Mike Walker loves wearing a multi-coloured beanie (those woollen hats) on cold, wintery days. Mike Walker also loves his Granny (Gogo = Zulu for Granny). He combined these two loves, to form a project, Gogo Beanies, that is now creating hundreds of jobs and lighting up people’s lives.

A few years ago, Mike would visit his Gran weekly in her old age home and one day had an inspired thought “Gran could knit him some beanies for winter”. So, on the next visit, he took along some wool and she happily knitted her grandson some woolly beanies. He was delighted, she was delighted! And when he experienced her delight he realised that he should get more wool for her to make some more. Thus Gran was on a roll of making beanies and the question arose of “how many beanies can one man really wear?”

So Mike started giving some beanies to his friends. The other grannies in the old age home became inspired by the delightful energy of beanie making and they, too, began to knit beanies. All the time Mike kept taking more and more wool and more and more beanies were being knitted and soon Mike and all of his friends had more than enough beanies. The Grannies, however, didn’t want to stop because making beanies gave them a feeling of purpose and it was at this stage that Mike had another inspired thought “what about giving beanies to orphans for winter?” Thus Gogos made beanies and Mike gave beanies to orphans and Gogo Beanies was truly born…

To cut a long story short (too late, I know!), M-net has recently sponsored R 2 million to the project but with a slightly different spin – now not only Gogo’s knit beanies but women in rural areas can knit beanies and the R 2 million will ensure R50 goes to the knitter for every beanie knitted.

So, suddenly, Mike’s project has gone from just making Grannies and Orphans happy to now

1x beanie = a job for a day!

That’s the power of following your passion!

A BIG Fairy Godmother Wand Wave to Mike Walker for following his passion, spreading love and taking just one step at a time on a powerful journey.

Help Mike to keep grannies and the unemployed kitting and to keep orphans warm…

visit the Gogo Beanie Website or become a FAN on Facebook

A little video of the day in the life of a Fairy Godmother…

 Start with one positive thought.

If you repeat that thought over and over again and focus on it enough, the mind will latch onto it and do its smart work of looking around the physical world for other thoughts to match it. It creates a thread of thought that becomes a story as more thoughts corroborate the first.

Many teachers have written about this technique over many years – it is called affirmation. An affirmation is a made-up, empowering thought. Repeat out loud to yourself as you get ready in the morning.  Write it on post-it notes and stick these wherever you will come across them in your daily life – on your fridge, your desk, your bathroom mirror. In a few days, weeks or months your mind will take the sentence and create a story out of it with other thoughts that it finds in the world. You will find you are living in a new story and have thus created a new reality of the mind, which in turn creates a new reality in the physical world.

Affirmations should be constructed and repeated in the present tense. Here are some examples of affirmations:
•    I deserve to be wealthy.
•    I am a being of light and whoever I touch feels inspired.
•    I attract loving, caring men into my life.
•    I take excellent care of my body and crave only healthy food and beverages.
•    I am young and successful earning at least R30 000 a month.

When you begin the first tentative mumblings of affirmations, you may feel silly, and some of these affirmations may conflict with existing stories suspended somewhere in the sky of your mind. When you say an affirmation, it may conflict with a ‘bigger, stronger story’ (i.e. one that has more thoughts attached to it). The bigger, stronger story doesn’t like this pesky new-thought-on-the-block and will try to quickly punch it out of existence as it fights to maintain its place in the mind. This is because the mind does not like to encounter contradictory thoughts; it wants to be ‘right’, and how can it be right if two contradictory stories are both true?

As you repeat the words, ‘I am now and always will be responsible with my money,’ the contradictory story may chatter in your mind. The bigger, disempowering story will try to squash this new thought by bringing up evidence, examples and thoughts about why this new thought is not the truth.  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! You, responsible with money? Why do you have R40 000 worth of credit card debt if you are so responsible, huh?’

The trick at this stage of the affirmation game is twofold:

1.    Become the observer of your thoughts and realise both thoughts are stories and neither is the truth. The disempowering story is in a fight for its survival.

2.    Keep repeating the new affirmation – as often as possible. Have it around you as much as possible. Write it often. Repeating the affirmation or thought will create the sticky glue that it needs to attach itself to other thoughts and thus form the chain that creates a new story.

