Читать книгу Switch On To Your Inner Strength - Sandy MacGregor - Страница 17

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It often takes a crisis before we discover our inner strength. What a pity that this quality so often lies dormant for years and is only activated when our backs are well and truly to the wall. This has certainly been true in my case. It is sad to reflect about the waste of human potential represented by these long periods of dormancy in all our lives.

So that you will understand how I have come to this position I would like to take some time to share some things about my life, my own journey, with you. None of the things I will tell you is for the purpose of blowing my own trumpet, or engaging in self pity, or in seeking sympathy. The purpose is so that, as you continue reading this book, you will know exactly where I am coming from. Later in this book I may say some things, about forgiveness for example, which you might find extremely challenging. By understanding my journey you will be able to see that I am not just repeating things that I have read in text books. I have really experienced the power of my inner strength and I have seen others also experience the same power in their lives.

To understand my background, I'm a military guy, a retired Colonel. I went through Duntroon, the Royal Military College in Canberra and graduated from there in 1960. When I was still a young officer the army sent me to Sydney University where I completed a Civil Engineering degree. This was necessary because, on graduation from Duntroon, I was allocated to the Army Engineers. Then I worked for a few years as an engineer, building roads and bridges and other field constructions and ....... Oh! ....... Here there was a minor difference from the work my civilian colleagues were doing, in the army we also learnt how to blow up our constructions once we had built them! Believe me you cannot get a more analytical, logical, prove-it-to-me, black/white person than a combination of being a military guy and being an engineer. It is, I think, simply impossible. I fitted the mould exactly and valued the concepts of logical thought, meticulous planning and careful analysis above the ideas of intuition, emotion and dreaming. All this was before the Vietnam War.

Then, in 1965 I went to South Vietnam with the Australian forces at the Bien Hoa airbase. I commanded 3 Field Troop – the first engineers to support the infantry.

We'd heard about the Viet Cong tunnels all over Vietnam but up to that point none of us had actually seen one. One day in October, 1965, in an operation in War Zone D the infantry soldiers found some tunnels and called me forward. I remember standing there near the entrance and thinking, “There's the tunnel, boys ... what do we do now?”

Up until that time tunnels hadn't been searched out. When a tunnel entrance was found the procedure had been to pump smoke and tear gas through the tunnel to expose more entrances, and then seal up the entrance by blowing it up. What we did was to actually go down the tunnels and crawl around in the silent blackness of the still dank air. Some of the tunnels were so small that you could not turn around in them. You had to keep on going until they opened out and then when there was another room off to one side, then you could turn around. But then again some other tunnels were just a little bit higher so that you could squat up in them and turn around. It was extremely frightening work but as soon as we went down the tunnels we found intelligence (that is, paperwork), and that was particularly so in that very first area of tunnels that we had found, the tunnels of the Ho Bo Woods. We had landed right on top of a major Viet Cong headquarters and we took out ammunition, equipment, tons and tons of explosives, and over a hundred thousand sheets of paper. One of the things we obtained was the current assassination list that the Viet Cong had compiled on their political and military enemies in Saigon.

For the role I played in the tunnels I was awarded the Military Cross, one of the highest orders for bravery. I also received the American Bronze Star from the United States Government as recognition of my work.

When I returned to Australia I progressed in my military career, for a time continuing in the regular army, and then, for a time, in the army reserve. Upon leaving the regular army my civilian career progressed well and I joined the ranks of the ambitious corporate executive. My moment of personal crisis had certainly not yet arrived. Up until this point my experience of life had generally been a favourable one where I had succeeded at just about everything I had put my hand to. Sure there had been problems along the way, including a most stressful few years in my married life, but I thought I could handle everything that came up. Through the work that I did as the National Production Manager for a bedding and furniture company my mind was constantly confirmed in the analytical, logical processes I had picked up in my army days and in my education as an engineer. All in all things were looking up.

During the 1980s something happened which caused me to realise that the scientific advances, particularly in medicine for example, were not necessarily providing all the answers we wanted.

During this time I faced a family problem involving my son, Andrew. It was this experience that was to start me on an inward journey of discovery about the use of the mind, relaxation states, faster learning and power of the inner strength that is in all of us. This was not to be my crisis but I later realised that the experience was like a guidepost which pointed me in the right direction when my crisis came.

