The Imaginal Heart: Practice Group

The Imaginal Heart will be a group container for sharing and exploring imaginal practice together.

Our journey will follow a series of pre-recorded videos introducing the psychology and philosophy of active imagination, as well as opening up the field of the practice and relationship with the imaginal.

During our group meetings, however, we will be focused on our own experiences with the imaginal, and dedicated to sharing and developing practice together. The intention is to deepen our relationship with the imaginal, and to refine our sense of what’s possible in the practice of soul-making. Therefore it is encouraged to set time aside weekly for dream journalling, imaginal practice, and having an openness to sharing inner life in a group container.

During our journey we will be approaching active imagination, not merely as a therapeutic method, but as a way of relating to ourselves, images, the world and life in general, which springs from the imaginal perception of the heart. Awakening and cultivating the imaginal heart is a liberation of the body and mind – and therefore of the world – from the reifying stance towards existence. The Soul, in this perspective, is not a thing, but an inexhaustibility of beauty and meaning within life itself – birthed forth through our participation herein.

The group will emphasize receptivity, presence and embodiment – learning to meet and engage with archetypal figures, dreams, and images as living and autonomous presences; subtle bodies which can be felt viscerally and which are often connected to land, place and ancestry. Neither “in here” nor “out there”, but in the intermediate space between…

Neither fantasy nor escape, but a realm – “the mundus imaginalis” – bridging the split between inner and outer, mind and matter, human and the more-than-human. 

Here we learn a way of relating to perceptions, where they are neither seen as real nor not-real, but beyond such dualistic fixations. Phenomena are recognized as wild and free, as we open up to a sense of ourselves, life and nature, which does not necessarily comply with our categories, concepts and distinctions.. 

As such, imaginal practice could also be seen as an eco-psychological response to the climate crisis, and a way of restoring the soul of the world – the “anima mundi”. If the reification of phenomena is what lets us use the world as a resource, and ourselves as mere instruments, then imaginal perception can restore the recognition of Soul within the heart of everything, appreciating the depth which is present as the aliveness of phenomena. 

Awakening the heart to its artistic participation in life, may then be seen as soul-response to our times; the instrumentalization of nature and the loss of beauty, meaning and belonging. 

The invitation, then, is to engage in imaginal practice as something to be deepened, broadened and refined, in order to participate in the soul-making of existence. Lovingly cultivating the skill, to tend to the part of the garden, in which we find ourselves. This is a lifelong practice and journey, a maturation of a boundless relationship with life itself.