Practice Guides
Imaginal Practice creates more connection and freedom of expression in your experience. This post describes it as a practice and talks about some of the common themes that may arise.
At its simplest, imaginal practice is connecting with your experience and allowing it to express itself to you through images, stories, archetypes, colours, shapes and other imagery that you can see, feel or experience. It can be a bit like consciously dreaming while you are awake or being on psychedelics. There is also an alchemical aspect of the practice where you are allowing what you encounter to transform and change you on a very deep level.
Imaginal practice is a natural capacity that everyone has within them and lots of children are constantly in some kind of imaginal experience. When developing it as a practice you are learning to reconnect to this aspect of experience and finding a deeper, more nuanced and more mature understanding of this natural expression of your being.
An experience of the imaginal realm can be very gentle and soft, with vague senses of things being evoked, or it can be incredibly vivid and realistic, like journeying through different realms. The intensity can depend on things like how naturally wild your imaginations is, how deep your capacity to concentrate is, how in touch with your energy body you are and how deeply you are connected to your emotions and inner world.
One of the differences between imaginal practice and fantasy, is that in imaginal practice you can feel the image from the inside. It’s bringing you into more presence in an embodied way rather than taking you away from presence through planning or rumination.
My practice took me on an interesting arc through all this. When I first started practicing, my imagination went wild and I had a huge amount of incredibly vivid imagery. As I processed and purified experience my mental imagination started to fade and I now have aphantasia. I can no longer see anything in my mind’s eye, I only feel what I am sensing in the imaginal realm through my subtle body. I would love to study how this shows up in the brain.
My approach to Imaginal Practice is inspired by Rob Burbea’s work on imaginal practice, but also has influences from shamanism, energy healing, tantra and Jungian psychotherapy.
More About Imaginal Practice
Imaginal practice is a way of holding space for what is present in experience and letting it express itself through you while you are meditating. You are connecting with emotions, sensations, energy, intuitive feelings, perceptions, desires and intentions and allowing their innate creative expression to be felt more directly in experience.
To access the imaginal you are letting go of your more rational, conceptual way of looking at the world and embracing a softer-focus way of making sense of the world through your imagination and felt senses.
Connection & Wholeness
Two of the deepest values of my approach to imaginal practice are connection and wholeness. There are lots of parts of you that you aren’t aware of or that you don’t access in your normal way of being in the world.
They could be parts that you have actively learned to disassociate from or reject. Or they could be parts of your subconscious being that have always been under the surface. The imaginal realm offers a unique way of getting in touch with these parts of yourself, and often only opens up for people when they are able to include their shadows and the challenging parts of experience.
During imaginal practice, you create an environment where you know that you are safe. This means that you can set the needs of your body and rational mind aside because you know they are taken care of and connect more deeply with the full spectrum of your energy body, creativity, inner world, emotions and mysticism. The practice creates more freedom for the fullness of you to emerge.
If you connect to new parts of yourself through imaginal practice, it then becomes possible to integrate this back into your understanding of yourself and the world. You can become a more connected and whole expression of your being.
Oppression of the Imaginal
Lots of people struggle with imaginal practice or oppress it when it does arise during meditation.
One of the reasons is because we live in a world that focuses on a very logical way of being and understanding. Our schooling system crushes creativity and we are told that fantasy, imagination and magic are all childish and silly.
Another reason is because serious meditation practice has become synonymous with disconnecting from personal content.
It is important to have some space and freedom around content in your experience, so that you are not completely caught up in what it says about you or totally lost in a train of reactive thought. This space can be cultivated through things like non-dual realisations, vipassana meditation, shamata meditation practice, talk therapies and relational practices.
Once you have some of this space, it is through connecting with your most deeply personal emotions and experiences that you can open the door to getting intimately in touch with the depths of experience.
Engaging with imaginal practice and the depths that it can take you to requires you to connect with the vulnerable parts of your experience. Rather than seeing thoughts as distractions, you can notice that they are flags that are highlighting something that is important in your inner world. You can carefully peel back the layers to notice the emotions, sensations and depths of meaning underneath thoughts that resonate through your being, and you can connect whole-heartedly with that. This can be particularly fruitful and rich when what you find is challenging in some way.
