It’s the eve of Valentine’s Day and I’m thinking about LOVE…
Love has to be my favourite topic and I have written articles, scoped out books, given talks, recorded videos, led workshops and guided meditations on love many, many times.
So how do you find your ideal partner?
It took me a while to find the true love relationship I always wanted. I was 38 and Pat was 50 before we met and we’d both had our fair share of ups and downs in relationship before finding each other.
Here’s my article from Connect Magazine – Meeting My Match – about how I finally prepared myself for and attracted a really great life partner:
Pat and I at our wedding in 2003 – making offerings to the river
It wasn’t long before I was inspired to run Get Ready for Love workshops as part of my coaching practice. During the course of a weekend, participants dived into the deep and delightful process of preparing themselves for a superb relationship.
This article by the Daily Express, shares some of my top tips on getting ready for love:
Everyone seems to be talking about it – that the time is upon us to make radical changes – to find kinder, more balanced ways to prosper in life and business.
As the ‘old ways’ of greed and exploitation continue to falter and fall, we are digging deeper than ever to find alternatives. How can we create fair societies, healthy economies and sustainable lifestyles?
Even the government has commissioned a study on how to foster happiness, finally acknowledging how important this personal level of well being is.
I am relieved to say I have heard on a reliable grapevine that the government are genuinely taking heed of the findings.
And thank goodness some attention is being placed where it is due. After all, when we are happy we are healthier, more productive and cause less trouble! All governments should take heed!
Here’s the link to newly launched Action for Happiness whose work I follow and admire – www.actionforhappiness.org
Being a true Aquarian, I’ve been ahead of the curve on this theme. A couple of years ago, I spoke at a conference about our experience of setting up a community run shop in our village.
One of the things I mentioned was that giving and contributing to other people (in this case by volunteering in the community shop) was creating increased happiness and that Gross National Happiness was as important as Gross National Product.
But perhaps it’s true that charity begins even closer – at home i.e. within ourselves. Are we happy, in balance and being kind to ourselves?
When I spoke to former TV Dragon, Rachel Elnaugh, about this she admitted that she felt she had to get ‘tough’ in her early days of business. This left her out of balance and in need of reclaiming her feminine side.
Nowadays Rachel is actively engaged in supporting a new era of feminine wisdom in business. She is in the process of setting up her new project Source TV – a cutting edge platform, specialising in video, dedicated to supporting and promoting ‘heart-centred thought leaders’.
It is so inspiring to witness the growing strength of this wave of conscious and creative entrepreneurs and mentors. I had a very enjoyable couple of days supporting Rachel at the Business Start Up Show in London recently.
Thank you to all you amazing people who I met at Rachel’s stand. The bounce in your step and the sparkle in your eyes is the only proof I need that a time of happiness, life balance and feminine wisdom is nearly here!
Robert’s work has always intrigued me and I’ve heard great things about him from colleagues and friends. Reading his article, I remembered that Robert is a good friend of Nick Williams – another warm and inspiring UK coach who I connected with a couple of years ago.
And so, that led me onto reviewing the video chats Nick and I had recorded together. Up popped this one – Nick asking me what steps I advise people to take if they are starting out with a new business idea.
It’s called Tips for Inspired Entrepreneurs and I give three or four really good practical steps that are helpful if you are formulating or wanting to develop a new business – however big or small.
One of the points we discuss is how PERSONAL it is running your own business and how business success goes hand in hand with our own development as a person.
After all, our business is our creation and an expression of who we are. So to make the best of our business, we need to understand and manage how our personal strengths and weaknesses play out in our work .
And it works the other way too – running a business is one of the most character building endeavours we may ever find ourselves involved in. It can be enormously challenging and by the same token, enormously growthful.
So how does it all begin? How do you formulate and launch a new business idea? Have a look…
As it happens, starting new business is a topical for me as I’m planning to attend the Business Start Up Show in London next month.
My friend and colleague Rachel Elnaugh (former dragon from BBC TV Dragons’ Den) will be there to speak on ‘Metaphysical Marketing’ and ‘The Future is Feminine’ – two topics that are close to both our hearts.
