Dreams & Healing – Embodied Imagination –

“Dreams give individuals access to a form of intelligence originating deep inside the brainstem, where signals travel up to the cortex and down through the neuro-endocrine system to affect the body at a micro-cellular level. This activity, as natural and innate as the human heartbeat, has extraordinary therapeutic potential and is widely thought to trigger the body’s own self-healing response.”- Santa Barbara Healing Sanctuary

“Medical research begins at last to reveal what indigenous peoples have always known: imagination is medicine. A major therapeutic vehicle in the ancient world was the healing dream.” – Kimberley Patton (Harvard Divinity School Paper “Ancient Asklepieia: Institutional Incubation and the Hope of Healing” 2009)

“Neuroscience has convincingly demonstrated the connection between mind and body, validating ancient healing traditions. In doing so, science confirms the existence of forces in the psyche which stimulate the body’s capacity to heal itself. Through stress, trauma, physical pain and the busyness of modern life, mind and body can become disconnected. The body is the place where we experience feelings and “the key for effective therapeutic change is the cultivation of effective embodied experience.”- Alan Schore (The science of the Art of psychotherapy 2012)

Healing by Way of Dreaming

An important contribution of the EI method is that it has been developed to access various embodied states, present in the images, and hold these in the crucible of the body, enabling new connections and profound healing both physical and emotional.

EI Can Contribute To Healing Trauma

A woman has been hit by a car. It not only has hurt her physically, but after she comes out of the hospital she is not able to go back to work. She stays home and is afraid to go out of doors. She can no longer come to my office. We do therapy, at that time, in the early 1990s, by telephone. After a while, she wants to talk about the trauma itself.

Before she starts, I help her to get back to the scene before the accident happens. It appears that there is a large oak near the intersection where she was hit. I help her focus on the quiet street and then on the tree. She notices the strength of the tree and the quality of the bark, the exact way it is shaped, until she becomes possessed by the presence of the tree. She can feel its robust stability, I ask her to stay in this state for the week between the sessions, not moving on with the memory beyond this point. By the next week, she tells me that the tree presence has calmed her down substantially.

It appears that she can stay in the environment of the trauma when removed to the periphery. By locating her consciousness in an identification with the tree, it becomes possible for her to go back into the outside world. Slowly, over a period of several weeks of walking around identified with the robust tree, her post-traumatic stress begins to subside. After a month, she goes back to work. She is no longer in the tree identification, it has slowly been absorbed by her entire biological system, and the trauma has let her go. In this case, we dealt with the traumatic memory, but stayed in the anteroom, as it were—the moment before the traumatic events took place from a point of view other than the client’s habitual perspective.