Another reason the imaginal gets oppressed is because some of the things that arise can be disturbing. Often when you slow down and enter a meditative state, it is the difficult emotions and ideas that you have been oppressing in your daily life that arise and so this is what the imaginal practice expresses.
It’s important to remember that there is no such thing as a bad expression during imaginal practice. You are making space for the energies and emotions that are swirling around experience to show themselves to you.
Much like the content of dreams, the messages, emotions and symbolism that can arise in imaginal practice can be deeply personal and revealing, but it also doesn’t say anything about you as a person that they are there.
One of the things that helped me open up to receiving imaginal practice was listening to Rob Burbea’s talks about it. I remember him sharing a story about how he had experienced a vision of fighting on a stage with a Goddess with several arms. He was ripping her arms off and eating them. He has lots of other helpful and interesting stories of his practice. This helped me relax around some of the violent and strange stuff that I was being shown in practice.
I share some of my stories below.
Another tool for opening to imaginal practice is meditating with music. The sense of flow and resonance that it brings into practice can sometimes allow people to access the imaginal space more easily.
Eros
A lot of imaginal practice involves a sense of eros. Eros arises when a creative and inspiring connection is being made between you and something else. In our culture this is often very closely tied to sexuality, but it has a much broader possibility and scope than this.
Creativity comes from two things merging, inspiring or reacting with each other. At its core, creativity and eros is the life-force that creates everything and it manifests in experience as a feeling of aliveness.
Eros is key to imaginal practice because it’s important you are connecting to something that you find meaningful in some way. You are connecting to the parts of experience that you find beautiful or compelling and allowing that desire to fuel the development of your practice.
Developing Sensitivity
When you’re first starting with imaginal practice, the things that are presented can be quite nebulous. For example, it could be very gentle colours or shapes, or a vague sense of a place or archetype evoked in you.
If you enjoy making space for them, it is my experience that you will become more sensitive and the messages, images and feelings will become clearer.
There are certain skills and techniques that will allow you to sink more deeply into the imaginal realm.
Jhana practice, or being able to get into an absorbed connection with pleasant body sensations, allows you to be present and hold space for the content. Vipassana or mindfulness practice will create more space and awareness for content to arise in without you getting lost in it or fused with the content.
It also works the other way around, that these skills can develop as a result of doing imaginal practice. Imaginal practice is often the doorway into deeply, pleasant states. Also, all awakening moments and experiences have strong aspects of the imaginal in them and the more you are in tune with this, the more sensitively you can connect to them.
Reclaiming Parts of Yourself
Imaginal practice is a deeply embodied practice and an important part of it is that it is about coming into your being in its fullness. This means that rather than turning away from the difficult and juicy parts of experience, you are embracing them and using the practice to reintegrate them into your way of being in the world to become more whole.
It’s a unique opportunity to connect with parts that have been oppressed or separated. For example, this could be reintegrating challenging or dark aspects of yourself, or it could be remembering and reconnecting with your joy or wonder.
In a whole and healthy practice, you are introducing more playfulness, joy, creativity and soulfulness into practice while also balancing this with a deep sense of respect towards showing up for your challenges, facing your suffering and coming out the other side stronger and more compassionate for it.
It’s an important aspect of the practice that you can adopt the understanding that you aren’t here to fix things; there’s nothing wrong with you and the process in and of itself is transformative. You want to develop a trust that allowing things to surface and be witnessed or felt in a space where they will be welcomed and accepted is enough.
The main important factor is to maintain an open attitude. You can do this by using these three qualities:
Curiosity: Stay open to exploring what is arising, remember that it doesn’t say anything about you. Follow the thread and be interested in looking for more details or what wants to happen next. Engage with things that feel important or interesting to you.
Compassion: It’s ok to feel all the feels during imaginal practice. Crying, joy, erotic sensations and all expressions of emotion are very welcome and a sign that you are connecting with new parts of yourself.
Joy: Find a sense of beauty, meaning and purpose in the practice. See if you can access a sense of dark joy, or joy in the face of challenge. This will help you meet all the different aspects of ourselves, welcome them and connect to them.