Andrew had suffered the effects of asthma for fifteen of his seventeen years. It had always been a problem and it just seemed that the conventional way of treating it didn't really work. Andrew's attacks became worse and worse until his bouts with asthma required hospitalisation and treatment with a cortisone drip in his arm. The worst thing was that there seemed to be no medical prognosis for Andrew's recovery. In army terms, all we were doing with Andrew was fighting a delaying battle with no real plan of winning. There had to be a better way, a way in which we could win the battle against asthma.

I took Andrew to a doctor and the doctor taught him how to relax and release stress quickly _ during the actual asthma attack. It really helped Andrew. One of the problems of asthma is that, once a bout commences, it is not unusual for the victim to become frightened and panic a little. This panic causes more difficulty in breathing, the difficulty in breathing causes more panic, and so a dangerous spiral pattern of cause and effect sets in. Relaxation can break this pattern and Andrew was mastering it, taking control of it. Andrew's deliberate use of his mental persuasion over his body was more powerful than the latest drugs. What an interesting insight that was!

Then Andrew, who rode a motorbike, had an argument with a bus one day and lost. His leg was badly broken below the knee – a ghastly mess with bone shattered and sticking out. For a time there was every chance that Andrew might lose his leg. He was advised that cortisone, which he needed to control the infection (nothing else would work) inhibited the growth of bone marrow, so the best solution was to amputate the leg.

I called back the same doctor who had previously helped Andrew control asthma. The doctor said he could help Andrew control his infection and that Andrew could also help to control his own pain and assist his healing. Andrew undertook the mental discipline of directing his own healing and so the next thing I saw was Andrew recovering with his leg and getting better with asthma, both at the same time. A miracle – completely foreign to me!

There was something going on in Andrew's subconscious mind that I couldn't understand. I said “Hey Andrew, it's so powerful, teach me”. And so he did. It took me a year and in that year I proved to myself that there was such a thing as a powerful subconscious mind. During six months of that year I released 22 kilograms of weight using only my mental powers to do so. I was able to bring down my blood pressure by 20 points just standing right in front of the doctor and could also reduce the strength of my pulse at will. I was excited. Proof! I devoured every book I could possibly find on the subject. The Power of the Subconscious Mind by Dr Joseph Murphy was the first one and then that referred me to many more. I was off on a new journey.

So in this process of development there was a little chink starting to open up in my belief system. I could see that some of the conventional ways of medical treatment were lacking and I became open to the idea that the power of the mind might be far greater than I had previously given it credit. After a while the chink became bigger and bigger because the most important thing for a “prove-it-to-me-person” had been provided to me – proof! The case of my weight release was proof because I purposely took no other measures such as dieting or exercise to shed the unwanted kilograms. I knew that I would never ever be bored again in my life because there was just so much to do, so many things to learn about and that learning could be so much easier.

Then, on 23rd January 1987, the real stuff of personal crisis came for me. I had the most traumatic experience when three of my daughters and one of their friends were shotgun murdered in the safety of their own home. Jenny and Kirsty were twins and 19 years old, Lexie was turning 16 the very next morning and their friend was just 19 too. They were far too young to die, they were just innocent kids, blameless victims of a crazed attack.

That was a real shock to me .... and shock is the first thing that I can really recall. When I was told about it and how it happened and all the other details I was just dazed, really dazed. I didn't accept it, didn't buy it, didn't believe it and couldn't possibly reconcile how such an act of extreme random madness could happen to the members of my family. Again, going back to the idea of my basic mind-set which I have described to you, it violated that logical process I believed in which said that a logical cause would have a logical effect. I couldn't come to terms with the idea of chaos, the idea that my girls were the victims of an utterly chaotic random chance.

At first I hadn't started the anger process, or that process where I desired revenge. Revenge, hatred, bitterness, these were emotions that were yet to come. For me it was just disbelief, total disbelief – and then shock. Vietnam hadn't prepared me for this.

