The morning was taken up with updates from those that wished to share their news and in the afternoon we de-camped to Streatham Hill for the continuation of the meeting.

We had a most interesting guest speaker, Jane Puckett of DreamKnowing.com , and a fascinating talk on dreams as she explained how her life changed when she started paying attention to her dreams.   Jane is an experienced psychotherapist and long qualified, but she is now concentrating her efforts more fully on helping people tap into who they are by accessing their dreams.

Jane will be starting a 6 weekly conference call with members of The Creation Experiment in September 2010.  I very much look forward to taking part and am excited about the process of tapping in further to who I am and listening to my unconscious and the messages it has to give me.  This can be a very powerful process.

Sharon Rose, one of our Members gave a short and very interesting talk on abundance and how we can manifest this in our lives.  How we are all made up of matter and how every thought is an energy in motion.    She explained how very powerful thoughts can be and that just by thinking a thought, we set a whole train of events in motion whether positive or negative.

The afternoon took off with the traditional tea and carrot cake.  The carrot cake from Perfect Blend is just out of this world!

Kate brought along her old and trusted friend - the BBQ – and she did the most fantastic job cooking all our meats on there.  Well done Kate!  Everyone else brought food they had prepared, fruit, Pimms, Champagne, Fruit Cocktails. There was an abundance of everything.  A veritable feast was had by all.

As the BBQ was lighted and got going, we decided it was time to have the Blessing of Judith’s Abundance Shed.   Judith had her shed built some months ago and it resides at the bottom of her lovely long garden.   This is her office and she conducts most – if not – all her business meetings in there.   It is a fabulously peaceful place to be.  We all gathered in the Abundance Shed.

Gill Brabner was the instigator and organiser of the blessing and Gill brought candles and Tibetan musical instruments, abundance and inspirational cards along with angel cards – these together with flowers were laid out beautifully on the table in a pink theme to go with Judith’s colour preference.  Everyone was asked to light a candle and say something about the abundance blessing to Judith and this we did and each in turn picked a word and then a card and shared this with the group. Each word and card had a powerful meaning. Some of us read poems.   It was altogether a lovely affirming blessing ceremony and we hope that Judith has many abundant happy days in this very special place.

A few days ago I was in a meeting and Judith (who was at same meeting) said to me “you don’t realize how powerful you are” and I didn’t really know what to make of that to be honest.    I thought perhaps because I have been told that I have a sunny light and extrovert personality and am quite noisy fairly often, she was referring to that.

This morning I received a message on Facebook from my cousin’s daughter Maria.    Maria is in her late 20s now; she comes from Austria and is a total free spirit, she cannot seem to settle in one place and just loves travelling the globe, exploring, discovering and meeting people and so in between her work as a nurse in Austria, she jumps on planes as often as she can and goes exploring.    This is quite unusual for the Austrians that I know for they are usually home birds but I should not wish to offend any Austrians reading this blog who may well be world-travellers.

In a few days Maria will be passing through London on her way to exotic South America and this morning she sent me this message “I don´t know if you can remember but once you sent me a quote from Mark Twain and I have never been able to get it out of my head :  “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the things you did do.   So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor.    Catch the trade winds in your sails.  Explore,  Dream. Discover.”

I have absolutely no recollection of having sent this quote to Maria but the fact that it resonated so strongly with her and that she reminds herself of this regularly moved me unbelievably.    I have to say that I was taken aback when I read her message and actually I felt extremely emotional and I have been trying to work out why this is.    I think it is to do with the fact that I have made a difference to Maria, that having sent her this quote when she was a young girl, validated who she is, the free spirit within her and that I encouraged her to do what her heart told her which was to keep on exploring.    Today I feel quite proud of myself and privileged and I have today patted myself on the back for this is a trait I want to have, am pleased to have, both as a coach and all over my life actually, to know that I have made a difference.

So today I realize what Judith might have meant when she said those words to me and I say thank you to Judith and to Maria for making me realize that I can make a difference, that I am powerful and that I can take this and use it for the good in building my business dream.

We are all more powerful than we know – we just need to exercise our skill of noticing.

Starfish Malawi is a schools linking scheme between the UK and Malawi.

Listen to Carole’s interview here

And read more about Starfish Malawi here

Click here to listen to Bianca.