Experiencing a wide range of energy body sensations is very common during imaginal practice, for example heart-opening feelings, unitive experiences, a sense of merging inner and outer worlds and goosebumps and shimmering in the energy body.
More About The Imaginal Process
The body tells stories and creates film-like or dream-like experiences that allow you to go on a journey through your inner world and the collective conscious.
Everyone will have a unique way of doing this and their own creative experience of it. It is not supposed to be reflective or descriptive of reality and the more you can let go of the idea that you need to understand it on a logical level, the more freely it will flow.
The content that the practice brings up can be very detached, like watching a film play out, but it can also be really emotionally and energetically involved.
Energy and Archetypes
There are two main ways through which the imaginal expresses itself – connecting with energies and connecting with archetypal or mythic content.
They will overlap but the main difference is that the energies feel more conceptually abstract and experientially direct, while archetypal content feels more like imagined figures, worlds and realms that you are interacting with. The energies are more bodily while the archetypal content is more mental.
An example of energetic content might be feeling things like ‘a blue cloud of diffuse energy in the chest’ or connecting in with ‘a dark pool of calm stillness that infuses everything’.
An example of archetypal content might be imagining ‘seeing a wide grassy plain with a warrior stood in the centre of it’ or ‘feeling like you are in a vast sky of stars and planets that you can journey through’.
Themes
Everyone’s imaginal practice will be unique to them, but there are some common themes that emerge.
Some of the common themes that may arise during imaginal practice include:
- Wonder
- Eros
- Intense or violent experiences
- Symbolism
Wonder
This type of practice is incredibly enjoyable. It’s essentially anything where you feel lit up in some sense or connected to something that feels very alive and beautiful to you. It can be very intimate and it often arises with a strong sense of beauty and tenderness.
This is putting you in touch with what makes you feel engaged, curious and creative in the world and can have a strong heart-opening effect.
Allowing this type of content is really great practice for letting yourself be creative. It also tends to show you the things that you are attracted to and curious about.
Examples of this in my practice are seeing lots of different animals that are really beautiful, merging my body with the world around and feeling like I am radiating energy and light.
Eros
This is similar to wonder, but it’s comes from really feeling your life-force and desire and connecting to that as a source of fuel and inspiration.
Desire is very intimately linked to eros, they are inspired by the things that you are drawn to and that bring you to life in some way. This could be creativity, nature, sexuality, other type of relationship, life purpose or many other things.
Imaginal practice with eros can create a huge amount of freedom around desire because you can connect with it in a way where you allow yourself to be impacted by and attracted to things without worrying about whether you are going to get them. It releases the grip of craving and attachment and opens up a more non-dual, tantric relationship with desire.
Working with this requires getting in touch with the embodied feeling of desire and seeing what emerges in the imaginal realm. You can do this by feeling into sensations in the body and energy body that feel alive and pleasant then seeing what images are evoked. Through the practice you are awakening and exploring the connection between eros, or life-force, and the energy body.
An example of this would be making space for feeling alive and excited and seeing what images emerge as an expression of that. Some examples of images that could emerge are visiting beautiful places, doing fun things or imagining expressing yourself creatively.
The images can sometimes be erotic and sexual in nature. One of the important distinctions to make between imaginal practice and normal sexual fantasy is that you’re not purposefully imagining something in order to get somewhere – i.e. you’re not thinking about something sexy in order to have an orgasm. You are allowing space for what is inside of you to express itself and connecting with how that makes you feel emotionally and in your body in this present moment.
Romantic and sexual fantasy can be one of the deepest doorways into intimacy and practice is all about cultivating intimacy with experience so this can be a very rich place to explore. It requires a level of skill to stay with the experience in an open-hearted way.
Intense or Violent Experiences
This is probably the type of content that people are most likely to oppress or think is bad. Experiencing intense or violent content is typically about the alchemical process of reclaiming power in yourself. Rage, anger and violence are all expressing ways in which oppressed power is in some way releasing.
