perceive so many different energies; some are so sweet that I start imagining elves dancing. It is the interweaving of trees and Earth. For 16 years we have walked the area with Sufi wazaif practices by full moon, sensing the vital energies radiating, starting here and expanding to town and beyond. A shaman from Nepal who was here taught us something that we adapted to our tradition: first thing in the morning after the full moon, we walk with holy mantric recitations from our Sufi traditions.
From a forest of monoculture to diversity
S: The forest here used to be a pine monoculture. We have planted many deciduous trees. Retreat guests always stress that nature is so healing for them.
K: Recently, someone told me about the woodpecker reminding him to pause. People reconnect with nature ‑ inside themselves as well as outside. The deer started to give birth on our land. It was so beautiful with the mother standing outside our living room and the two fawns playing nearby. And there were no flowers left... We have planted even more flowers and plants and let them grow, as is done in permaculture. That way, animals may eat and there are still plenty of flowers blooming. Also the young rabbits, play and jump so joyfully. It is beautiful to observe! They stop and look at you. What a blessing for people in retreat.
K‑u‑n: Especially now in summer there is an incredible concert of birds.
S: We have made a list of every bird seen, and there are 40 kinds of birds living here. Yes, nature and beauty are so healing. Recently, someone in retreat here saw a short‑toed treecreeper, and said it is 20 years since he has seen that species of bird.
K: When we were running the nearby clinic, patients gave us feedback on the positive effects of community building and nature, and they often mentioned the chickens. The chickens are also very healing with all the sounds they make. There are always a lot of guests in our centre, and people enjoy the chickens strolling by. They are associated with health, their shining feathers, their peaceful walking, how they scrabble and pick.
Permaculture gardening
K‑u‑n: You are also cultivating a sustainable, regenerative way of living in loving relationship with nature. Are some of the salads and vegetables we eat in the centre from your own garden?
S: My first task when we came here was to build a garden together with my mother, with compost and vegetables. It is important for us to live with nature and care for her health, to live without using any poisons and not to intervene too much, leaving parts wild, and not disturbing the animals with too many paths. In 2019, I became passionate about permaculture. Apart from nourishing us, we also want to set an example to others and show what is possible. As our soils here are sandy, these are good conditions for applying permaculture. After we started, new plants found the place by themselves. plants that I had tried to cultivate for decades. There is more fruit than we have ever had before. With the water and flowers, there are many more insects, and then more birds spreading the seeds. So much life is increasing. It is wonderful. When the plum trees were in blossom, I was suddenly walking in a forest of butterflies.
K‑u‑n: I am curious to know more about permaculture...
S: Permaculture was developed by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren to bring desert developments back to life, to regenerate edible forest gardens. We are supporting the living circulation of nature with permacultural practices. There is so much more happening if I do not intervene.
F: When I listen to you, I see it is the same that is happening in humans: healing is coming alive again, a revivifying of life energy. Illness is absence of aliveness, missing life force, and especially in these times of climate crisis it is good to hear what may happen if we support and let grow. Nature is carrying the same self‑healing powers if we let her recover and give a little support. It gives so much hope!
S: Once a psychologist working in a heart clinic 1 km from here said, A good energy from Caduceus is radiating also to us.
F: It is all about a Ziraat project here, isn´t it? about seeding, collecting, nourishing...with the Earth on all levels. The inner and outer seeds are connected in a wonderful way.
K: Yes, it is about the healing of the Earth, and connecting us with Ziraat ‑ another one of the seven Inayatiyya Activities.
S: When I got to know permaculture, I said: Yes, I want to heal the Earth. Before, I would never have dared to talk like this. It is possible, and I will try everything to make it possible.
The Inayatiyya Healing Activity
K‑u‑n: It is very special that you are coordinating the Inayatiyya Healing Activity in Germany from this healing place, that it is grounded locally in this way. Could you share about the Healing Activity in Germany that you are coordinating, Kabir?
K: There is an increasing interest in the Healing Activity as there is such a need for healing in the world. In Germany, we are approximately 30 active conductors leading the healing service. At the last Inayatiyya Healing meeting in June we were 36 people participating. From the International 2‑year Inayatiyya Healing course (2019 to 2021) an initiative arose for a conductor´s retreat in August 2021, which I was happy to take up. And in 2024, we started a conductors training.
Distant healing and the Healing Service were the focus of our activities in the times of Covid. They also give us ways in which we may attune and work with people who are present: it is a good opportunity for people to experience how healing energy is working on them, and for the healers, working directly with people, it is a powerful experience, holding the inner concentration on the person. We attune with the divine names Ya Shafi ‑ Ya Kafi. It is also possible on Zoom, when we are concentrating together on someone. I was astonished how it worked on me: a pain disappeared.
