MIND CALM FORWARD | Dr Robert Holden
Have you seen the Monty Python comedy sketch ‘100-Metre Dash for People with No Sense of Direction’? Picture the scene: John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and the rest of the runners are at the starting line. They are impatient and agitated as they wait for the starting gun to fire. Finally, the race begins, and everyone races off in different directions – meaning no one gets to the finishing line, no matter how fast they run. This sketch is a perfect metaphor for our mad-dash world, manic lifestyles and the chronic busyness that repeatedly takes us to our knees and makes us feel there must be a better way.
Where does this pressure come from to live so fast, to be so busy and so manic? Is it from society? Our upbringing? The media? Sandy Newbigging recognizes the external pressures, but he encourages us to look closer to home. In Mind Calm, he shows us how to liberate ourselves from the inner mind-made pressures that cause us to race for our lives. What Sandy helps us to do is to stop suffering from our own psychology. He helps us to be the thinker of our thoughts instead of the victim of our thoughts. He offers us liberation from fear, judgment and attachments.
In my work as a coach I see that most people don’t need more therapy, they just need more clarity. Sandy sees this too. He takes us beyond the fix-it approach. He helps us cultivate a healthy relationship with our mind. That’s his approach: peace with mind. Sandy coaches us on how to befriend our own mind, and he does it brilliantly. Step by step, he shows us how to stop suffering from psychology, so to speak, and to cultivate an awareness that makes an inner shift from becoming happy to being happy.
My encouragement to you is to read Mind Calm with an open mind. Read it slowly. Don’t race to the end. What you are looking for is on every page, not just the last page. Enjoy the journey. Sandy has filled Mind Calm with lots of insights, epiphanies and exercises that are truly enlightening and helpful. Give yourself to the programme Sandy has created for you, and as he says, ‘let the loving hand of the universe guide you.’ Mind Calm is an inspiration, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Robert Holden PhD
Author of Shift Happens! and Loveability