Click here to read more about Buiga Sunrise.

I have had problems with some email mapping stuff for -well months now.   Having spent inordinate amounts of time and hence money as I run my own business exchanging my time for money,  and having lost emails,having had a guy around to me who assured me he could do it but couldn’t, I asked someone who I thought could resolve it to look at it for me at a distance and duly sent him everything. He looked at it and said- no cant do it you need a mapping expert- a server support person.
Now, the thought of my having to go and find a yet another person was the final straw in a series of sagas.  So, I had a bit of a verbal spiral with my head talk saying “nothing ever works right, I’m sick of spending my time dealing with rubbish and dealing with people IT related who seem to create problems rather than solve them , all my systems are set up wrongly anyway -how do I know I wont just create another problem .    Why don’t I just throw all the blumming websites up in the air and get some expensive webbie to redo the lot host it with them- give them control and forget about “managing” them..blah..blah..blah.
Here’s the manifestation process bit so, listen up!
Now, when I get like that I walk away in order to think and do a bit of self talk that says ” stop trying to solve it.What’s the outcome you want to ask for .”    Now I’d written down the IT outcome I wanted re emails and site mapping but I hadn’t articulated my own outcome which was ” I want someone competent at this stuff  to take this problem, solve the short term one and come up with a long term one that meets my needs.   I’ve got a good designer, like the sites I’m talking about- I want a geek.   Ideally I want a geek I can eyeball not one at a distance because if I eyeball someone I can usually tell if they can do what they say they can do.”
Feeling a little jollier on my walk as I had got to a place of knowing, I left the park and went into the shop to buy a bar of chocolate. As I Passed a courtyard on the way back to my office, I noticed a little plate sign that said “Attend IT” Now I pass this place at least once a  week and I know it as the milkman’s yard because-  indeed the milkman has his office there too.   I had never noticed this tiny little business who I now know have been there for 3 years.

I knocked on the door and sat with the lovely geeky, sensible chap for 10 minutes whilst he fiddled with some internet and email diagnostic thingy to check my sites doodas.     Then, he said the magic words. ” I know what the problem is, I am 80% sure I can fix it but I wont know until I have a good crawl around your systems , get a big piece of paper, work out what’s working and what’s not and that will take me about an hour.   IF I can fix it, I have to tell you your whole mapping and wotsit is too complicated and I would recommend doing it all a different way with one host -that’s stage 2 and you can choose whether to do that or not”.
I thanked the universe and felt great.He did indeed solve the problem within the hour. Bliss
I forgot the chocolate in all that excitement! (clearly I still need to practice completing manifestations)

It concerns how to manifest what you want, rather than concentrating on (and complaining about) what you dont want.

Our friend is reading The Vortex by Jerry & Esther Hicks and this helped her to clarify something she did well by accident recently, when firing a member of staff.   Rather than listing what was wrong with this guy, our experimenter wrote a list of what she is looking for in that role.

And lo and beyold, this is exactly what she did then go on to manifest in short order.

Our Creator ends with “So I am going to make a point of doing that for everything in the future (especially my new business).  Rather than trying to control the project I am just going to ask for what I want it to be like and see what happens.”

Hmm, food for thought.   We know it works like this but how often do we remember to work this way?

This is precisely what we had in mind when we created The Creation Experiment; that we would become mindful of our inappropriate ways and notice what worked better and make up our minds to experiment with that in future.

A deliberate intent to do things differently and see what happens.

What could you do differently?   And will you join our experiment and let us know what happens when you do?

The morning is always a round-up for the Founders personally, ten minutes to talk about what we have manifested and how we would like to tweak that.   Being the first meeting of 2010 we were all concerned with the top three things we would like to create in this brand new year.

After lunch we moved on to discuss our mission.   We got closer to creating our first space by discussing a particular space one of us may have available to offer to TCE and working out a list of things we would need to make this space ready.   It was rather a long list and we are therefore still in discussion about whether or not this is the right place for us to start.

We want our spaces to be a soft place to fall for those in need of respite, a break, a breather and so we want the spaces to be fit for purpose.   Comfy and calming.   Warm and supportive.

