Up: [[Active Imagination]] Created: 2025-05-02 Updated: 2025-05-09 ### Witness Your Mind In an [[Active Imagination]], you want to be able to distinguish between what your mind is producing and what your unconscious is producing. A good way to do this is simply to sit silently and watch your mind doing its thing. Set a time limit with a minimum of fifteen minutes and an ideal maximum of thirty minutes. You need at least fifteen minutes to be able to experience your mind calming down on its own. It will start with intensity and usually with lots of triggering content, but eventually it does become quieter and less triggering. ### Use Guided Visualization While [[Active Imagination is Not]] guided visualization, using guided imagery can help you learn to tune into mental imagery. Guided imagery also shows us what it feels like when the ego is controlling the image-generating activity of the mind. There are all kinds of guided visualizations available online. Some good sources are in the work of: Jon Kabat-Zinn, Thich Nhat Hanh, Tara Brach, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, Deepak Choprah ### Favour the Seed Image There’s lots more information in [[Choosing a Seed Image]] but the basic idea for this preliminary activity is to get comfortable with what Ken James calls ‘favouring’ the seed. You could use an image from a dream or from any other source such as a tarot card, or perhaps one of the horses from the [[Two Horses Active Imagination Exercise]]. Let the seed image emerge into your inner awareness just like anything else might do. Don’t concentrate on the image, but favour it. Meaning allow your mind to do its thing without attempting to control it or follow it. So you’re not dragging your mind back to the seed image the way you might in meditation, but you’re gently favouring it. Practice this often, not moving to engaging the seed image until you can comfortably favour it. ### Engage the Seed Image This is where it starts to get woo-woo. You have to trust the process. - Introduce yourself to the image. Tell the image why you have asked it to come into your inner awareness. - Wait and witness. - Depending on the modality of the seed (see [[Choosing a Seed Image]]), explore the seed’s setting. For example if it’s a visual seed image, circumambulate the inner space and see if you can look at the seed from different perspectives. If it’s an auditory seed, are you aware of any other sounds in the inner space? What is the pitch, intensity, timbre of the auditory seed? Is it a form of speech? Music? Noise? Use the same idea with other modalities, using the modality to direct how you explore. - Be alert for any changes in the seed. For example, if it is animate, does it speak? Move? Come closer? Back away? If it’s an image from the environment, is there movement of the air? Look for any changes along the dimensions of: silence/sound, stillness/movement, darkness/light