Author Interview: Victoria Pendragon & SLEEP MAGIC: SURRENDERING TO SUCCESS
Victoria Pendragon was born and raised in the vicinity of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is the oldest of eleven. Her life has been defined, as are most of ours perhaps, by conditions that would seem to have been beyond her control. Eighteen years of various sorts of abuse and two diseases that should have killed her rank among the most outstanding of those.
Her study of metaphysics began in early childhood as an attempt to validate the lessons she’d been learning from the earth and the trees whenever she left her body. She has been working as a professional in the field of spirituality since 1995, has read tarot since 1964 and created in 2007, Sacred Earth Seven Element Tarot, a tarot deck designed to bring the world community together.
Victoria began training in art when still a child, eventually acquiring a BFA from The Philadelphia College of Art. Her work hangs in numerous corporate and personal collections, among them The Children’s Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Moss Rehab and Bryn Mawr Hospital Rehab.
She has two children by her first marriage, a son and a daughter, both of whom amaze her. She is currently married to her third husband, a man whose kind soul has created for her an atmosphere of clarity and creativity in which she dances, writes, creates art and helps when asked.Her latest book is Sleep Magic: Surrendering to Success.
The author may be contacted through her website: http://site.heavenisinyourheart.com.
Blog: http://blog.heavenisinyourheart.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/victoria.pendragon
Victoria: (laughing) Well, not in the way it pertains to most books on the market, that’s for sure. Most available material on The Law of Attraction tells you that, in a sense, you are what you think; that if you set your mind to a specific goal and direct your thoughts that way that you will draw to you what you have been focusing on but there’s a flaw in that reasoning. Your mind is generated by your brain; your brain is a part of your body and your body began being programmed with information while you were still in utero. We know this. Candace Pert’s work on the molecules of emotion is a good place to begin learning about how this happens. So your brain, which contains, physically, the very same cellular information as the rest of your body, can only generate from what it has been ‘made’ with. Consequently, if you were surrounded, in your early – and for the most part, very unconscious – life by stressful or abusive situations or by information that was counterproductive to the goals that you think you have in mind, then merely thinking something is not going to change that vibration and you will continue to attract what you are, in a sense, made of…unless you can, at a physical level, change the emotional charges that locked that information and energy into your body. So the thinking thing can work for those whose cellular information is clear and lovely and without hurdles to be overcome but for the rest of us, The Law of Attraction means that we have to change at a cellular, physical level if we want to improve our circumstances.That makes a lot of sense. When did you discover this?
Victoria: It discovered me. In 1988 I acquired a disease process – progressive systemic sclerosis – that by 1989 began rapidly turning my body, inside and out, into scar tissue. My doctors projected that I might live another 6 months. I was in more pain than I could have imagined possible, crippled by my ever-tightening skin and almost totally disabled. I had a very difficult time sleeping because of the pain but in the few hours I got I was often transported to a state of being that felt glorious. I was absolutely confounded by that. My waking life was so challenging and so dispiriting that I was actually considering how I might end my life but when I slept, I was in heaven and I’d awaken with a sense that I could do anything. Years later, after I actually did do the unthinkable and healed almost totally from the disease – only my hands remain crippled – I happened to meet a man who taught me a little formula for accessing the wisdom of the body while it was sleeping and even as he was telling me about it, I knew what had happened to me, knew how I had healed. That’s when I began studying up on early childhood psychology and the brain and when I began to put down in writing the basic tenets of Sleep Magic, expanding the simple formula I’d been given with what I’d learned – and continue to learn – about the brain and cellular consciousness.How has your book helped others? Can you give some personal examples?
Victoria: Oh my, yes! In fact the information in the book – which I used one-on-one with numerous people from 2003 through, well, now – has changed lives. I know that for a fact because they write me! Even people who read it years ago write to let me know that they are still using it. I certainly am. Once I began using it consciously, it changed my life in totally unexpected ways. My favorite comment from a Sleep Magic student was the woman who told me that she’d made more progress in using Sleep Magic in one year than she had in 20 years of therapy! One woman, with a very challenging life situation, told me that working with it had saved her life. This was particularly moving coming from her as I knew that a) she had been both depressed and suicidal and b) her life situation – a challenging family dynamic – remained the same; she changed enough to be able to handle it! Personally, I have an interesting story around it too. As I began sharing the work with my clients I enlisted my then husband to edit the work for me as he’d been a professional editor at one time; in fact, that’s how we met. He became so intrigued by the work that he decided to do it also. So we were both actively engaged in this process which effectively changes you at a cellular level and what happened was that as each of us became more clear it became apparent that our relationship was not what it needed to be. We had about the best divorce on record. We helped each other find places to live; helped with the moving; it was amazing.Who would benefit the best from your book?
Victoria: Anyone who is either dissatisfied or uncomfortable with some part of life would benefit. That said, using the technique – which is, by the way, as easy as pie and takes about 2 minutes a day – requires a certain amount of discipline. The work doesn’t do itself and one must learn – which the book elaborates on – how to be acutely self observant. Sleep Magic is also a fabulous tool for both creators – artists, writers, those kinds of people – and students. It is the absolute best tool for integrating information into the body that I’ve ever encountered. I’ve twice blown people away with the amount of information I was able to learn overnight.If you had to pick one of the most inspirational lines out of your book, what would that be?
Victoria: The clarity you seek will arrive as soon as your Body Intelligence is able to allow it. I love this line because it sums up life itself: we can only perform that which we have been, in a sense, designed to perform by the information we carry in the cells of our bodies. If your body knows that money is a problem because it grew up in a home where financial struggle was a way of life, then you are apt to view finances as an issue throughout life and because you do, there will be stress and/or problems around money and even if money is good and easily available, your relation to it will be stressful or filled with doubt. Either condition can end up causing dis-ease at the physical level.I would love to read an excerpt from your book. Can you pick out one?
Victoria: Sure! You have no doubt heard the term, “Mastery.” More completely put, the term is Self-Mastery. If you do not have mastery over yourself and your behavior, then your mastery over any other aspect of life is worth little. I mention this because the regular use of SleepMagik can bring you to a place of Self-Mastery. SleepMagik is giving you the tools you need to create new behavior patterns and a new way of living. It is preparing you to surrender to your Spirit Self and, by doing so, to achieve contentment in your life. Whenever you find yourself in situations you would rather not be in, with people you would rather not be dealing with, or doing things you would rather not be doing, you can know without a doubt that there are, lurking within you, attractors that drew that experience to you. It cannot be otherwise. We draw to us that which we are programmed to attract. That programming was installed, for the most part, during the early years of our lives. So, when you find yourself in less than satisfactory circumstances, feeling less than wonderful, you can know that you are there because something inside your Body Intelligence is still hanging onto something you may wish it weren't!Thank you for sharing your book with us, Victoria. What’s next for you?
Victoria: I’m thinking about dying…as a subject, that is. (laughing) My body knows more than a little about it from personal experience and I think it’ll help me out with the writing…while I’m sleeping. Sleep Magic works wonders for that sort of thing too! Thanks so much for having me! And sweet sleep!
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