Guided imagery involves mental visualizations to relieve stress, change patterns, and achieve spiritual awakening. The guide can be a licensed psychotherapist, spiritual instructor, or friend. The images seen have meaning and can be used for self-suggestion and self-healing.
Guided imagery is a way of walking a person through mental visualizations. These visualizations are meant to do a number of things, including relieve stress, change underlying patterns, discover answers to nagging questions, and spiritual awakening. Guided imagery has been around for some time, but it saw a major revival during the 1960s and 1970s, and is now a cornerstone of various alternative psychological treatment techniques.
An important concept of guided imagery, which may seem contrary to the name, is that the type of vision that occurs is not always visual for everyone. Although the images are often described by the guide and seen by the recipient, sometimes the sense of seeing is more of a sense of feeling or an arising of various emotional states that convey a sensation similar to seeing actual images in the mind’s eye.
Guided imagery is facilitated by some sort of guide. This can be a licensed psychotherapist, spiritual instructor, teacher, or just a friend. Depending on what the recipient is trying to get out of the experience and what the guide is trying to convey, they can take different approaches. Most often, however, guided imagery begins with the facilitator guiding the practitioner through deep breathing exercises with eyes closed, to calm the body and relax the mind.
The facilitator then gives suggestions to help lead the practitioner somewhere and to start the process. The practitioner can, at this point, verbally interact with the guide, telling them what they are seeing and feeling. The guide can then react to this, encouraging the practitioner to look more closely at certain elements and helping him move away from images that can be destructive or towards images that can be positive.
Although the images that appear during a guided imagery session may seem superficial, most guided imagery practitioners believe that almost everything seen during a session has meaning. Similar modes of interpretation are used in many guided imagery as in traditional dream analysis. In fact, guided imagery shares a lot with dreaming, although the conscious mind is even more engaged and an outside force is able to interact directly with the subject while they are in the midst of dreaming.
Guided imagery can also be used as an avenue for self-suggestion or self-hypnosis. In this context, guided imagery is often used for things like self-healing. By directing the practitioner through a guided series of images that relate to physical well-being, such as manifesting healing energy as golden light and then directing the practitioner to move that golden light to an afflicted area, the body is thought to be able to direct the own healing energy more specifically. This type of self-suggesting guided imagery can also be used to overcome psychological issues, such as overcoming long-term fears, breaking addictive cycles, and improving confidence.
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