It was when I was in this dazed condition that the wife of an old friend from my Duntroon days reached out to help me. And luckily I had the good sense to reach back and take the hand she offered. Michael Burge, before his untimely death a while before this, had first extolled the virtues of the Insight Seminars to me and introduced me to Insight I. He too was a retired Colonel, in charge of Insight Australia, which basically runs self development programs and his wife Kathryn taught these programs. Kathryn offered the hand of help and advised me that as I had already attended Insight I, I should now do Insight II.

Kathryn was a wonderful friend in this time of grief. When Kathryn said, “Look Sandy, just do it, just trust me and do it.” It wasn't hard to trust and I really got a lot out of it. As a digression from the story for a moment, I just want to add here that when or if you ever face a crisis, you can be sure that there will be friends to help you. The help might come from a friend from a long time ago, or a recent friend, or, I believe, it might even come from a stranger. You might even be surprised by the area from which the help is offered. The important thing is this – grab hold of that help and work with it as hard as you can. Don't worry too much about thanks at the start, this can come later. Use the help. The true compliment of thanks can be shown to your friend by your willingness to work with his/her help. In the final analysis, (there's that word again) the fact of you ever actually saying “Thank you” may not even be necessary at all. Your helper might actually be performing a duty of thanks that he/she has to someone else, or fulfilling a spiritual purpose. Your chance to show gratitude will come when you recover from your crisis and have the opportunity to pass on the help. Help can be like one of those chain reactions, starting at one point but quickly spreading, by a series of links and connections, far and wide.

But back to the story. There is no doubt that the Insight Number 2 course did help me; one of the things it brought me to was a group of people that I could relate to. I was encouraged to release grief by talking about the event, by talking about the girls, by doing as much of the natural grief process as is possible. I did not get the chance to bottle up my emotions .... and for this I'm forever grateful. I've now learned that by pushing down emotions, not expressing them, having the “stiff upper lip”, not talking about events, goes a long way to causing post traumatic stress.

I had another helper too and that was my son Andrew talking to me. In the midst of his own grief about his sisters he was able to spare some emotional strength to reach out and help me. Andrew's help was a wonderful example of a man with access to his inner strength. How else, at a time of such personal trauma, could he take his mind from himself and help someone else? I learnt that it is not only on the battle fields of war or in the tunnels of Vietnam that heroism is shown. It is actually all around us.

Andrew helped me to go into my own mind and seek, find out and answer questions. And gradually I got to the stage of working with the passion for revenge, the anger that raged inside me and the hatred that I felt toward the person who had killed my daughters. And in the process of going into my mind I dealt with all the bitter questions of “Why me?” and “What have I done to deserve this?”. If you ask the wrong question, what do you get? That's right _ the wrong answer. For me the question brought up guilt. Feeling guilty does not serve a purpose. The sort of questions brought up for me were “Could I have been a better father?” “Could I have somehow prevented this? Somehow? Somehow? Somehow?” I've found that a quick way through that guilty feeling is saying something like “I did the best I could do with the tools that I had at the time”, or “I accept what I've done and now that I know I'll do better next time.”

I disciplined myself to meditate each day and, like an athlete in training, attempted short sessions at first but built up to longer periods later on. I was in meditation for 20 minutes at a time, then for 30 minutes and then for an hour a day just sitting quietly in my room with all sorts of questions (and answers) coming to me.

I really want to emphasise, when talking about the grief part of it, how important it was to talk about the children, to have fun with the thoughts that are there and not to bottle up anything. There is a strange way that guilt that can creep in at times of grief. The strange guilt is that you can feel that it is not appropriate to laugh or chuckle at the funny things the children did when they were here. You can even feel guilty for being happy that the children brought so much fulfilment to your life because you think that this thought might be selfish. The thought can torment you, “How can I be happy about them when they have died so tragically?” The guilt can also come because it is a social expectation that at such times all should be sadness. You must resist any such tendency when dealing with grief. Bring it all out in the open, talk about it, remember the wonderful things, relive the good times, talk about it, talk about it, talk about it!

