About

Lindsay McLeod and Body Harmony found each other in 1992 when Lindsay saw one of Don McFarland's books on a coffee table. 

Her arms were stiff with badges from guiding, school house and form Captaincies, a level 5 ballet certificate from the Royal Academy of Dance, Basic Canoeing (in Scotland, without a wetsuit) and Scottish ski-ing certificates, but she reached for the book anyway.  It enthralled her. 

She had been travelling through Ecuador, Colombia and Italy with a group of musicians, dancers and martial artists, coming to rest in Argentina for a year, where she lived off grid for the first time in her life.  She walked through virgin forest where the trees, the land, the rocks and the animals were a more populous and known presence than humans. 

She grew immensely small and deeply connected to both earth and cosmos. 

It began the process of her understanding that true belonging is something that takes place in our bodies and is indivisible from the earth where we stand.  Don McFarland's book resonated with that understanding.  She used a small inheritance to go on a residential course in Gottland, Sweden, where Don was teaching.  It was magic.  Don’s co-presenter, Patrick Collard (the real person behind the character Patrick Jane in the series The Mentalist), was so impressed by Lindsay's innate understanding of Body Harmony that he offered her free classes wherever in the world they were teaching.  She went to the US, Vienna and Stockholm. 

Then she went to Switzerland in a VW bus to join a group of a capella singers she'd met and sung with in Arizona.  She stayed there for ten years after meeting the future father of her children on the day of her Saturn return.  They lived in the attic of a schloss with two floors of cellars, surrounded by water and extremes; extreme wealth, extreme clarity and a dark underbelly of dysfunction.  Work with a counsellor brought Lindsay to the realisation, among other things, that her soul was dying.  She left Switzerland for Andalucia

In Andalucia she was embraced by a tiny house and its land and the heat of Spain, Spanish openness, multigenerational inclusivity and respect, the aromatic air after rain, umbrella pine, cicadas, scented jasmine on a stifling summer night.  Pomegranate.  Fig.  She woke to wild horses at her window, watched passing herds of goats and loved the surrounding mountains.  Ravens and owls flew overhead and she heard their messages.

Andalucian glory.  But before we get too carried away let's remember that single parenting is like clapping with one hand.  But at least, as Lindsay says, it's no longer tied behind your back...

Andalucia gave Lindsay back the fire in her belly.

Which was just as well because then life hauled her back to England and the densely populated South East.  Under an overlay of tarmac, too many people and their anthropocentricity, the Sussex downlands, chalk cliffs and shingle beaches were still breathing under the run of the winds along the English Channel.  Lindsay made good friends and met another soulmate.  But there was a descent, and she was tenderized by the loss of people and things. 

A gift from the planet took her to Dartmoor to heal in the wildness.  She knew the land from her childhood on Renfrewshire moorland.  Her nose knew it, her feet recognised it, her ears were comforted by the familiar sound of wind against tussocky grass and through moulded hawthorn bushes.  It was like being back among family and it fed her soul.

Lindsay says, 'A huge chunk of my power comes from being fully in my body, listening to all the messages being picked up by the antennae of every single cell.  Wild places nourish that and put me at the centre of myself, where I am of maximum service to myself and others.'

Lindsay has practiced swinging poi since 1987.  She has been a student and practitioner of yoga for thirty years.  She studied Afro dance in the Senegalese tradition in her early thirties and somatic movement with Victoria Cresswell.  She began studying Continuum Movement with Robert Litman and continues those studies with Robert and Bobbie Ellis. 

Lindsay has a Masters Degree in Liberal Arts from Edinburgh.  She introduced the didgeridoo to Argentina.

She studied Body Harmony with Don McFarland from 1992 to 2016, qualifying as a practitioner in 1994 and a teacher in 2009.  She has practiced and taught Body Harmony ever since. 

'There is nobody alive on the planet without trauma.  Personal, collective and epigenetic trauma.  We have no choice but to soak it up.  We are swimming in wonk soup.  Body Harmony is the safest, most in-depth conversation you are ever going to have, led by the consent of your body, that will help you clear the wonk and breathe, at home in your body and as an integral part of the universe.'

Lindsay's sons, Benj and Josh, are her proudest contribution to life.  They are sane, kind, adult humans.  Round of two-handed applause.

~ Yvonne Green of Hummingbird Mint