ACTIVE IMAGINATION - EXPLORING THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND

“The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself.”

 – William Blake

What is Active Imagination?

Active Imagination is a transformative practice developed by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, that offers a path towards attaining wholeness of mind by accessing the unconscious. By engaging with the unconscious mind and fostering open communication with it, individuals can uncover and integrate aspects of themselves that may have remained hidden or repressed.

In our modern society, which tends to over-emphasise left-brained thinking, active imagination can be a lifeline of self-realisation and healing. If you’re not familiar with this wonderful technique, I’m glad that you are about to discover the benefits it offers. And if you are familiar, I hope this article and the exercises I’m sharing on YouTube will deepen your practice and bring you greater benefit.

Compared to Eastern meditation, active imagination is relatively unknown and underutilised in the West. However the unconscious mind is communicating with us and governing our thoughts, speech and actions all the time, whether we are aware of its existence or not. Daydreaming, talking to ourselves, and dreaming are all clear examples of the conscious mind interacting with the unconscious mind. The interaction between the conscious and unconscious minds is a natural part of what it means to be human and has been serving our development all the while.

The difference with active imagination is that it is done deliberately and consciously. The conscious ego becomes involved in the process and a two-way interaction can unfold. In this way unconscious content can be made conscious, and likewise the unconscious comes to reconcile with the ego.

During active imagination, you engage with archetypes, like the Magician, the High Priestess, or the Trickster. You can re-enter a recent dream to engage with its characters and uncover the lessons. Exercises like The Shadow Room allow for the exploration of shadow elements of the mind, while techniques like the Emotional Integration Meditation enable working with presenting feelings or emotions. The possibilities for exploration are endless, and no part of the mind is off-limits. Although active imagination can be fun, it can also be challenging, but the benefits of the practice are always worthwhile.

Benefits of Active Imagination

We already discussed how Jung believed that active imagination is the most powerful way to engage with the unconscious, but why does that matter? Why is it beneficial to open up an engagement with the unconscious?

In short, because all our challenges can be construed as psychological or spiritual challenges, whether emotional pain, relationship challenges, even financial or career woes and larger scale challenges such as climate change and a dysfunctional economy, all ultimately arise from issues in the mind. Opening up to the unconscious mind and resolving our inner conflicts, can and must play a role in solving all of these challenges (see episodes 1-3 of the Make It Conscious podcast for more on the benefits and necessity of spiritual practice).

Active imagination provides many benefits in the pursuit of spiritual growth and self-reflection. These benefits include:

• Deep self-knowledge. Active imagination can help you gain insight into who you truly are, beyond the expectations of society,
• Greater freedom: It be used to uncover and integrate repressed aspects of the personality in shadow work, enabling you to show up authentically in life.
• Resolve emotional challenges: Active imagination can help you gain insight into daily challenges, resolve your inner conflicts and improve your relationships and circumstances.
• Personal and spiritual growth: By gaining insight, resolving conflicts, and integrating the archetypes of the personal and collective unconscious, you can achieve personal and spiritual growth.

The work of spiritual growth is really a two-pronged task of coming to insight on one hand, and facing up to feeling on the other. Active imagination is useful for both.

Whether you need guidance from your higher self, some creative inspiration, help with a tough decision, insight into how to work with a particularly challenging colleague, or just find that life has lost its excitement, you can apply active imagination. Anywhere that you experience challenges, or any kind of suffering, active imagination is a potentially useful tool for working through it.

Although active imagination is not widely practiced, it is an invaluable method for spiritual growth. However, it is just one piece of a larger puzzle and should be used in conjunction with other daily life practices, such as those captured in the Seven Habits of Individuation.

The benefits of active imagination can be observed in changes to your mind. After a particularly beneficial session, you may feel light and relieved, like you do after a satisfying dream or a nourishing conversation with a loved one. However, even if the sense of relief is not immediate, the experience can still point you towards further work, deeper insight, or emotional healing, ultimately leading to the integration of the mind.

Active Imagination vs. Meditation

Active imagination and meditation share many similarities. Both are dedicated practices for making the unconscious conscious. In this sense, active imagination falls firmly under Habit 7 of the Seven Habits of Individuation – “Daily Dedicated Practice.” Like all seven habits, active imagination is a practice and a skill that you will get better at over time.

While both techniques involve an interaction with the unconscious mind, the primary difference lies in the approach. Active imagination allows the unconscious mind to express itself freely, whereas in meditation, the goal is to consciously let go of thoughts as they arise, building concentration. Both methods are effective for bringing order to the mind and making the unconscious conscious, but they address different challenges. In meditation the emphasis is on the smaller-scale, everyday conflicts that accumulate over days, weeks and months, while with active imagination, the emphasis is on addressing larger-scale overarching issues that govern our lives and its direction, promoting congruence and authenticity in our daily lived experience.

