Imagery : Experiencing Pandimensional Awareness

Elizabeth Ann Manhart Barrett, RN; PhD; FAAN
Health Patterning Therapist, Private Practice
New York, New York
Professor Emerita of Nursing, Hunter College
City University of New York

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Conference of the Society of Rogerian Scholars, Emerging Pattern in a Changing World, in Savannah, Georgia, November 15, 2003.

Rogers’ (1992) ideas pulled many of us into a new world of nursing like a powerful magnet. She endorsed certain health patterning modalities including imagery, and she put me in touch with Gerald Epstein's (1989, 1994, 2003) work. His seminal knowledge, wisdom, and originality regarding imagery are consistent with Rogers' postulates and principles and have illuminated my understanding and practice of the healing power of imagery. Gerald Epstein, M.D. is Director of the American Institute for Mental Imagery, New York City. Like Martha, Jerry has been my teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend.

Images live in the home of pandimensional spacetimemotion. There is no here and there, in and out, up and down, no location, no directionality in the nonlinear domain. Imagery is a unitary experience and Parse (2003) reminds us that "unitary means indivisible, unpredictable, and every-changing" (p. 17).

Imagination is an essential power tool for exploring pandimensional life. Imagery, a unitary experience that transcends Cartesian mind-body dualism, allows us to glimpse life in the arena where there are no linear spatial or temporal attributes. This domain is the home of images that we create in waking life or in dream life. Imagery exercises transport us from the domain of logical, causal conceptualization to the analogical, acausal realm of pandimensional spacetimemotion where they facilitate the seeing and doing of possibilities. The motion is not physical; rather, it is unitary human field motion, which I define as a perceptual experience of the continuously moving position and flow of the human field pattern (Barrett, 1986). Light, color, sound, and motion can arise spontaneously in imagery or can be introduced in exercises designed for use in healing.

What is Imagery?

Imagery is the universal language of the mind that uses the imagination to think in pictures, sounds, smells, tastes, or touch sensations. It’s amazing to think about the fact that there are thousands of word languages and dialects, yet imagery is a universal language used by all people regardless of the language they speak, their culture, or the country where they live (Epstein, 1994). Imagery is thought with a sensory quality rather than thought with words. In essence, we think in two ways: with words or with images. Through imagery we watch our human field movie from an intuitive place and quiet the distracting, chattering voices that often speak to us.

Imagery is a knowing beyond words that can enhance one’s power to create change. We bypass the analytical, logical mind to go "on site" to "gain sight" of feelings, beliefs, attitudes and memories (Linda Caigan, personal communication, August 23, 1999). "On site" is not a location, and to "gain sight" is also a metaphorical expression that has nothing to do with our sensory vision; rather, these expressions refer to the pandimensional awareness known as imagery. With imagery, we take a quantum leap and the net appears (Fran Greenfield, personal communication, April 25, 2003).

If imagery is the natural language of the mind, what is mind? We’re certainly not talking about the brain, and our skin does not bind it. From a Rogerian perspective, mind is a nonlocal manifestation of the human-environmental field mutual process, literally rippling throughout the universe. I think of mind as a machineless Internet. Mind is the information-processing channel between the visible and the invisible. Data travels via image, a language shared by everyone everywhere. Messages are communicated quickly in a second or two through each image.

"Modern quantum physicists and Chinese mystics both have said that what we subjectively experience as time, our limited picture of reality, is actually the continuous flow of change" (Epstein, 1989, p. 19-20). Imagery, however, is the language of no time. It takes place outside of ordinary clock time and physical space. Just as when we are dreaming, the time and space considerations of the ordinary, visible world do not exist. A picture is worth a thousand words, and seeing an image conveys much information quickly. There can be a switch from one place to another and among many time frames instantly. You can imagine a minute ago and a thousand years ago while experiencing being here and across the world or even out of this world all at once. It is a unitary sensory phenomenological experience of thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Why do we want to do imagery?

