Elfreda Pretorius

Hello! I am Elfreda Pretorius and 23 years ago Providence stepped in and forced my life in a completely different direction than I had planned. It was a blazingly hot day in January 1989 on a wild and beautiful beach in South Africa when the freak accident occurred that changed my life forever. Prior to this I was just a mom who wanted nothing more than to see her children grow into healthy, happy adults, but within hours I found myself at the bedside of our critically injured child in ICU - facing the bleak medical prognosis that the trauma to our seven year old son’s body was too severe for him to cope with. Without any prior notice, Hell had paid us a visit - and we were so unprepared!

With its usual stroke of brilliance Life has a way of transforming raw anguish into immense opportunities for personal growth and understanding, and the day of the accident was just such an occasion. An avid student of Philosophy, Universal Law (including the coveted Law of Attraction) and the less known Principle of Healing, you’d think I would primed in knowing how to handle a crisis such as this. Not so! With volumes of knowledge stored in my head I sadly had no practical experience of any of it. A stark realization faced me that day: Knowledge without experience is absolutely meaningless! However, in my hour of greatest need I found a way through storytelling to convey the Principle of Healing to my critically injured child. I am very grateful to tell you that while Death kept a chilly vigil in the far corner of ICU, ready to strike at slightest sign of our little boy yielding to its menacing stare, he nonetheless survived and the miraculous account of how he healed himself with the help of the doctors is the next book I will be writing. Yes, Fate certainly stepped in that day to help me understand the Principle of Healing on a practical level, but it also directed my life away from self interest and began moulding it towards “service to others.” Gratitude for having the life of your child spared is a mighty force that can create miracles. In my case, it caused a whole career adjustment!
A fundamental truth that emerged during the recovery process is that we unwittingly complicate matters through erroneous thought processes. A fascinating fact that revealed itself was that the formula to solving our problems is quite simple and as old as the world we live in. As a direct result of this experience and based on these very principles, I wrote my first book in 2004, “Stop Struggling and Start Living – The Rules of the Game,” which quickly became an Internet bestseller. I do not believe in gurus. I believe that each person is his/her own best teacher and given the right set of tools, everyone can fix or adjust whatever ails them.
The problem is not ignorance - it is perception. We are not ignorant of our troubles; we are overly aware of them. Often it is all we see. We all have gifts and mine is to show others how to focus on what really matters for it has the power to transform a life completely. “Whatever we give our attention to, will manifest in our lives.” I have had the privilege to witness very many of these transformations. In the case of healing it is always the patient that does it, not the therapist. Similarly I have watched countless couples work through great personal differences by learning how to recognize strengths in each other, instead of taking aim at the weaknesses.  There are many other wonderful accounts of success like overcoming depression, healing broken relationships, becoming gainfully employed after years of unemployment, and of course, understanding what creates abundance in our lives.
The words of Dr. James Kaikobad, an esteemed Clinical Psychologist and Medical Psychotherapist who has been in private practice in South Florida, USA for over 26 years validated my book in an extraordinary way. His endorsement, together with other unsolicited accounts of lives transformed can be found here.