Rachel will also be there ‘womaning’ her stall in support of her exciting new TV channel – Imago People TV. If you want to know more about it, have a look at Imago’s new website:-
But to give you a taste, here are Rachel and I having a video chat about telepathic marketing.
And you are welcome to track down our other videos including our discussion on the emerging Feminine Wisdom in business on my You Tube channel, Thrivecraft.
In the last few days I’ve been reading a book by spiritual teacher Dr Wayne W Dyer called There is a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem. It’s great – so relevant, uplifting and re-assuring – and is awakening many creative thoughts within me.
Wayne first became a source of inspiration for me after my husband Pat introduced his work to me eight or nine years ago. During the 1990s, Wayne taught the Ah meditation – a manifestation practice that he’d learned from one of his Indian Gurus – and Pat and I have been passing it on to friends, colleagues and clients ever since our Thrivecraft days.
Last year, I explored the practice in depth at my Entrepreneurs Find Inner Wisdom event, held here in Totnes, Devon. This was filmed, but apart from posting the videos on my blog soon afterwards, I have not really made a point of publishing them. Despite this, I have noticed that often people find the videos searching for information on the Ah meditation, so perhaps it’s about time that I made them more available…
Having plucked Wayne’s book off my bookshelf recently (and realised it was gifted to me by my special guest at Entrepreneurs Find Inner Wisdom – former BBC TV Dragon and business mentor, Rachel Elnaugh) I took this as a sign that it was time to run the Ah meditation video series here on my blog.
So here you are, a series of six short videos on the Ah meditation to dip into. Do let me know what you think – and what results you get! Enjoy!
1. Manfestation – You are a magician!
2. Introducing the Ah Meditation – Background and How to
3. Questions on the Ah Meditation – Do You Have to Believe for it to Work?
4. Preparing to do the Ah Meditation – Guided Relaxation / Opening the Chakras
5. Practising the Ah Meditation – Guided Practice
6. Concluding the Ah Meditation – Guided Om Chanting
I’ve just returned from London where I was attending my friend Rachel Elnaugh’s live mentoring filming event – Business Magic.
As an award winning entrepreneur (for her multi-million first business, Red Letter Days); former Dragon from BBC TV Dragons’ Den; and author of Business Nightmares and forthcoming Business Magic, Rachel is a formidable business mentor.
From the autumn, however, Rachel is winding up her mentoring programme to make way for an exciting new project – see ‘message from Rachel’ on her website www.rachelelnaugh.com Before she does this, she wanted to capture some business mentoring on film in order to create a DVD programme.
And so, at the atmospheric Magic Circle (and on the night of a full moon and lunar eclipse!) we all gathered to hear Rachel reveal her business magic live on stage.
Fantastic! So inspiring!
Coming home, I remembered that I was fortunate to have some live mentoring from Rachel myself last year. And that we filmed it! And that I’ve not shared it with you yet!
So here it is – Rachel digging in to my inner story to help me define my name, brand and the title of a book I was writing.
Pat and I moved in February. Caravan dwelling came to a sudden end when problems staying on the field all year round prompted a rethink. The result was a move into this dinky modern house on the edge of the village with my 16 year old son Jamie. We are familiar with the house because its where Jamie has been living with his dad, Colin, and its been our support base whilst living in the wildfield. So Colin moved out and we moved in – taking over the main parenting role again and allowing Jamie to remain in situ in the big bedroom!
Weekdays have a different rhythm now – up at 6.45am with a quiet mug of earl grey in time to wake Jamie for school. Then its sandwich making, reminders about what’s needed for the day, making sure he catches the bus… By 8am I am out in the conservatory – the nearest thing to a caravan in the house – and getting on with my work. Evenings generally involve collecting Jamie from various after school activities, preparing a meal, a bit of TV – often with a foot massage from my guardian angel husband – and flaking out by 11.
