While it is possible to learn ImageWork by reading a book and doing the exercises, it is of course much easier to be guiding through exercises by someone else. So after being asked for this many times, I recorded almost all the exercises in the Life Choices, Life Changes book, complete with relaxations, instructions, questions, and lots of time to do your own imagining. These audio exercises are the result.
What is wonderful about getting one of them is that it is not something you use once; the exercises can all be done again and again, and each time, you can learn something new. They are really tools for life.
Some of my students have enjoyed gathering a regular group and playing the exercises for everyone and then sharing on what has emerged. That way you can have the benefits of individual sessions with me in company with your mates, and without spending an extra penny.
The descriptions of all the exercises are below. You can download any of the 16 individual exercises as audio file from the online shop.
Who am I – and what’s next?
Image as life metaphor
This is an excellent introduction to using images to gain access to your own deep inner knowledge about yourself and your life. You will be guided to invite an image that will be an amazingly accurate metaphor for your life, and can help you understand who and where you are now, what has led up to this situation, and what your next step should be. This basic exercise can be adapted for understanding and resolving any confusing situation or problem: you simply invite an image that represents that issue, and work on it in the same way. This exercise is my own first port of call when my feelings are a mystery to me, or more generally when I don’t know what’s going on!
My inner child – and inner male and female
This is an opportunity to understand and integrate some vital aspects of your inner self so that you can feel more whole, more peaceful, and less alone.
Exercise One: Befriending the child within
Here you will meet an ‘inner child’ or adolescent based on a memory from a period in your life which is particularly relevant right now. You go back into childhood or adolescence to help him or her through any difficulties, and then bring the child into the present to be your companion through life. This is a wonderful way to heal pain from the past, resolve difficult feelings in the present, and find a more joy-filled way into the future. I use this to help me manage life situations in a way that is both adult and compassionate to myself and others.
Exercise Two: My inner male and female
Here you will meet an ’inner male’ and an ‘inner female’ who represent both your own inner resources, as well as the way you relate to men and women more generally. You will find out how to benefit from the qualities and resources of both your male and female aspects working together as a team, and hopefully also figure out how you can improve your relationships with the males and females in your life. This is wonderfully illuminating. I was astounded when I tried it out for the first time.
Where am I going?
These exercises are based on the simple but very powerful ‘turning hindsight into forethought’ principle of making plans and decisions by putting yourself forward into the future and looking back to see what choices you did make! This works as well for everyday tasks as for long term goals. Some of my clearest and most useful visions of the future come from these exercises.
Exercise One: Exploring potential life paths
This exercise takes you on the path of your life to a crossroads, guides you down the years on the various paths and eventually lets you return to the crossroads and choose. You can get 15 years on 3 different paths, choose with wisdom, and still be young enough to enjoy it. Great fun too.
Exercise Two: Becoming my future self
This exercise takes you in your personal space/time ship into two possible futures – a happy and an unhappy one – and lets you send messages back to the present to make sure you get the one you want. You choose your own future time – half an hour or half a century. Then you can do it again and again with different future dates. This is incredibly useful to chart your future very specifically, and to see what is not going to work for you. In most cases, I find, it is going on just as you are that brings the negative future!
Making life changes
These exercises help with making life changes or achieving the inner and outer goals that you really want and yet find difficult or impossible. This is for when you know what you want, but find it hard to make it happen. They show you the attitude you need for success, and gives you a push in the right . direction. I love them.
Exercise One: Achieving difficult goals
This exercise is wonderful for making changes in yourself or your life or for carrying out cherished projects. You begin by accepting yourself as you are now, then get a clear sense of how you will be after you have achieved your goal, and finally find out how to get there in a way that is focused, trusting, consistent and anxiety-free. You do all of it in a magic private cinema, in the most comfortable chair in the world.
Exercise Two: Time and money
This exercise takes you to your House of Time or House of Money, complete with consultants, to find out about those deeply held attitudes to time or money that are getting in your way – and what to do about them. Life changing insights tend to emerge from this.
Health and healing
This is for anyone who wants to feel more positively and glowingly healthy, whether you are actually ill or simply not flourishing. They are a must if you have health issues of any kind.
Exercise One: The House of Healing
This takes you to your House of Healing where you will meet your own personal health consultant and healer, clarify your present patterns and attitudes, and begin the healing process. You even get a gift from the House. A real joy.
Exercise Two: Listening to my body’s messages
This helps you focus on your body as a whole or on a body part that you are concerned about, and allow images to emerge that can let you know what the real problem is and how you can work towards healing yourself. This can have a miraculous effect on physical symptoms.
Relationships
These exercises help you explore your relationships – whether personal or professional – through talking in your imagination to someone in your past or present with whom you are not at peace.
Exercise One: Transforming relationships
This exercise should help you with those relationships that you want to improve, perhaps because right now they make you feel tense, unresolved, angry, hurt or confused. It’s the best exercise I know to understand and heal your relationships, and the tools can stand you in good stead every day.
Exercise Two: Saying goodbye
This is about becoming able to let go and say a full goodbye when someone has died or left you, or when you have left someone (or need to do so but can’t), or when you are full of resentment and bitterness. The exercise can also be adapted to saying goodbye to a place, situation or phase in your life. It’s a must if you feel left over feelings from the past that you can’t let go of.
Choosing a long and happy life
This is about bringing a new and profound quality of health, happiness, and fulfilment into your life.
Exercise One: Choosing a long and happy life
This exercise helps you to look at your deepest feelings about living and dying, a subject which can often be taboo in our culture, yet is immensely enlightening. You imagine your own death by illness or accident, look back at your life and decide what you would do differently next time around. Then you get another chance to live that long and happy life. Most people find this exercise much easier than they expected, and a real jewel in their own life as well as in relation to loved ones who might be facing death.
Exercise Two: Becoming fully healthy
This guides you to see yourself first as you are now and then as you would be if you were fully healthy-and find out how to get from here to there. A simple exercise that may just give you the key that you’ve been missing.
Beyond the personal self
Here you will be shown how to use images to transcend the normal boundaries of everyday self. This is really about making the spiritual dimension part of your everyday life. This works to expand your resources and potential and give you a sense of meaning and purpose even if you don’t really believe in it all.
Exercise One: Finding inner guidance
This gives you the opportunity to meet first a wise and loving guide, and then a shadow being who represents what you consider negative, but who probably has just as much to offer you. Always a wonderful experience.
Exercise Two: Tuning into others
Here you will practice “tuning in” or sending your antenna out to other people, as well as animals, plants and objects, either in order to send and receive messages, or to heal them and be healed, or to gain from their expertise and insights. Tuning in is one of my most useful tools when I work with people. You don’t need to believe that this is possible in order to benefit from this mind-expanding experience.
Dreams as turning points
This exercise shows you how to use your dreams to understand what shift you need to make in your life right now, and which personal quality or attitude can help you make that shift. You can choose any dream or dream fragment; a recurring dream is particularly powerful. You will find that no matter how difficult the dream was, this exercise will leave you with a good feeling of how it could be different. Highly recommended.