Why do we want to do imagery? Imagery provides a doorway to tap into what's going on in our lives, to understand and discover answers to everyday stresses of life, and the meaning of our symptoms and illnesses. Giving free reign to the imagination, to acausal pictures rather than sequential word-thinking, enables us to "go with the flow" of the accelerating change of helicy while getting in sync with our resonating rhythms in the integral mutual process of all that is. In imagery, we experience the principles of homeodynamics that Rogers named helicy, resonancy, and integrality.

Imagery can enhance general well being and promote health. I define health as a process of manifesting possibilities for well being by knowingly participating in the power of change. Imagery can increase comfort, decrease pain, reduce anxiety, depression and other unwanted emotions, stimulate the immune system, or help in preparation for life events such as surgery or other procedures. Imagery is safe, easy, and inexpensive. All it takes is the time and willingness to unlock the power of one’s imagination (Rossman, 1993). It's not hard work; it's hardly working (Epstein, 1989, 1994, 2003).

Imagery is a modality that allows people to more fully participate in their health care by mobilizing healing abilities using the power of the imagination. It enhances one's power; power is the human ability to participate knowingly in change through being aware, making choices, feeling free to act on intentions, and being involved in creating change. These power dimensions of awareness, choices, freedom to act intentionally, and involvement in creating change are not sequential; in fact, they cannot be separated. Individually, they do not constitute power; rather, they are what they are (awareness, choices, freedom to act intentionally, and involvement in creating change). Only when they are considered as a dynamic unity do they signify power. Power is the oxygen of the soul; imagery allows us to breathe the oxygen of power.

When we are freely making aware choices and allowing ourselves to act on our intentions, we are in the world in a powerful way. We can freely choose how we will involve ourselves in the mutual participation of creating, together with everything else in the universe, the reality of our existence. I’m reminded of something Rollo May (1975) said, "And now I go forth, for the millionth time, to create the reality of my existence." Imagery facilitates our mutual participation with all that is.

Historical Background of Imagery

Imagery has been used all over the world as a healing modality for the past 5000 or so years, as far as we know arising in Egypt where the hieroglyphs constituted the picture language of images (Epstein, 1994). However, when I was in Australia, I was told the Aboriginal peoples have been using imagery for many, many more centuries.

Before the 17th century reign of Cartesian thought came to dominate western scientific thinking, imagination held a prominent role in the healing process. People lived in "participatory consciousness" where they and the environment were experienced as one organism, the universe. As we know, conventional medicine, despite its many important advances and useful interventions and cures, still focuses primarily on the physical measurable aspects of illness from a causal perspective with little emphasis on health and healing of the whole person. You can't put the unitary person under a microscope; yet, researchers based in Rogers' science have been examining pattern manifestations of unitary human beings for several decades. Incidentally, before microscopes, no one had ever seen bacteria either, but that doesn't mean it didn't exist (Epstein, 1994). Mainstream health care is primarily an illness oriented, deterministic, militaristic approach of fighting infection, battling disease, killing germs, stamping out organisms, and conquering illness.

Nevertheless, when the paradigm shifted at the turn of the 20th century, the foundations of western science embedded in causal deterministic thinking were shaken. It was discovered that the atom was not the smallest unit of matter; rather, all of material reality is made up of subatomic particles. They are so small they can't be measured, and they have never been seen. We know they exist by photographs of the trails they leave behind. They come into existence when we observe them (Chopra, 1989, 2003).

It's a mutual process of observer and observed. And so it is with power, the capacity to participate knowingly in change; there is a mutual process of humans and environments. In the same way, through awareness and attention we transform our world and manifest our intentions with no attachment to goals, and never knowing what the outcome will be. One way of facilitating this is through imagery. And when we become aware of what is, we are more fully able to freely choose how we will involve ourselves in creating change. In other words, how and what we become aware of, as well as where we put our attention, has a great deal to do with the choices we freely make and what we are mutually creating. This is how power operates and it is true for everything in the universe, including a radical shift in health care that takes place when the new way of thinking replaces the old.

Imagery in 20th Century Science

Just as Rogers’ imagination helped shape 20th century nursing, Einstein’s imagination helped shape 20th century science. Rogers and Einstein both studied in many disciplines and used imagination to reinvent their own disciplines. With the advent of quantum thinking, the role of imagination and imagery once again flourished.