There is a danger in not talking things through. The fact is that if you don't talk about it you will push it down into the subconscious mind. If the whole crisis goes into the subconscious mind without being dealt with, it could become post traumatic stress. The subconscious then deals with the crisis as hot sweats, nightmares, unexplained anger and totally irrational behaviour. Not talking about it is a reason why some Vietnam Veterans suffer post traumatic stress about the war. Some talked about it when they came home and some didn't, and the same has probably applied to all service men and women who have returned from all wars.

Now I was also lucky because I had Ian and Lara who were only 3 and 5 at the time. They brought it up all the time because the girls had been a part of all of our lives and we used to go camping and go out as a family and of course they would talk about the girls in person, in a familiar way and without the need for any hushed reverential voices. I remember people saying to Ian, one year later, two years later, “How many brothers and sisters have you got?” and Ian would say, “Oh I've got four sisters and one brother.” And the person asking often said, “Four sisters? I thought you only have Lara.” He'd say, “Oh, no, I've also got Jenny, Kirsty and Lexie.” To Ian it was just as though they were in the next room. There was no denial about it, he knew that they had died, but he still saw them as a part of his network of relationships. You know when a child speaks like that it's really healthy and it helped me too. It helped me and others around us to be able to keep on bringing up their names. We have their photos on the mantelpiece, where we can see them, and every time I speak about them, quite frankly I smile. There is no doubt that Ian and Lara have helped me in the grief process by keeping on talking about their sisters.

So talking about the area, any grief area, is a way to go about handling grief. This can apply when you grieve about a great variety of circumstances. You may face a situation of grief concerning the loss through death or divorce of a marriage partner. Your grief may be about some practical thing like the collapse of a business that was important to your self image or, upon retirement, the loss of your job that did so much to define who you were. You may even grieve, as you get older, for the loss of your physical stamina or your good looks, your beauty or just the loss of the carefree days and friendships of your youth. The circumstances of grief are almost endless, but whatever is your own private grief it will help if you can face it in a relaxed meditative state and remember all the good things.

But then grief is a progression. It is a progression through a particular mental state and then leading on to somewhere else. The length of grief can vary from being almost momentary in some people to other cases where it lasts for years. I know that we live in a society of fast foods and other quick fixes that are offered to us daily, and what I am about to say could be misconstrued by some to mean that I advocate a fast food, quick fix approach to grief. I don't and I know that time is one of the most important things when dealing with grief. It is however also true that a long term and sustained grief can be quite unnatural and totally debilitating to the life of the grieving person. To explore ways of directing our minds to deal appropriately with grief is therefore a good thing. It may even represent a return to some of the things we knew instinctively in our culture before the industrial revolution ever began. In many cultures there have been, and there are today, certain ritualised forms of grieving which ensured that it became a process and not a permanent state of existence. This is the type of thing I advocate in my work.

When it comes to other issues like anger, hate and revenge I had to handle that inside my mind too in a meditative process. I gradually got the message that to be hateful, to be revengeful, to want to hurt the person who killed my children, would only make me be the same type of person. I could become lost for the rest of my life in a quagmire of hatred and bitterness. I valued my life too much to allow that to happen. I saw it quite clearly, if I was going to be consumed by hate and anger and by revenge then that's the type of person I would become myself. For me to let go the inclination to hate, was the process that I knew I needed to go through. It wasn't an easy process but I quite clearly got the message after meditating. The message went like this, “Hey if you're going to be hateful, if you're going to be angry, if you're going to be revengeful, if you're going to think these thoughts about the guy who did this or anything else, then you'll end up the same way.”

Now that was quite a revelation and it was the beginning of me thinking, “Okay I've got to do something about it – the thoughts of hate that is – I've got to go through this barrier to something else.”

The first step in going through it was to come to an acceptance of where I was and what had happened. This involved accepting that chaos, not order, not logic, not reasoned thinking had ruled on the night of 23rd January 1987. So the process for me was acceptance first, acceptance of where I was, acceptance of what was happening with me, acceptance of my whole life. That takes into account love and it takes into account the handling of guilt.

I have already spoken a little bit about guilt but it was rather a big issue for me. I thought of every possible single thing that I'd ever done in my life to harm others. In my worst moments I concluded, “I deserve this.” So I thought of all the bad things, all the wrong things – and there were lots – and this all came up in my mind, and if you take it on board you just feel worse and worse. And so I realised that the next step in overcoming hate and moving on through the process to a position where I could jettison the feelings of hate, was that I had to aim at forgiveness.