I have to admit that I am relishing being a full-time mum again – and its much needed and long overdue. That’s probably why it feels so right. Colin and I have always lived near each other and co-parented amicably since we separated, but its the first time Jamie has been living in one home with me in all those years. The demands of Colin’s work has changed and its been hard for him to support Jamie on his own. With Pat and I sharing the home parent role and my work enjoying the flexibility of self employment, this is a much better arrangement for Jamie’s last few years of school.
The idea came out of the blue and fell into place immediately. None of us had been thinking along those lines at all. However, even Pat – a reclusive wild man and caravan-life adorer – was convinced of the plan’s merits as soon as it arose. He’s having the toughest time adapting back to ‘normal’ domestic life, but he’s doing his best for the greater good.
Part of the idea is that we keep the caravans and use them during the camping season. This means that any of us can escape back to the wildfield when we need to – just a stone’s throw away but a whole different world. And look out for a new retreat package I’ll be offering soon including accomodation in the wildfield – a perfect place to get away from it all.
Caravans in the Wildfield
So, only 7 months after the biggest downsizing move of my life, it’s been time to upscale again! Having given away all our furniture and household belongings, we needed to start over. However, the abundant universe soon showerered us with gifts and blessings. Within 10 days of moving our new home was all ready and we were celebrating a house-warming with our generous friends and family. Another plus is that after spending a severe, snowy winter in a 25 foot caravan, this modest 2up/2down feels like a palace of comfort and modern conveniences!
Living room to conservatory in new house
The move back into householder life marks the conclusion of an unusually introverted few months over the winter. By the end of October last year (the date of my last blog entry!) I was starting to put the breaks on ever expanding business plans and activities to concentrate on things closer to home. After more than a decade of being full on and ‘out there’ with my vocation, finances and family needed my full attention for a while. It was time to get my own house in order!
Initially, I simply wanted to be around my mum in Scotland as much as possible. She’s been going through extensive medical treatment and I could think of nothing better than to drop everything and be with her. In the event, Pat and I spent most of December up there. Mum lives in a lovely villa on a tiny island off the west coast of the mainland. We spent much of the UK’s ‘big freeze’ up there – helping with driving and hospital visits, enjoying family communion and filling our souls with the stunning beauty of the place.
View out to sea from mum’s upstairs window
Scotland was a tonic after spending November with my nose in account books. As well as doing my current end of year accounts, it was time to face some financial music about a business that hadn’t been doing so well and needed winding up. It was painful and confronting, demanding ruthless soul searching as well as loads of practical work. Every assumption, motive, decision, choice and step that Pat and I had made in recent years had to be examined. With no stone unturned on any level, it was excruciatingly personal and challenging to our self-esteem – and SO hard to forgive mistakes and let go!
As my colleague Rachel Elnaugh will tell you in her brilliant book, Business Nightmares, most entrepreneurs go through extreme financial challenges. Yet there’s a lot of shame and secrecy surrounding it – especially in the UK – and therefore its rarely discussed. But without sharing this crucial business experience how can we learn how to handle it from each other?
Business Nightmares is such an encouraging, inspiring and informative read. By revealling the inside stories of how even well known and successful entrepreneurs struggle, Rachel makes you realise you are not alone. And far from being shameful, knowing what the entrepreneur has been through makes you respect them even more. Do get yourself a copy if you haven’t already. It’s so well written by the wise, warm and witty former TV Dragon, Rachel Elnaugh. Click here to find out more www.rachelelnaugh.com
Telling the Coaching Connect conference about Rachel’s book
During November’s process of intense self-examination, it also dawned on me that I’d become a little bedazzled by a kind of ‘ambitious glitz’. I’d spent the previous 18 months vigourously developing my expert platform (as its called!) – glamming up my public image, publishing blogs and videos, courting book and media deals, launching new workshops, speaking at conferences, cultivating exciting new colleagues and establishing an international network via social media.