If you can allow space for this built-up energy to express itself in a way where no-one’s going to get hurt, then that oppressed energy gets released and you reclaim that part of yourself. It becomes a part of you that you can access in a clean and healthy way.
The oppressed energy may come from a small build-up of daily things or it may be karmic or collective energy. For example, I have spent a lot of time processing the ways in which the Universal feminine energy is oppressed, which we all carry within us.
The point with violent content is not to understand where the feelings or images came from or to bring awareness to the emotion, it is to trust in your body’s natural capacity to heal and express itself when it is held in a container of loving presence. This is another move that requires a bit of skill and experience to know how to navigate.
Some examples of this in my practice were feeling rage coursing through my body or feeling like I was a giant dinosaur that is trampling the entire world.
It is through embracing this aspect of imaginal practice and reintegrating these parts of myself that I have been able to cultivate the capacity to hold space and the ability to stand in my truth and power.
If you want some support to do this, Shadow Work Therapy is excellent for allowing all types of content to emerge and offering the intuitive moves that open things into greater spaciousness and clarity.
If you want to include something like this with a meditation practice, The Warrior’s Solution Retreat, by Ken Mcleod, lays out an imaginal exercise where you are cutting through whatever is between you and presence with a sword. It is integrated with a Buddhist approach to practice.
Symbolism
The symbolism that arises in imaginal practice can be infinitely rich. It’s like having dreams in your meditation practice and it can help you process and make sense of experience.
Just like dreams it can be playful, interesting, dark, obvious, strange, mysterious or just include a lot of seeming nonsense. It can arise with nice pleasant emotions or it can include processing more challenging experiences.
It is ultimately a way of opening into your emotional and intuitive experience of the world and giving it some space to express it itself.
If you oppress or ignore this all the time it will start to get agitated in you or just shut down entirely, so it’s nice to give it some room and to listen to what it has to say.
For me, this has presented as an enormous range of stuff. A few examples are encountering different animals, religious symbolism or having very elaborately symbolic scenarios playing out.
Shared Practice and Shamanic Journeying
I have developed a practice called Shared Imaginal Practice. In Shared Imaginal Practice people take it in turns to be guided on a journey through the content of their inner world.
This is a really beautiful experience. It opens up a new way of connecting to your own experience and sharing in experience together, in a way that is simultaneously deeper and requires less vulnerability than connecting in the usual world.
Whether the content is deep and emotional or light-hearted and fun, the practice tends to have a profound and lasting impact on people and their ability to connect with experience.
The simplest way to journey together is to drop into a meditative state together and for one person to ask another person questions about their experience, with a focus on what is happening in the body, energy body and imagination.
Here are the instructions for doing Shared Imaginal Practice, including a recorded example.
Shamanic journeying is opening to a more mystical aspect of this. It is surrendering to a more inexplicable or cosmic connection to the imaginal realms that includes some aspect of the collective conscious or a greater intelligence.
A shaman will have content channeled through them in a more consistent way, either when they are meditating or just when they are moving through life. It’s something that Western culture doesn’t have a lot of context for and people with this capacity are often diagnosed with psychosis rather than taught how to connect with this sensitivity in a wise and meaningful way. This is a topic I’m very passionate about and I have written a guide to holding, healing and integrating spiritual psychosis.
Having shamanic content channeled through you can be quite intense but I have also found my experiences to be incredibly meaningful, so I developed a technique for channelling this in a way that reliably presents as wholesome and useful for people. I now use this to guide people.
In shamanic journeying two or more people’s experiences are connecting, or an individual is connecting with a cosmic or mystical force, and they are being taken on a journey through the content, which could be symbolic or prophetic, for example. It can also include the use of psychedelics to get into this receptive and surrendered state.
How to Do Imaginal Practice
If you want to start doing imaginal practice the invitation is to practice in whatever way feels meaningful and alive for you.
It is much easier to begin imaginal practice once you have some access to the jhanas or are able to feel a sense of energetic resonance in the body. A mindfulness practice can also be beneficial. It isn’t necessarily a pre-requisite, as imaginal practice may help open the door to some of these things, but the more you have access to these the more embodied the practice is and it allows you to get absorbed in the content.