Many are familiar with Einstein's famous quote, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." However, the quote does not end there. The complete quote is: "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world" (Einstein as noted by Viereck, 1929). We know that many of Einstein’s ideas for his theories appeared to him in dreams, yet we are less familiar with the fact that he also used visualization in waking life to develop his ideas, views, and theories (Miller, 1984). Since when imaging space and time are nonlinear, it was just a quantum leap for Einstein to see that time and space are relative. In the pandimensional realm of nospacetime he saw reality differently. The images that emerged led to his theories that are now woven into the fabric of our culture, as for example, in Startrek (Miller, 1984) and the Matrix trilogy.

Einstein's predominately visual mode of thinking allowed him to "wonder" quite spontaneously, rather than getting mired down with fixed ideas. Imagery was fundamental to his special (1905) and general (1915) theories of relativity. Max Wertheimer, the Gestalt Psychologist who was a close associate of Einstein, recounted a conversation with Einstein who said, when developing the theory of relativity insights, that axioms (in words) played no role in the thought process. He quoted Einstein as saying, "No really productive man (sic) thinks in such a paper fashion….These thoughts did not come in any verbal formulation. I very rarely think in words at all" (Einstein as quoted in Miller, 1984, p. 204).

As reductionism shifted to wholism, logic shifted to analogy and thinking in words shifted to thinking in images. The reductionistic worldview was anathema not only to Einstein and Wertheimer, but also to the quantum physicists. Imagery, which they often called visual thinking, was integral to their creative, scientific discoveries (Miller, 1984). This is not surprising! The paradigm shift from the positivist, causal way of understanding reality as a mosaic of parts to the nondeterministic understanding of nonlinear, synchronistic associations required a new way of thinking in wholes.

Miller's (1984) book Imagery in Scientific Thought chronicles the vital role of imagery in the creation of 20th century modern physics, including numerous introspective accounts of scientists whose discoveries came as a "lightening flash" (Miller, 1984, p. 301). Imagery lost favor in science around 1925 when behaviorism was on the rise and visualization of the atom gave way to mathematics. The quantum properties of the atom were measured by spectral lines that serve as the atom's signature, instead of the unobservable electron orbits derived from visual thought experiments (Miller, 1984).

Research

Currently, more and more research is supporting the effectiveness of imagery as a therapeutic modality (Eller, 1999; Epstein, Halper, Barrett, Seriff, Phillips, & Lowenstein, 1997). There has been an increase in studies that demonstrate that the nervous, digestive, reproductive, circulatory, and immune systems respond physiologically to imagery. Other studies have demonstrated that those who used imagery had fewer surgical complications, shorter hospital stays and less anxiety before and after surgery (Levy, 2001). In a particular type of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) used to track brain function, results of the brain activity recorded on the MRI were the same whether people experienced something or only imagined it (Levy, 2001). PET scans provide similar evidence.

A study suggests that if a picture is worth a thousand words, images of clogged arteries might lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes. People who carried images of their damaged arteries in their wallets lost more weight and were more likely to stop smoking than those who saw pictures of their damaged arteries only once. After a year, participants in the photo group had a statistically significantly greater reduction in the average thickness of the walls of their carotid arteries compared with the no-photo group.

I was an investigator along with Gerald Epstein and others in a study funded by NIH. Forty-seven percent of the people in the experimental imagery group were able to decrease or discontinue their medications, while only 18% of the people in the control group were able to do so. Participants did not have a decrease in their pulmonary functioning after decreasing or discontinuing their medications. Also, the people in the imagery group became more powerful from the beginning to the end of the 16 weeks of the study as measured by Barrett's (1986) Power as Knowing Participation in Change Tool (Epstein et al, 1997; Epstein et al, in press). The quantitative study will be published in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine (Epstein et al, in press) and the qualitative study was published in Alternative and Complementary Therapies (Epstein et al, 1997).