All that had been so much fun that I didn’t realise I’d got a bit carried away, taken flight and lost touch with my home ground, or that a certain pushy “must have big success” had crept into me. I knew something wasn’t right because things stopped coming to fruition and I was feeling increasingly strained. Eventually I consulted my inner guidance about it and the message came through loud and clear – “Just STOP, Srimati!” And so I decided to drop everything and take some time out.
It was scary letting go and not knowing what was going to happen, but my courage was rewarded. Having followed my soulful beckonings through the dark of winter, I did find myself back on firm ground and free from the burden of grasping after future success.
There’s a new ease and relaxation in my approach to my vocation and I feel deeply contented and quietly confident that the right work will come to me at the right time. Of course the universe has received my telepathic energetic transmission instantly and a graceful wave of wonderful new work is now gently cascading into my well balanced life. It sure beats chasing the big time!
So I’ll leave you with a video of a conversation Rachel and I had last year. We are talking about telepathic marketing – the art of attracting business opportunities by paying attention to our inner life. It draws on the universal principle that life simply delivers to you whatever you energetically expect will come – whether good or bad – and whether you are conscious of it or not. To find out more about this phenomenon, see the book Ask and it is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks.
The trick is to be aware of your beliefs about life and the signals you are therefore putting out. With a little inner work, you can make sure that they are genuinely aligned with your best interests – and so the universe delivers what’s in your best interests. And as I can testify, there’s nothing better than graceful waves of wonderful things cascading into your life because you’ve put your own house in order!
Do you trust your own rhythms? Do you allow yourself to do nothing and stare into space just because you feel like it? If a rush of creative ideas wakes you up at night, do you get up and start scribbling or smother it down because ‘you must get your sleep’? When all your energy has vanished, do you force yourself to get on with some work or allow yourself to rest?
Observing the ebb and flow of my creative energy here at the wild field has prompted me think about this. When we first moved, it was easy to see why I wasn’t dreaming up any new workshops or enthusiastically promoting my latest inner wisdom product – I was knackered! Then the weeks went on and I settled deeply into my inner world – wanting to do little more than meditate and write.
After a while, I started to get a bit concerned. What if all that creative juice has gone? Should I try to drum something up? But no matter how I looked at it, I just did not feel like it. I know from hard experience that it’s counter-productive to exhaust myself trying to swim against the tide, but it’s not always easy to keep the faith. None-the-less, this time I managed to wait and trust that the change would come naturally.
Then, a week or two ago, it happened – a huge uprush of creativity and inspiration came bursting through. Ideas, excitement, enthusiasm and energy aplenty – fully formed and in such abundance – and my new workshop was conceived. A couple of phone calls were made and the people and resources I wanted fell into place beautifully. There was a quality of effortless co-operation with a power so much greater and wiser than myself. My job was to be switched on enough to notice the turning tide, fit enough to get on the surf board and keep my balance, and from there-on-in simply have a wonderful ride!
And so I can announce to you with enormous enthusiasm and excitement that I’m taking my new workshop to Glasgow in Scotland next month. Wake Up Your Wisdom – a day retreat for entrepreneurs and professionals ready to develop red-hot intuition and learn the secrets of mind-to-mind marketing. My fabulous colleague, Rachel Elnaugh (former Dragon on BBC TV’s Dragon’s Den), has agreed to give a presentation on her experience of using inner wisdom for business success. I can’t wait to give my first ever workshop in my home city! More details here – www.srimati.com/events
To me, one of the greatest gifts of my self-determining lifestyle is the delicious opportunity to follow my natural rhythms more truly. Sometimes its an emotional rhythm – feeling slow and sad or fast and excited; sometimes its intellectual – clear as a bell or dull as dish water. Then there are physical rhythms prompted by hormonal changes or meal, exercise and sleep patterns. And of course there’s the environment – the light, the dark, the sun the moon, the seasons, the weather, the surroundings…
Our bodies and psyches are fantastically engineered sensing machines. Should you pay attention – simply pay attention! – you get all the bio/psychic feedback you need in a nano second and you will KNOW what’s right for you at every turn. However, if you override this awareness by getting too busy and out of touch with yourself (or giving too much of your power and freedom away to an over-demanding person or job), you lose one of your most precious abilities – to regulate a happy, balanced lifestyle for yourself. What’s more, regulating yourself like this is your primary responsibility in life. No one else can do this for you or be blamed if you do not do it for yourself.