Both practices offer insight into the nature of the mind and reality, and they complement each other. Experience with meditation can be particularly helpful in developing an active imagination practice, as the concentration cultivated through meditation can be used to face any emotions or thoughts that arise during active imagination. Likewise, active imagination can provide valuable guidance for meditation, offering insight into greater conflicts and challenges that may limit the benefits of meditation without addressing them.

Eastern-style loving-kindness meditation in particular is not dissimilar to active imagination. In loving-kindness meditation, the practitioner imagines people and creatures, starting with those they find easy to be around and gradually expanding to include those they find more challenging. The aim is to cultivate wholesome intentions for all beings. While this practice does not involve giving the unconscious total free-reign, it does involve communicating with the unconscious mind to resolve any conflicts that might arise, by taking on board the wider reality.

Attempting to merely “train” the mind without honouring the vast expanse of the unconscious is to place it under totalitarian control. This can lead to ego inflation, the development of spiritual personas. It is important to acknowledge the unconscious and incorporate it into one’s practice in order to avoid these potential pitfalls.

An analogy that can be helpful in understanding the differences between active imagination and meditation in the context of dedicated practice (Habit 7) is that of carving a beautiful stone statue. The unindividuated mind is like an uncarved block of stone. Active imagination is like a larger, more powerful tool, capable of removing hefty chunks of rock on the way to shaping the statue. Meditation, on the other hand, is like a fine chisel, used for achieving super high-precision and aesthetic refinement.

While this analogy has its limits (in reality, both practices are often used together, not sequentially), the main principle is clear – active imagination works on a larger scale, while meditation operates on a finer scale. Without a fine tool, one cannot attain deep states of concentration and awareness. However, without a powerful tool, not only might you not ever get there, you could be carving entirely the wrong statue. By utilising both practices together, individuals can develop a more complete understanding of their own psyche and work towards realising their true potential.

The divination arts (including tarot, astrology and numerology), used critically and correctly, also come into this to form a triad with the other two techniques that can be applied in your daily practice of Habit 7. These are also a kind of dedicated practice, although not strictly a meditative one. They facilitate self knowledge, and understanding of our potential and path. They are therefore analogous to a design or plan for the statue, so you know what to carve. In terms of scale, the divination arts operate at a higher level than active imagination, with meditation occupying the finer end of the spectrum. Active imagination can serve as a bridge between the two. Although this is not the place to delve into the divination arts in detail, it is important to recognise that all three practices work synergistically to form an effective daily practice for integrating the mind. Each technique complements the others, enabling us to bring the unconscious to conscious awareness, gain insight into our lives, and develop a more holistic understanding of ourselves.

If you only ever practiced meditation without incorporating active imagination or divination, the resulting statue may be precisely carved but with many anomalies. It wouldn’t represent ‘you.’ It may appear as an entirely different entity, lacking the depth and beauty that could be achieved through the integration of active imagination.

There is a place for all three of these practices. Jung himself did not dismiss the value of Eastern meditation practices outright, but he was cautious about their uncritical adoption by Westerners. He believed that Western individuals should seek to develop their own methods for engaging with the unconscious mind, which would be more in tune with their cultural and psychological backgrounds.

In this context, active imagination can be seen as a technique that is more suitable for the Western psyche, as it allows individuals to engage with their unconscious mind in a more direct and interactive way, which is more aligned with the Western cultural context. However, it is essential to note that Jung’s views on this matter were a product of his time. A lot has changed in the 60+ years since his death. The modern westerner has a lot to gain from practicing Eastern meditation techniques, provided they are practiced honestly, with wholesome intentions and in the context of honouring the deeper aspects of the unconscious mind.

Guided vs. Unguided Practice

Active imagination is a common practice in the work of Jungian analysts who guide their patients during one-on-one therapy sessions. Similar techniques are also utilised extensively by coaches and other therapists specialising in gestalt or psychosomatic disciplines. While it is possible to practice active imagination alone, without guidance, it can be challenging for most people, even those experienced with the technique or traditional meditation.

This sets it apart from regular meditation, where there is a case for letting go of guided practice when ready, as it can lead to deeper concentration and a more beneficial practice. With active imagination, however, having guidance can facilitate a deeper practice, even for those experienced in regular meditation. This is because navigating the journey unguided can require a certain amount of thinking, and having someone else’s voice guide the overall structure of the experience frees up attention to focus on the imagination and let it unfold. Although, like with meditation, there is a place for both guided and unguided practice, and I recommended to try both to determine what works best for you.

