In January 1987 a tragedy of the worst imaginable kind struck Sandy's life suddenly and senselessly. Without any warning, three of his daughters were viciously murdered in the safety of their own home in a hail of shotgun fire. They were the innocent victims of the crazed rampage of a young man with a gun. There was no rhyme nor reason to it, there was no way to prevent the crime and, worst of all, there was no way to say “Goodbye”.
Sandy was driven to the edge of emotional collapse by this. But in this crisis he reached down deeply into his soul to find reserves of inner strength that he hardly knew existed prior to the crisis. Sandy connected with his own wells of inner strength, tapped them and overcame the debilitating effects of a great personal trauma.
It usually takes a lifetime to gain enough experience of life's turbulent course before one can claim to have a modicum of wisdom – the old are the wise. What a pity it is that we become wise often only at the end of our lives. It is invariably too late to influence others; the “wisdom” may be there, but the drive and energy to take the message to others is often gone.
I believe that for some people the “getting of wisdom” is telescoped down to a shorter time frame than normally comes through the “wisdom of age”. Some people get it when they are quite young. This telescopic effect is usually through dire circumstances, requiring a difficult period of introspection. It is not usually through choice. The benefit for the rest of us, when it happens this way, is that the drive and energy to take the message to others is still there. To my mind it all begs the question of whether there is a purpose to suffering.
It would not be possible to find the person who has not suffered something somewhere in their lives. One of the problems with this suffering that we all go through is that it is impossible to put a gauge on suffering. It is impossible to compare one person's pain with another's. What may be a minor incident to one may be a major catastrophe to another.
Sandy MacGregor's tendency to leadership, combined with just a trace of flamboyance in his personality, make it natural for him to want to make the link with all of us; to find the common ground between us. Sandy's idea is to go further than just establish the fact that we share common experiences. His idea is to look into the question, “So what?”. His idea is to examine the possibilities that the mental processes we find from somewhere in a crisis, can be extended into our everyday lives.
Can we use these processes, this inner strength, to get rid of the ghosts in our cupboard, the things that hold us back. Can we use this strength to assist with healing? Can we use it to direct healing? Can we use it to think creatively? Find solutions that had previously evaded us? Explore spiritual purpose? Once we open our minds to think about it these are some of the interesting questions that face us. Sandy's first book Piece of Mind is about how to relax in 30 seconds and using an eight step process to word and achieve goals faster. Switch On to Your Inner Strength is about how to use a deeper state of mind where even more clarity is reached. One outcome of this clarity is that you can examine issues in your life which lead to your goals. As the number of true stories in the book show, Sandy has certainly been successful in reaching out and making a link with many many others. We all stand to benefit from this.
Many of the great ideas start out as uncertain fantasies; flights of the imagination; tentative hypotheses. Science often catches up later on with the imagination of the dreamers. In the field under discussion in this book the gap between the dreamers and the scientists is not as great as one might at first think. Scientific interest in the power of our inner strength is growing continuously.
No one has an exclusive right to special knowledge in this field. As the presence of the various personal stories shows, this book is not just about one person's reaction to trauma. It is an inclusive work about how a large number of people are discovering the same things that Sandy has found out. This book can be about you too.
Sandy now writes, conducts seminars and accepts speaking engagements to lead other people to discover their own inner strength. He uses the techniques described in this book in his personal and business life every day and believes that they can be adapted to a wide range of other fields. He has built a vibrant and successful business and still follows one of the principles he learnt at Duntroon: “Never tell anyone to do something which you would not be prepared to do yourself.”
David Mason-Jones
Author/Writer
Singleton, New South Wales
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SWITCHING TO INNER STRENGTH
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Think of all those in your circle of friends. Have you ever seen a situation where two of them are faced with a similar emotional challenge? One rises to the occasion and copes the other doesn't. One succeeds, one fails. Why is this so?
Think of your work environment. Have you ever seen someone who is progressing well, suddenly stopped by an unexpected obstacle? An obstacle they can and could overcome, but don't. Have you seen someone else in the same career who clambers over obstacles one after the other to make it to the top? Same career, same obstacles, one succeeds and one fails. Why is this so?
Think of the television news. Can you recall seeing a report about a victim who has suffered a great injustice? The news reporter invariably tells us that the victim's life “has been ruined” by the terrible experience. But have you ever browsed in the bookshops and seen the stories of people who have gone through the same injustice, conquered its traumatic effects and lead lives of great moral victory? Story after story tells of the victory of the human mind and spirit in circumstances where they could have been excused for just giving up. The victory is invariably one of the inner strength of those individuals, not their outward circumstances.
What is the difference between people in these circumstances? Is it luck? Is it education? Is it who they know or play golf with? Is it their ethnic background, financial resources or social status? No! It is probably none of these things that ever makes the final difference.
The real difference so often lies in that ill defined quality known as their Inner Strength. And to make the point a little finer, it is not just the existence of their inner strength that counted, for it is an assumption of this book that everybody has stocks of inner strength, it is their relative ability to access their inner strength that was important in the end.
What an appealing idea it would be if we could all use this inner strength. But why not? Why can't we all use it .... or, can we? Why is it that the television reporter can be so certain about predictions of ruin, when, left to themselves, people often recover from the worst traumas?
One of the purposes of this book is to open you to the idea that it is possible to use your inner strength in a conscious, self directed and deliberate way.
Viktor Frankl, in his book Man's Search for Meaning described the process of inner strength. Many holocaust victims were shot, gassed, and otherwise murdered violently. For these people any will to survive was transcended by the physical violence of their deaths. It is also true that many of those who died in the holocaust, died of sickness, deprivation and exposure. Of the people who were not actually murdered, the ones who had goals, who had a family they knew they had to survive for and those who had a great purpose, tended to be the ones who withstood enormous difficulties and survived.
Those who were not obeying some great purpose, those who were not gripped by the need to achieve an important goal, soon found no meaning in the daily struggle for life, gave up psychologically, and eventually died.
Some years ago, I was quite brutally sexually assaulted at knife point. This, teamed with the ensuing trauma of coping with family concern, and medical and police activity, left me in a dismal state of mental upheaval, which was unmoved with any type of professional counselling.
In order to reclaim myself, manage the distress and return to a considered normality, I plunged into your “power of the mind” technique and thoroughly soaked