I’m quite impressed with Paul McKenna’s work with regard to this. Paul McKenna www.paulmckenna.com is a British hypnotherapist who has written many excellent self-help books including I Can Make You Thin. The core principle of this book is that to eat appropriately (and therefore lose excess weight) you simply need to tune into this self-regulating ability. By slowing down and paying deep attention to what food your body really wants, you naturally find your optimum weight. I used this method myself last year and effortlessly shed 20 lbs in so many weeks. (I seem to be in a ‘putting it back on’ phase at the moment – but that’s another story!).
However, there’s another whole dimension of rhythm in our lives – the ebb and flow of INSPIRATION – our spiritual rhythm. When you are inspired you feel a creative energy rising up within you, giving you the ideas, direction and impetus to make something new happen. It seems to bubble up from inside you even if its triggered by an external source like a stimulating talk or a sublime piece of music. Sometimes it just seems to come from no-where.
The Buddha taught that inspiration can only be experienced when you have prepared yourself to receive it. When you first start to meditate, it can take a while to draw all your disparate energies into some sort of coherence. That’s what meditation does for you first of all – it helps you feel less scattered and more focussed and more whole and complete. This is the initial stage of INTEGRATION (bringing together).
Only then – when you have a sense of being in possession of your whole self – can inspiration start to come through into an adequate container. This second stage, not surprisingly, is called INSPIRATION. Having pulled yourself into some sort of shape, your natural creative energy has a place to arise and a vehicle through which to express itself. It feels like you have a well-spring within you, constantly bubbling up from your deep inner source.
I explain these two aspects of meditation in this video – Meditation for Integration and Insight
As a coach, I’ve always preferred to work with inspiration rather than motivation. As well as being a carrot rather than stick approach, it is a much more empowering and graceful way to work. Helping people ignite their own natural joyful impetus is more independently sustainable for the client than trying to push them up a mountain they’d rather not climb.
Sometimes I think we’ve got it all wrong – that we think we have to ‘make’ ourselves do stuff because it’s ‘good for us’. No, no! Spend the time to develop the self-love and find the thing you really want to be doing because you were meant to be doing it! Then its just a matter of lighting the touch-paper and standing back while an inspired new lifestyle takes off!
Inspiration is a massive force for the good. When you are inspired you are in touch with who you truly are and feel moved by love and joy rather than fear and dread. One of my favourite tips is the one that tells us how to know when you are making the right decision. By asking yourself , ‘Am I making this choice from love or fear?’ you can discern whether you are doing things for the best (the best way is ALWAYS the one that is inspired by love rather than avoiding fear). If you are making a choice based on love, you feel expanded and free. If you are making the choice from fear, you feel contracted and strained. You can feel that expansion or contraction in your body – often in your tummy area. There’s a reason why we use the term ‘gut instinct’.
I go into the art of following the right inner promptings in this video – ‘Which Voice in Your Head Do You Trust?
So please do keep the faith, dear people – you do know what’s best for you. Your only responsibility is to cultivate sensitivity to your rhythms and allow inspiration to flow. Of course many of us have busy lives with many demands, but even within that, it’s possible to invest a little time developing awareness. Meditation is a brilliant way to do this. Just ten minutes a day – sitting quietly, feeling your breath move through your body – is a wonderful start. For superb meditation guidance, try www.wildmind.org
In this video, Maggie Kay asks business mentor and transformational coach, Rachel Elnaugh (TV’s Dragons’ Den) about her approach to marketing and agrees that the law of attraction and telepathic marketing are powerful hidden factors that draw clients and new business.
In 2010, Rachel attended Maggie’s one day training retreat for professionals – Entrepreneurs Find Inner Wisdom – where telepathic marketing was taught and practiced.
Thrivecraft with Maggie Kay 