Personally, I have found active imagination to be an exceptionally valuable technique. Whether being guided by my coaching colleagues, performing my own guided exercises, or practicing unguided, I have seen its value in my own life. Furthermore, I have clients, friends, colleagues, and family members who have also attested to its effectiveness.

In searching for guided active imagination exercises online, I was surprised to find very few published. There are countless guided meditations available, but active imaginations seem to be a rare find, despite their value. This is particularly surprising considering how much active imagination especially benefits from guided practice.

Having already recorded a few active imagination exercises for my coaching practice, I decided to share them on YouTube. Based on the positive feedback received, I plan to continue publishing more exercises. Over the next 12-18 months (i.e. to summer 2024), I aim to release approximately 100 exercises covering a range of purposes, challenges, archetypes, and situations, creating a valuable resource for those seeking to develop their practice or prescribe the exercises to their own clients. I hope these exercises will be a useful tool for coaches and therapists seeking to incorporate active imagination into their work.

To this end, I thought what better inspiration for these exercises than the major and minor arcana of the tarot? The tarot are a map of human experience, covering the main archetypes, rites of passage, and the kinds of situations and challenges we face, making it a comprehensive guide for the types of active imagination exercises that will prove useful.

These exercises can also be used by divination practitioners and their clients as a way to:

1. delve deeper into a particular card and integrate its wisdom
2. gain insight into a reading, and the presence of a particular card
3. discover more about your true nature by performing the exercises for your significator cards that appear on your birth chart
4. prescribe as a remedy for a particular situation or challenge (e.g. the Two of Wands exercise for a situation involving a difficult decision).

In addition to the tarot-inspired exercises, I will release exercises for integrating the primary Jungian archetypes, as well as exercises for shadow work. There are over 100-150 exercises in the works if they continue to be well received. These exercises have the potential to serve as a valuable resource for coaches, therapists, and individuals seeking to explore the range and depths of the psyche and attain greater self-awareness and self-realisation.

Tips for Getting the Most out of the Exercises

Active imagination is a dedicated practice for making the unconscious conscious, falling firmly under Habit 7 of the Seven Habits of Individuation, which encompasses all the other six habits. When practicing Habit 7, we are essentially practicing all seven habits simultaneously.

In this section, I will provide tips to maximise your active imagination practice, drawing on the other six habits as inspiration, and discussing how they relate to your active imagination practice.

The first tip is to set the scene by taking responsibility for your mind. This is crucial in active imagination, as it is in daily life. Approach the exercise with the understanding that whatever you experience is a reflection of your own mind. No matter who or what you encounter, they are a part of you and can offer insights into yourself. Be prepared to take responsibility for any cravings or resistance that may arise without placing blame and know that they are pointing to areas of your mind that need to be integrated.

The second tip is to adopt the right mental stance by cultivating wholesome intentions. Decide from the outset that you are going to be open to what your unconscious has to say. Give your unconscious space and allow it to do what it needs to do, without judgement or trying to push it away. By doing so, you allow a union between the conscious and unconscious to occur.

The third tip to maximise your active imagination practice is to practice skilful communication with your unconscious. This means bringing the same kindness and compassion to your interaction with your unconscious that you would practice in daily life. If you encounter hostility or malevolence towards you, a skilful response is one that transcends aggression and avoidance, finding the middle way. It’s essential to understand that merely acting “nice” can be a kind of defense mechanism. You need to hear the other side out to resolve the conflict. The way you relate to your unconscious will affect how you relate to yourself and others in daily life.

Next, it’s important to approach the exercise with a mindset of generosity, both towards yourself and others. Active imagination is a method for understanding yourself and your unique set of facts at a deep level. Bring this intention of generosity with you into the exercise, recognising that you are making a positive contribution to your own growth and development, as well as potentially to the lives of those around you. Be assured that this is a valuable use of time, and safely let go of any reservations you might have around whether this is a worthwhile exercise.

Be prepared to put in effort during your active imagination practice. Although you are relaxing and allowing your imagination to flow freely, the exercise still requires energy and focus. If your mind starts to wander to unrelated thoughts, gently bring your attention back to the exercise by applying some effort, much like in regular meditation. Your meditation practice can be helpful in developing the focus and concentration needed for active imagination. I recommend beginning each active imagination session with a short period of meditation to settle the mind and allow it to come to a natural place of rest. My guided exercises on the Make It Conscious YouTube include a short period of meditation at the start of each exercise.