The ultimate aim, what might seem the unachievable aim, would be to forgive the person who had done this thing. I soon realised that if there was ever to be any forgiveness, the process ultimately had to start with me, myself. I went through all these other things that had been causing me guilt, all the things that I had done in my life to harm others. One by one I forgave myself and others, saying “Hey it's okay .... it's okay, it's just human.” I went through this forgiveness process with the help of books and with the help of the Insight course recommended by my army friend.

About this time I started to experience a new sort of thought coming into my mind during meditation. About a month after the girls were killed I was getting quite vivid pictures, really vivid pictures of them. Now I'm a person who doesn't visualise by seeing when my eyes are shut – like being able to see your dreams. Some people dream in colour, some people dream in black and white, some can easily visualise in meditation, they just shut their eyes and “see” pictures. Some people “hear” clearly and some “feel” a lot. I find that I am one who “feels” but I don't often “see” things clearly. But in this case I was “seeing” things, I was “seeing” Jenny, Kirsty and Lexie quite clearly, they were talking to me. This worried me and I went through the whole process of thinking I was going quite mad or something.

And then I could recognise their voices and they were saying things like, “Hey I'm all right, I'm all right I'm happy up here, I've done my tour of duty, I've finished with the earth, I'm a lot better off up here, I'm enjoying it you know.” This is the sort of thing that came through to me and then Lexie would come in to the meditation and say, “Oh come on Dad! Get off your butt and get into gear!” Lexie was quite a rebel and that's how she would speak to me. Or she would say things like, “Come on! Do it Dad!”

I was quite enjoying going to my meditative state and having “conversations” with the girls and thinking about them quite often. Through this process of talking with them I came to be a little bit at ease with “where they were” and “what they were doing” because I knew that they were “out there somewhere”. Just what “out there” meant was a little hard for me to really put my finger on. Maybe it was to do with some form of energy, yes energy, that appealed to my logical part – you know Newton's Laws and all that – energy is neither created nor destroyed (but it can change its form). Maybe it could all be my imagination as well. Whatever it was, and I still find it hard to put it into words today, it gave me a deep sense of spiritual insight. And whatever it was, it was a form of energy or a life force that was very powerful.

Worried by the whole concept of having such vivid visions I decided to write to the person in the United States who had originally founded the Insight Seminars. His name is John Roger and I posed a series of questions including whether it was possible that I was seeing the girls. His reply was, “Yes! Absolutely!” But then he challenged me with a profound concept.

He put it to me that while I was doing that sort of thing, while I was bringing them into my mind every day, I was actually hanging on to them. And by hanging on to them I was inhibiting their spiritual progress. Well that was like a real big stick, I mean there's no way in the world that I would turn around and inhibit anyone's progress. I didn't really understand what “progress” meant at that stage, but there was no way that I wanted to inhibit their progress. Right now I was really beginning to understand that this form of energy that's out there is their soul. I was beginning to understand that they are living on, and wherever the soul goes, or whatever it does, it needs to have the freedom to go.

I knew a little bit more now and so I decided to “let them go”. That was rather overwhelming for me because it meant that if I let them go, that meant not attracting them to me, not bringing them into my mind, not having conversations with them, not seeking them out. John Roger gave me a couple of clues to help. He said, “Let go and let God” and he also advised me to always send my love.

I was on the threshold of understanding these sorts of “spiritual” concepts. Deciding to follow John Roger's advice and “let go” the girls was an extremely traumatic time for me, and I shed many tears. It continued to be difficult for another couple of weeks and then all of a sudden I felt comfortable about it and it's been fine since then. Of course it doesn't mean I don't think of the girls and the good times we shared.

Now I just send my love and light any time that they come into my mind. I imagine my love being like a ray of light or a ray of energy or something like that. My love goes along that ray of energy and they get it somehow or another and it also gets back to me. How it happens I don't know. One thing I do know is that when you try to explain concepts such as these you pretty quickly get to the limits of what language can actually communicate.