Rather than getting lost in thought, the aim is to feel the imaginal with the whole body or the whole of experience as much as possible.
Here are some ideas for structuring an imaginal practice meditation session. Like with any meditation, you will want to find a comfortable posture, sitting or lying, and may want to set yourself a timer. Feel free to riff on the ideas and bring in your own creative structures.
1. Concept-Led
Choose a concept that you would like to explore during your practice time. You can find a list of suggested concepts on the Shared Imaginal Practice directions. Drop the theme into your experience and see what emerges in your body and felt-sense of experience.
There is also a list of questions you could use to start exploring the concept on the Shared Imaginal Practice page.
2. With Music
Create a playlist of 3 – 5 songs, on a theme or genre. Allow these to take you on a journey. Notice how the music makes your body feel as well as the images it brings up for you.
Here is a playlist of music that is good for Imaginal Practice.
See if you can notice how you inner world is creating some kind of artwork in response to or in harmony with the music.
3. A Visitor
Start by setting a scene; create a landscape that is inspiring or interesting for you. It can be somewhere in real life that is important to you, somewhere you’d like to travel to or somewhere completely made up.
Imagine that a magical being has come here to give you exactly what you need in this moment. Who arrives and what do they bring? What has this interaction changed in the felt sense of your immediate experience?
4. A Portal
Imagine opening a portal that allows you to visit any aspect of experience; from becoming the tiniest atom to being the entire Universe.
The place the portal takes you to can be as abstract or concrete as you like. For example, you could learn what it’s like to be the essence of sadness or imagine how it is to be someone you know.
5. Your Imaginal Body
Stay more directly with your body for your entire practice time. Connect with all the different energies and sensations you can find, the separate parts and the ways they interact, using the imaginal to go more deeply into the different aspects.
For example, what colour is your knee right now? What texture is the feeling of wanting to move away from the cushion? What does an itch feel like? What images come up when you connect to your heart space?
6. Follow Your Eros
Start with a sense of eros – what is attractive to you? What are you magnetised towards? What positive experiences can you imagine while still staying in touch with the sensations in the body. It can be quite wild or quite mundane. Can you allow it to express without filtering it?
7. Breathing is Imaginal
Stay with your breathe for the entire practice time. Let it become imaginal in as many different ways as it wants.
For example:
- Can you feel the colour of your belly when you breathe in?
- Does the breathe feel more like a wave in the ocean, wind moving through the sky or something else entirely?
- Does it have a soothing energy, a spiky energy, or something else?
- Does it feel blocked or contracted in places? If so, how would you describe it, for example, a blocked pipe, a stretched rubber band or something else?
- If you do a slow breathe out of the nose, can you feel the way the breathe creates more space in experience?
See if you can find a pleasant way of connecting to the breath through the imaginal that makes it easy to stay with.
8. The Imaginal Screen
Allow images to play out, but pay attention to where they are arising rather than the content that is in them. Where do they come from? What’s the stage or backdrop on which they play out?
9. Guided Practice
Build the skills you need to deepen your practice by listening to the recorded guidance from our Becoming an Imaginal Practitioner Retreat.
Conclusion
Through Imaginal Practice you can learn to make space for experience to express itself freely during your meditation. This can have some positive, healing benefits; it can lead to deep and profound awakenings; and it can also be something that you do for fun and for the sake of enjoying it.
It can be a safe space to explore and express things that might not be acceptable out in the world. It can deepen your relationship with yourself and your experience and deepen your capacity for connection with life. Ultimately it can start to point towards the nature of the cosmos and where experience arises from.
You don’t need to be strict about what counts as imaginal practice. I can remember that I used to get lots of interesting visualisations when I was listening to music or getting a massage before I ever started meditating or had heard of imaginal practice.
It can become an incredibly deep and nuanced practice, but the purpose of the practice is to hold some space for yourself in whatever way feels comfortable and allow whatever is there to be expressed.
If you are first getting into it, music and a safe space are the best ways I have found for helping people relax into it. It can also be fun to play with the space between waking and sleeping to see what arises here.
The more you practice the more deeply you can get in touch with this ineffable aspect of experience.