Create a suitable environment for your active imagination practice by finding a quiet space where you won’t be disturbed and assuming a comfortable posture that promotes stillness of mind. You can do the exercise sitting in a chair or on the floor, with a straight back, or you can do it lying down. But don’t worry about getting everything perfect. Letting go of such conditions is more worthwhile than needing to control them.

Lastly, during active imagination we are also practicing mindfulness, which you can think of simply as “present moment awareness.” In the context of active imagination this means cultivating and maintaining your alertness to whatever comes up. It means opening up to experience it fully with your complete bare attention, not as a label or a judgement, but as a direct, raw experience. This applies to any sense sensation or feeling you experience. For example, if you feel happy during the exercise, rather than thinking “I feel happy,” turn your attention to the physical experience of “happy” and the associated sensations in your body. During guided exercises, I will occasionally give the instruction to turn your attention to the feeling being experienced.

There is no need to ‘think’ about or process what is happening as it happens. The left brain can stand down during the exercise. During the exercise it is best to just stay with it and experience what is happening. Rest assured that simply by opening up to experience in this way, that the work is unfolding the way it needs to.

Journalling

After the exercise, I recommend taking some time to journal what you experienced and reflect on what it might mean for you. This is a valuable step for uncovering and integrating the unconscious into your conscious mind. To deepen your understanding, you can share your experience in the YouTube comments section and receive further guidance from myself and other explorers.

I prefer to record and reflect on the exercise at a separate time to the exercise itself. During the exercise, it is best to let the left brain stand down and remain purely with the experience. Everything you need is already within. There is no need to try to ‘catch’ anything as it happens. By remaining with the experience, you will train your mind to be more receptive to right brain activity and stay in the present moment.

This approach differs from the method recommended by Jungian analyst Robert Johnson. Johnson advises typing out the dialogue with the unconscious in real-time to avoid the conscious mind’s tendency to forget and edit what was experienced. While there is a case for this, by taking responsibility for your mind from the outset, cultivating wholesome intentions, and practicing mindfulness as described in the previous section, you can bring the ego more on board and minimise its tendency to forget or edit aspects of the exercise.

Personally, I find the benefits of full immersion and involvement outweigh the ‘risk’ of forgetting any details, which is really nothing to fear. Conversely, certain details may only appear if you let go of the need to capture anything and instead allow the experience to unfold.

Ultimately, have confidence that the exercise unfolded in just the way it needed to. You might have felt like you really got to the bottom of the issue you addressed during the exercise and came away with a feeling of satisfaction and resolve. Or, you might have felt that you didn’t consciously get to the bottom of everything, and that’s okay. Don’t worry, nothing has been lost. The message is still there, waiting to rise to the surface one way or another.

Even if you cannot consciously put your finger on what it all meant, trust that your psyche understands the symbolic language. Simply by performing the exercise and opening up a communication with the unconscious, work has been done. Even if you don’t capture anything, have faith that progress has been made and your trajectory has been changed for the better.

Conclusion

In conclusion, active imagination is a powerful and transformative practice that complements meditation in the journey towards individuation and self-discovery. Through engaging with the unconscious mind and fostering open communication with it, individuals can uncover and integrate aspects of themselves that may have remained hidden or repressed.

Meditation and active imagination work synergistically, with meditation providing a foundation of concentration and mindfulness, while active imagination addresses the larger, more complex issues within the psyche. Including divination arts into your daily practice can further enhance your path towards self-awareness and personal growth.

Jung’s caution on the uncritical adoption of Eastern meditation practices highlights the importance of developing methods that resonate with one’s own cultural background and that address the larger scale issues governing our lives, direction, and challenges on the individuation journey. However, modern practitioners can still benefit from Eastern meditation and concentration practices when approached with honesty, wholesome intentions, and a deep respect for the unconscious mind.

Guided active imagination exercises, inspired by the tarot and Jungian archetypes, can provide a valuable resource for those seeking to explore their inner world. To maximise the benefits of active imagination practice, it’s essential to take responsibility for your mind, cultivate wholesome intentions, practice mindfulness and skilful communication, and approach the exercises with generosity and patience.

Journaling after the exercise is an important step in the integration process, allowing you to reflect on the experience and uncover deeper insights. Trust that your psyche understands the symbolic language and that the process is working, even if you don’t consciously grasp everything during the exercise. As you commit to this journey of individuation and self-discovery, you’ll find that active imagination, meditation, and related practices can offer a rich and rewarding path towards a deeper understanding of yourself and your place in the world.

If you are interested to take your practice to the next level, you can:

• • Check out my guided active imagination playlist
  • Listen to the Make It Conscious podcast
  • Download the Seven Habits of Individuation Handbook
  • Read the Blog