Using Imagination To Change Your Life

by Ross Heaven

In ancient Egypt and Greece, healers would ask their patients to visualise good health in order to overcome disease, or to imagine healing delivered to them by their gods. What was important in both cases was that by an act of faith it was possible to be well, and the expression of this faith was an image.

The effectiveness of this technique is apparent in modern healing practices too. Carl Simonton, an American doctor, asks his cancer patients to imagine their healthy cells as an army taking-on the cancerous invaders and defeating them. When used with orthodox clinical methods, this approach is 50% more effective than the use of medicine alone and, in many cases, has led to otherwise unexplained spontaneous remissions.

Nor is it confined to matters of physical healing. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung also encouraged his patients to use their images as a route into their unconscious, and spent many years himself delving into his own deep unknown. “The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life,” he said. “In them, everything essential was decided.”

How can the use of something seemingly so simple as an image lead to such spectacular healing results?

The success of visualization stems from the fact that everything – good health or disease – must first be imagined before it can be created. Images, in other words, are reality before they becomes visible to others. “Imagination is the beginning of creation,” said George Bernard Shaw. “You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.”

Since all things originate from the imagination, the image we have of ourselves and our circumstances is key to our experience and understanding of the universe, and of ourselves within it – whether we see the world as something to be feared or enjoyed and whether we see ourselves as healthy or otherwise. In fact, our images are our selves and our situation. Because of this, the purposeful use of our images has a power which can be used to remodel - re-vision - our lives, to solve problems and to deal with issues that are unresolved and, perhaps, not even a conscious part of our daily lives.

These personal symbols structure our thoughts, feelings, attitudes and actions, and continue to have a major impact on us and, through us, to the world around us; the choices we make and the actions we take in life. By choosing to use our images in a fully conscious and constructive way, we gain access to more choice and greater personal freedom.

Everyone can work with images. If you relax and close your eyes right now and think of a specific situation you have been in, an image of that situation will come to mind which could present itself in the form of a feeling, a smell, a sense or a picture of the scene. It may not be the exact replica of the scene itself – in fact, this is unlikely - but it will be an accurate reflection, however presented, of how you feel about and experience that situation.

If you think about your job, for example, you may not see yourself in your office - the literal view you have of your work and the tasks your day is filled with. Instead, you might see an image of a monkey house at a zoo or a picnic by a river in summer.

Normally, you might be irritated at these “intrusive” images which are “preventing” you from thinking about your work. But if you pause for a moment, you can see that each of these images gives you very different information immediately about how you feel in the moment.

In any film, the director has chosen the look and feel of each scene. The people in the background are not there by accident, they are actors paid to be there because they are necessary to the plot and the film would not work without them. The actors, the setting and the action taking place is all there purposefully.

In daily life, your unconscious is the director and the images it gives you in response to your questions are equally purposeful and have just as much meaning to the film – which is your life as a whole.

Even if you try this technique and it does not seem to work for you, it could still be working! That is its beauty. Let’s say you get no image at all to begin with; that you see only darkness around you. That in itself may be useful information. What is this darkness, this nothing? What was your question which prompted its appearance – is it in any way meaningful that “nothing” comes to you in response to this question? How does the nothing feel about this? Even the darkness is an image which has form and information for you.

When new information is given to us about our lives in this way, we can actively question the basis of our assumptions about our past and create a new truth for ourselves from which to move forward. This may include redefining the past so we can recover a new sense of the present and the potential for a completely different kind of future.

Images contain our inner truth and they can help us to question the mythological models we are using in our lives, revealing a different truth that we could not consciously have considered because it simply would not have occurred to us. By deliberately focusing on them, our images can set us free.