I came to the realisation through this that if I was capable of sending my love to the girls then I had to be able to love myself before I could share it with others. It was the same compelling logic that applied to forgiveness. So right now the biggest change I had to make was to learn to love myself. If you try to love others but haven't got sufficient love for yourself then it's not real, true, love you are giving out. It might be a form of love, an honest attempt at love, but it will be limited. Think of it like a water tank with a tap at the bottom. The water in the tank is like the love in you. If the tank is only half full and the tap is turned on then the water, the love in the tank, will soon run out. If the water in the tank is brimming full or overflowing, then the tap can be turned on and the water be allowed to gush out lavishly. So it may be with human love. Loving yourself is that important! And what is loving yourself? Basically it's taking responsibility for yourself – for your own growth.

And what's the major obstacle? .... Oh ourselves, our mind, our subconscious mind. Our patterns – our belief patterns, the way we think, the way we've been brought up, that's the major obstacle and that's not easy to handle. Sometimes there are things that we've just got to let come up, let them work out and let them go.

Having accepted and practised all these things, the acceptance of myself, the forgiveness of myself and the love of myself, I could then turn to applying these concepts to others. Acceptance, love, forgiveness. I forgave others around me who have caused me anxiety in my life. That wasn't too hard, but then it got down to the guy who murdered the girls and his forgiveness. Not until I'd done all the other forgiving and loving could I even approach that subject because, deep down, it was still tied up with the revenge bit. So in the process of forgiving the person that's involved I must say that I have rationalised it to some extent and have turned it into a problem that may well be a little bit easier for me than others in a similar position. My rationalisation was that this person was mentally unbalanced, deranged, and as such, he's not really with us, he's got something else that's taken him over, he's like another energy. And so, eventually, I was able to forgive, forgive the man who took the lives of my daughters.

It has all been an amazing journey of self discovery. A journey in which I discovered the potential of the human mind and spirit to overcome great distress. I became aware of the existence of an entire portion of our world which had hardly been touched upon in my formal education and career experience. I became aware of my own inner strength, and by knowing about this, I became aware of the inner strength of others about me. Now I look for it and see it in others all the time.

The experience has changed my life, it has made it much fuller. The new discoveries I have made have not required me to cast out any of the old tools that I previously learnt about logic, analytical thought and the scientific method. It has enabled me to take on board this new body of knowledge in a way that coexists with what I knew before.

There is an idea that is contained in the Baha'i writings – it is that science and religion are complimentary, they need each other to achieve the correct balance. Science, by itself, will get lost in the quagmire of worldly materialism. Religion, by itself, will get lost in superstition. Science and religion together give the balance, rather like the two wings of a bird in flight. The bird cannot fly with one wing, it needs two to achieve the balance. It appeals to me to paraphrase this Baha'i idea. In the world in which we live the logical processes of the conscious mind and the contemplative processes of the subconscious mind compliment each other. Logic, by itself will get lost in the quagmire of worldly materialism. Meditation, by itself can get lost in mumbo jumbo and superstition. Use of the conscious and the subconscious mind together gives the balance just like the two wings of the bird in flight.

Awareness of both can create an incredible power of inner strength and my life and work are now dedicated to helping others achieve their strength. I have come to see my role now as one who can coach others. Take the analogy of a famous Olympic athlete or swimmer who excels in their event. That person has had a unique experience in life. What does the swimmer do with that experience when it is over? Does he/she just go back home to take up where life left off before the swimming began? Or does that swimmer use that experience to help others, to become their coach? I think the best way is to help others. And this is the way I see my role today. I have had a unique experience, one that was not pleasant and one which I dearly wish had never happened. But there is no taking it back – it is a part of my life. So what do I do with it? Do I just go back into the manufacturing industry and take up where life left off before all this began? Or do I use that experience to help others, to become their “coach”? For me the best way is to help others. I like the challenge of leadership.

I know that I am not by myself in this reaction to a personal crisis. In Sydney alone, without thinking about the rest of Australia, there is a small band of people like myself who are using their experience to help others. When we expand our vision beyond Sydney and beyond Australia to the whole world I reckon we form the nucleus of a vast movement of people dedicated to coaching others. My life is dedicated to this purpose.