Our other, perhaps better, idea was to create a website called Donate-A-Space where we would invite people with space in their homes, or holiday homes, or second homes to offer them up for those in need and TCE would be the intermediary which facilitates that.

We have called for a volunteer to donate the website and been lucky to secure that.   It will be a one page site which sets out our mission, is linked to our existing site, and invites people with spaces to let us know about them.   Its a start.

Its suprisingly difficult to get a team of a dozen women to agree on how this will work, except we all know it will because our intention is aligned.

It’s also difficult to resist rushing in and fixing up the first space and just getting on with it, rather than manifesting what we bring it to fruition.   We are noticing that for now.

This is, above all, an experiment and we are only just getting stuck in.   We are excited to see what will unfold.

On reflection, I feel I have not always been grateful enough for all that I have in my life and I find that as I grow older, I am much more appreciative of all my blessings, the people, family, friends, my home – the list goes on. My mother has always been a hugely grateful and expressive person and now that I am older, I appreciate her so much more but as a young girl I used to become somewhat irritated at the way she would stop in her tracks to admire someone’s garden or the sight of something that held her in rapture. I was just too embarrassed for words as she exchanged a word with whoever concerned. I did not know anyone else that behaved in this way. I have to say though that my mother was not always so grateful when in receipt of a gift from her children. She hated that we spent money on her. That was painful.

Now that I have little wrinkles appearing in my own face (some not so little), I notice the wonder of much more around me and I find myself behaving in ways just like my mother.

This blog is in danger of sounding a tad corny but I find that when I do take the time to complement someone or something about them – people usually always respond well and with gratitude and this in turn is a very pleasurable and uplifting experience for me.

I am a person who is usually upbeat, talkative and joyful; however, 2 years ago I went through a rather dark cloud for about a year. I was very low. I am not really sure what that was all about – time of life maybe? I searched for holistic ways to help myself get back and through to and in touch with my old self, I started exercising regularly – not too much mind, just a little and I drank less alcohol. These things helped me but what was to be much more powerful and what really turned everything around for me was a little experiment I heard about. I will share it with you.

Each night as my head hit the pillow I would consciously recall 6 things that had happened to me that day for which I was grateful. I practiced this every night continuously – sometimes I would become so moved by the smallest of my gratitudes that tears would flow. This simple exercise, in a relatively short space of time, quite turned me around –incredibly. For this I am truly grateful and I now share this exercise with everyone who is in need of an uplift and wants to hear it.

I recently listened to a couple of interviews, one with Jenson Button the Formula 1 driver, the second was Andre Agassi who was once thought to be the greatest tennis player of all time by the critics and I recently watched the documentary movie called The September Issue. The September Issue is all about American Vogue’s high profile editor Anna Wintour and what she gets up to in her day job. I loved this movie I have to say, being a bit of a fashionista myself and simply fascinated by the world of glitz and glam. You peeps might well be wondering what on earth these three have in common.

All three of these celebrities talked a little bit about their childhood and each one of them, in turn, had been told by their parent(s) from childhood that they would be “The Grand Prix World Champion”, “the World’s number one tennis player” and “the Editor of Vogue”.

Jenson’s career started as a kart racer where he was extraordinarily successful at winning races from a very young age. He said that from a very early age his father told him that he would be the Grand Prix World Champion. He was 2009 World Champion.

Andre Agassi was also once a top tennis star and at an early age groomed for big things. His father told him that he was going to be the World Number 1 tennis player. He was.

Anna Wintour’s father, Charles was editor of the Evening Standard (a London evening paper) and often consulted with her on how to make the newspaper’s coverage relevant to the youth of mid-1960s London. When asked by people what career choice Anna would make he would tell them “Why she is going to be Editor of Vogue one day”. She has been this for some years.

I am also reminded that Richard Branson was told by his parents that there was no limit to what he could achieve if he set his mind to it.

I do not have any children myself but how I wish I could have a baby right now and try this one out for size. I would use it as a case study and document it as we went along. I have told my young friend Ruth the story about these three, she was wowed, Ruth has a one year old daughter called Anna. Let’s see where Anna’s strengths lie and perhaps we can encourage her to use her talents and attributes to tbe very best of her ability and be something really great, something that will serve others and make a difference to our world. WOW – all you parents out there… what an opportunity!

It’s never too late to start believing how great we can be.