Sleep Magic
In the spring of 1984 The Universe sought fit to provide me with a learning experience which came in the disguise of a rapidly advancing case of diffuse progressive systemic sclerosis, sometimes known by the nickname: scleroderma. The disease attacked every muscle and tissue in my body including my internal organs. Because there is no cure for the disease, it is considered to be, generally, both incurable and fatal. It is also remarkably painful… suicide-seems-like-a-good-option painful.
Between 1984 and 1988, precisely because the disease is considered to be both incurable and fatal, friends of mine began to introduce me to alternative healers. Over the course of the next three years, I worked with a shiatsu therapist, a gestalt therapist, and the remarkable Medicine Women of the Lakota Sioux tribe. I also learned shamanic journeying. During this time — much to my general annoyance — a number of these people informed me that I was a healer. The Medicine women asked me to come with them back to their home so that they could train me. I was in no place to hear any of those proclamations as they didn’t seem even remotely possible. I had lived a life of dubious value up until that point. I had made some very bad decisions. Dying didn’t seem that bad; I just didn’t want to endure the pain any longer.
What happened instead of me dying was that small miracles began to unfold and it became obvious to me by the time my body was declared completely free of the disease that I had become a very different person, as the result of that pathological initiation, from the person I’d been.
Once I regained strength I had to return to work. I had been — and still am — physically disabled by the disease process: my hands remain with their fingers turned in tightly towards the palms of my hands. It took some persistence, but I found work in the customer service department of a company that manufactured equipment for physical therapy.
One day, one of the sales reps for the company who didn’t even know me approached me at my desk to tell me that she had a headache and that I could help her with it. When I looked at her as if she’d just told me that she was from another planet she said, “You can do that. I’ll be at your house at 5:30,” turned and walked away.
As it turned out, she was correct. When I placed the palms of my hands on her head I could feel what the energy in her brain was doing and found that I could subtly move it somehow with the energy coming from my hands. In retrospect, I knew from whence the skill had come from as I’d used to do a similar thing with men’s bodies when I was being abused as a child.
I thought that perhaps I ought to start paying attention to all those messages I’d been getting and move forward in the direction of becoming a healer so I set about studying and acquiring certifications of various sorts because somehow just hanging out a shingle that said “Healer” didn’t seem correct.
I may have gone overboard…. probably because I was trying to make up in some way for decades of very bad behavior. I became a student at the National Interfaith Seminary where I studied for a number of years, acquiring a ministerial ordination and an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree. I became a Reiki Master and a Master of Magnified Healing. I became an Aura Soma counselor. I validated the heck out of myself until it became clear to me, through a number of visions that I experienced, that I was good to go.
Visions. That’s something most people don’t expect. But I’d had similar experiences before. There were two visions that were very intense and impossible to deny that set me on my way and before I knew it I had as many clients as I could handle but after numerous years “doing the work” I became somewhat frustrated by clients who — it seemed to me — were using me as a way to ‘feel better’ rather than to do the personal work required for them to actually get well, unwilling to make the changes in their own lives that I knew both from my own experience and from my studies, would have to occur before they could truly heal.
I begged the universe for help on a regular basis and one morning, in 2003, in dream, shortly before I awoke, I heard a voice explaining to me how I could help people learn to help themselves. Upon awakening I wrote everything down everything I’d been told as quickly as I could so that I wouldn’t forget any of it.
One by one, I began introducing my clients to the method. Many of them — those with less disposable income than others — jumped on the idea because it meant a considerable drop in their expenses. My tutoring via Email was a lot less time-consuming for me — and therefore a lot less expensive for them — than an hour of one-on-one healing time. I was going out on a limb and I knew it because a drop in their expenses meant a drop in my income as well but it felt strongly as if it was my responsibility to help others learn a skill that they could use for the rest of their lives, one that they could even teach their children to help them through school which, as I knew all too well, could be very challenging.
I was particularly aware of the cost of healing — both medical and alternative — because of my own experience with a disease process that had baffled almost everyone. (The shamanic healers had been the most ‘comfortable’ with it.) I’d been fortunate enough to have generous friends and a mother who was a doctor… and I was acutely aware of where I’d have been without that help.
That’s how that Sleep Magic was born. Sleep Magic is, I finally realized years after it came through me, essentially a form of Emotional Cellular Reprogramming… a form that can be practiced by anyone with the discipline to simply do it once a day. I started doing it to work on my own challenging and bizarre past the day it was gifted to me. Five years later, at 62, I had become a woman who was strong enough to take chances, leave job and husband behind, and fearlessly set out on her own. A lot of things in my life changed dramatically. For me, the most amazing part of it was that, for the first time in my life, at 64, I fell in love. (I’m still there.) It’s amazing. I had no idea. I had never even come close to loving anyone except for my own children… and I hadn’t loved them nearly enough.
This year, my publishers, Ozark Mountain, will be publishing my fourth book on Sleep Magic. I wish it had been my first… but there’s no way it could have been. The book — Being in a Body — contains all the information my body has taught me about living in harmony with her over the past 17 years, information that is pretty much the same for anyone who embraces the concept that we are, in fact, as the song says, “Spirits in the material world.” (Thank you Sting.)
The body has its own life. It is a life that is constantly affected by every decision we make, by how we chose to live, and by the things that happen to us — or don’t. Very few of us are taught about the intelligence of the body. (I recommend any of Bruce Lipton’s books or those of John E. Upledger) The body is filled with wisdom… Sleep Magic has been designed (wherever it came from) to help a person gain access to that remarkable intelligence so that your body can help you live your best life.
Just try talking to your body some night before you go to sleep… ask a question… maybe just say thanks for a great day… see what happens. Bodies are always paying attention… it’s a big part of their job.
