Embodied Imagination
Practical tools and processes to explore the depth of our inner life often with significant results in our lives: fresh insights, increased creativity, frequently profound emotional healing and physical health benefits.
Robert Bosnak, renowned Jungian analyst and author, pioneered this innovative method called Embodied Imagination ® (EI) in the late 70s. He has 40 years of clinical experience working with dreams. Past president of the International Association of the Study of Dreams, he has taught worldwide and EI is now being practised in medicine, psychotherapy, theatre, fiction writing, art, business and technology.
Why – and in what ways –do dreams have the power to heal or transform us? Robert Bosnak, explores this question and illustrates this in many absorbing case studies in his books. A Little Course in Dreams, Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel.
Dreams and Memories
People in all cultures while dreaming, experience being in a place where something happens. Everything in the environment is embodied. In a dream the imagination presents itself as embodied. The method of embodied imagination helps to get back to the dream experience before our waking consciousness makes particular cultural interpretations.
Embodied Imagination ® uses slow motion sensate attention to explore the image environment of a dream, or daytime memory in this way it becomes vivid again. Through exploring the image presences, we find they have their own internal intelligence.
Dreams and Healing
Embodied Imagination® can be effectively used with physical pain and illness through working with symptoms and applying the craft of modern dream incubation to reach realms of intelligence far removed from habitual consciousness.
Since the beginnings of Western medicine, healing sanctuaries have used dream incubation to facilitate encounters with creative sources of healing. Robert Bosnak is a co-founder of the Santa Barbara Healing Sanctuary, a revival of a dream-based treatment, when dreamers would come to an Asclepian sanctuary to incubate healing dreams. It is designed to accelerate and deepen the healing process by way of integrative therapies while focusing on the resilient creative power of dreaming.
Research studies have shown that EI helps to reduce the experience of pain and significantly benefits cancer patients.