If you continue to do this, at some stage you will notice the old story simply disappears because the new story has enough corroborating thoughts to make it grow bigger and become ‘the truth’.   And that beautiful thing about creating empowering ‘truths’ is that your reality will begin to match whatever your mind believes to be true.

Create an affirmation now.

Get out those post-it notes, write it down.  Repeat it out loud while driving, in the shower or before you go to sleep at night and watch as your life magically transforms in that area.

Yes – the magic is that simple!

 Have you ever sat on a beach and watched surfers frolicking in the waves?

The effortless beauty of surfers mesmerizes me and I can watch them for hours.

Watching surfers will teach you a huge amount about “being in the flow of life” and about how to manifest your dreams and goals effortlessly (or at least make it look effortless from the shoreline.)

“Go with the flow, dude,” is typical surfer lingo and may be construed to be a little silly or naïve but it is the KEY truth in living an effortless life.

Life works in cycles and patterns and what connects one event to the next in these cycles is energy FLOW. Consider the seasons; night and day; birth and death – these are cycles.  Consider the patterns in nature, your fingerprint, in your body, in your behaviour, in music, in the universe – these beautiful patterns that mathematics is able to eloquently capture as numbers.

And between these cycles and patterns there is flow.  Flow is the way that energy moves between these cycles and patterns.

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I am so excited that I have just witnessed the first blossoms appearing on the trees outside my bedroom window.   Seeing those first blossoms are always a joyous occassion for me, because it means that Spring is creeping and ready to pounce – bringing warmer days and a sense of blissful renewal. So while Mother Nature begins to paint her canvas with delicate blossoms, warmer days and a tinge of crisp freshness and new beginnings,  inspired by the magic of Spring over the next two weeks I will be doing 5 blog posts in homage to the new energy that is blooming for all of us.

Our energy is naturally in rhythm with the waxing and waning of the seasons and now after the cozy-up, hibernating feeling of winter, the beginning of Spring brings with it excitement and energy, a time for reflection and a sense of new life, a FRESH START.

So how can you use the natural energy of the Spring season to get your body, mind and spirit back into shape?

Here is the first of 5 tips and tricks from the Fairy Godmother to use this Spring-time energy to its full advantage.

1.    Clean Up Your Space

By this I mean all space that you are in and that you take up – clean up space within yourself spiritually, mentally, emotionally and clean up space that you use on a physical day to day basis, at home, work, in the car and in the traffic.

It may seem fairly obvious to “Spring Clean” by cleaning and tidying up space – but apart from getting out your feather duster and clearing out your wardrobe – there are a few less obvious parts of your life that may need a spring clean too.

The concept of Spring cleaning is to get rid of the things in your life that are “weighing you down”, the dead-clutter from winter (or the past) that needs to be swept away to make space for the new feeling that Spring brings.

You will be amazed at how much of your energy is invested in the stuff that is “lying” around in your life and when you get to clean out all those things, there’s a sense of release, relief and a notable shift in your energy.

So make a commitment to yourself to clean out the places in your life that are clogged up with things – it may be your wardrobe, your office desk, your car, a shelf in your garage, your e mail inbox.

The key rule for a Spring Clean is: “When in Doubt, Throw it away”

The things that you think you should keep for a “I might need this at sometime” moment are things that actually need to be thrown away.  Be ruthless, clutter just complicates life.  If you haven’t used it in the last 4 months, throw it away.

Don’t be fearful of throwing office work and papers etc away, because in reality, we can source, research and find anything again with the Internet, the Google era is upon us and is very useful indeed.

Tip 2 – Cut out the “Deadwood”

Last night as I was sitting at a 27 dinner at a Primi Piatti, a wonderful wizard that I know pointed out some words on the menu which said – “Work is Love made Visible” and gleefully asked – “hey, do you know where that’s from?”

It turns out that it is from “The Prophet” by Khalil Gibran (and if you have never read it go out and buy it immediately!).

So before jumping into bed last night, I raided my bookshelf and found the little green book filled with Infinite Wisdom and I read the part on Work and about “Work being Love made Visible” – here is an excerpt…

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