A Guided Imagery: The Organization of Experience

A Guided Imagery: The Organization of Experience

In psycho-spiritual psychotherapy, guided imagery is a powerful tool for transforming the inner world. Through suggestions, images, sometimes sketching narratives, the therapist guides and facilitates the client or group through a journey, a process of inner discovery that is unique and magical. Guided imagery is always a close, intimate personal experience that allows you to have a new experience with yourself and reveal unrealized potential.

Here's how you do it.

In a way it's easier in a group. If there are two of you, one can read the guided images to the other slowly and steadily, gently and compassionately, with frequent pauses. Then you can swap roles and do it the other way around. Alternatively, one of you can read the guided images onto a recording device and play them back. This is the best way if you are doing it alone. Whether you are preparing guided imagery alone, in a group, or with another person, create the conditions for a meditation space. Disconnect phones and other noisy devices that may disturb you. Close doors and tell everyone else in the room not to interrupt. The room where you do the guided imagery should be clean and tidy, free from clutter, simple and preferably spacious, with peaceful images and ornaments. The temperature should be comfortable so that you can sit or lie relaxed and unhindered for a medium to long period of time. Consciously breathing through your body, from your feet to the top of your head, can help you achieve a deeper sense of relaxation. Once all of this is done, take a little time to breathe consciously before you begin.

Close your eyes and relax.

Here is some basic guided imagery for you to experience.

Take yourself back to childhood. Follow your memories of early innocence and naivety into a complex world of people, animals, colors, trust, weather, mystery, wind and nature. Remember your earliest experiences when all of this and more begins to emerge in your consciousness as you begin to open and receive impulses from the outside world. For a while it is not separate from you because you are a part of everything. But I want you now to bring yourself to the point where you are and all this “other,” the world as it affects your senses. You see, touch, feel, smell and taste it and it surrounds you and comes to you through your senses. You're somehow involved and there comes a point where you have to make sense of it. We call this the “organization of experience” because humans have a compulsion to organize, and if you think about it, it’s true. Now that you are here, you can see what you have done to organize yourself, your seating or lying arrangement, with your equipment around you. You have learned all of this.

Spend a little time now remembering how you organized your early life experiences...

Now consider how all of this learned organization and behavior affects you today. In some cases it may limit you; in other cases, it can enrich your life and benefit you. Try not to judge under any circumstances.

Take a deep breath, roll onto your left side and draw your knees to your chest and relax for at least ten minutes to complete the process.

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