We also started investigating collective healing together in the presence of people who are in need of healing. Pir‑o‑Murshid‑Hazrat Inayat Khan gave the foundation of Inayatiyya healing, and invited us to make our experiences with it, to investigate and observe our self‑healing. His teachings are not to limit but to open the elements of healing power: consciousness, belief ‑ ´I am a soul´‑ and the purity of life, the warmth of the heart that determines the power of healing. Sympathy, love, and attention are essential. In 1920 Murshid taught us these things; we fill them out and apply them in our contemporary life, and develop them further.
K‑u‑n: What is important for you, applying Murshid´s spiritual healing in these times?
K: We consider healing as a service. It is a basic principle not to take money when it comes to healing. Due to capitalism, there is a certain perspective on health and healing. And people are very affected by it. We represent the contrary to the economisation taking place in the health system. Murshid also designed how societies may look in future. It is about a planetary consciousness, a cosmic conciousness and transcendence. How do we make it alive today ‑ one humankind, one Earth? It is about inquiring and investigating: how are we with one another? how may healing happen? These questions are important not only individually but in regard to the collective dimensions, worldwide. Healing is also required for tensions, when conflict regulation is needed. The task of the Healing Activity may be as expressed in the words of the Nayaz prayer: ´Purify and revivify us!´.
F: As we refer to Pir‑o‑Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan as our ´grandfather´, I am interested in new developments: how do we unfold new things, not as ´extra´ and personalized to the one who develops it but as ´inside´ our tradition?
K: Yes, and my central question that arose in my work in Caduceus Clinic as a kind of translation from sacred to secular spheres is: How can we transmit self healing experiences of our context ‑ meditation or breath practices ‑ to other people in need without a faith being necessary. To create an open space of consciousness without insider language. I would like to consider this freedom that people need. How can we define healing in retreats? That is a good question to become aware of in our retreat guide trainings. There is a healing aspect in every retreat. Due to the body‑mind clinic we ran, many experiences about people in crisis have arisen. If someone wished to experience a spiritual retreat, we have always found a way to realize it, finding an adequate setting.
The conventional perspective about retreats is that one needs to have a powerful ´I´ to engage in the retreat, and then to transform it. Our experience is different and shows us that people considered to be ´weak in structure´ may also benefit from a retreat adapted to their situation. It may strengthen the ´I´: strengthen their self‑consciousness immensely, deepen their connecton with nature. That is what we have evaluated in the clinic work. People come for retreats and may benefit from our special experiences and competences as retreat guides in the context of trauma. As Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan originally developed retreats, their aim was to support spiritual development in the frame of daily problems. Here, we are applying it concretely to healing. Sometimes in body‑mind medicine, there is a lack of the spiritual dimension. To take the potential into account is so important ‑ not only as part of humanistic psychotherapy but a crisis may become a stepping stone.
K‑u‑n: Besides individual spirituality you have stressed your interest in the collective dimension, the global crisis.
K: Since 2007, conferences of the ´Spiritual Emergence Network´ (SEN) have taken place here in Caduceus Centre every two years. I am chairman of the board of SEN, and we just held a meeting about ´spiritual crisis in these times of climate chaos‘. How may we realize this subject in Inayatiyya Healing? Here is a first statement on it.
K‑u‑n: I suppose you are working towards healing our relationship with the Earth at all levels.
S: Yes, it is possible to stop climate change by simple means. We are trying to manifest all that is possible, e.g. compost toilets. Water is so important. It is astonishing how healthy the forest is. I think as the trees are living on sand, they are not endangered by heat. At the same time I guess that all our meditation and spiritual energy is doing well.
F: Yes, it is a mutual giving ‑ not only inside the tree species but within the whole living interspecies community.
K‑u‑n: It makes a difference how people in retreat here are living as part of the forest for a while, are perceiving and contacting the trees, even communing with them.
S: And several young people have stayed here for a time to help with permaculture; two have even been here for a year. There was also a young artist who has created a room for people to come here to open a space for their arts. That is our wish: Diverse people co‑creating the place!
F: Your hospitality is so notable: that you like different impulses and energies to come and flourish.
K: ...being active together on that ground. Meditating together. For many years now, we have offered mediation for all people to come together. Many get to know meditation here. And in the courses we offer connecting psychotherapy and spirituality, recently, people named it “The last Gallic village“ and said: ´Just being here is such a big part of the thing´.
S: We are very happy for people to come for a period of time and co‑create with us.
Dear all who read that interview:
You are warmly invited to come to Caduceus Centre to enjoy the place and be active here!
You may contact Safaraz and Kabir here.
Fotos: Klaus Döhner‑Rotter, Zenith Camp 2022