The first attempt to quantify the imagery process was in 1909 by Betts (Kwekkeboom, 1999). Currently, Kristine Kwekkeboom's (1999) research indicates that two factors are involved in imaging ability: the vividness of the imagery and the ability to become absorbed, i.e. imaginatively involved, in the imagery. It’s helpful to use as many senses as possible. For example, rather than saying, "I see myself lying on the beach," just let yourself be there on the beach in the moment, feeling the warm sand, listening to the ocean, and smelling the sea air.

A beautiful example of being imaginatively involved in imagery was in Eugene O’Neal’s play, Long Day’s Journey into Night that I recently saw on Broadway. Edmund speaks to his father, Tyrone.

"You’ve just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They’re all concerned with the sea….I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself – actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow’s nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which sleep together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see – and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! (O'Neal, 2002, first published, 1956).

What beautiful examples of images of light, color, sound, and motion!

In summary, there is considerable evidence that ancient tradition, modern research, and human experience support the practical effectiveness of imagery. Most healing, wisdom, and spiritual traditions use it in one way or another. It is a pro-active way of helping others and ourselves, since it evokes the vast human potentials of imagination and will, consciousness, and power as knowing participation in change.

Thinking by Analogy

Imagination is an analogical function that operates as a process that sees the whole of something (Epstein, 1981). The relationship of all things and beings has

engendered a corresponding method of knowledge called analogy that aids the discovery of essential truths. To think by analogy is a qualitative way of seeing the correlations among events. Rather than the logic of cause and effect, which works well in explaining the physical, mechanical world, analogy allows us to see the connections, the relationships of one thing to another. Imagery operates in the pandimensional acausal domain where wholes are seen, rather than parts and intuition and analogy prevail rather than logic. The analogical is a way of understanding and experiencing pandimensional awareness of the invisible reality.

Logical versus Analogical Thinking

Let me cite an example of the difference between logical and analogical thinking. "When we perceive the world as most people usually do, through logical, linear, causal thinking, we attempt to break it down into small pieces and find the sequences that lead from one piece to the other. Logical thinking is similar to watching a train round the bend: You see one car at a time, with maybe just a little bit of the car that went before it. But imagery (using analogical thinking) puts us in a balloon hundreds of feet above the track, high enough to see the entire train and several miles of track, as well as the town it came from and the city it's going to, the fields through which the train runs, and the mountain range in the distance. You grasp the whole picture and see how the variety of manifestations is related. In much the same way, imagery can help us perceive relationships between thoughts, feelings, symptoms and stressful life situations that we wouldn't otherwise realize" (Rossman, 1993, p. 297). Imagery is looking at the forest rather than the trees. It helps us see the big picture of our lives.

Thinking by Analogy in Health Patterning Practice

Relating thinking by analogy to health patterning practice, if someone has had a heart attack, we would wonder if the person had some kind of heartbreak -- perhaps the loss of a loved one, disappointment in a career, a broken relationship that was meaningful. Being heartsick, having heartache, eating your heart out, all have roots in the arena of love (Epstein, 1989). Understanding what is going on in a person's life provides a guide to designing imagery for healing the heart in a unitary way. This approach is different from and adds a new dimension of healing to the conventional physical and chemical approach to healing a heart attack and other forms of so called "heart trouble." As I imagine we have all had some form of heartsickness, here is an imagery exercise designed to help with matters of the heart that often get to the heart of the matter. It’s called "Arrows of Hurt"(Epstein, 1989, p. 80). If you are using this for yourself, you might want to record it and then listen to it giving you the instruction in your own voice when you are actually doing the exercise.

"Arrows of Hurt"

Close your eyes. Breathe out through your mouth with a long, slow expiration and in through your nose at a normal pace. Again, breathe out long and slow, releasing everything you want to be rid of and breathe in everything you need to nurture yourself. Now breathe out everything interfering with your well-being and breathe in beautiful blue healing light. Resume regular breathing. Imagine that you are gently unzipping your chest wall. Reach in and take out your heart. Hold it in your hand. Remove all the arrows of hurt piercing your heart. Remove them, one by one, and toss them away. Look at the wounds, seeing them all closing up quickly while you are telling your heart you love it. Clean up all the sore spots where the arrows were. Gently massage your heart. Now, toss your heart straight up into the cosmos where it receives the nutrient energy of the universe. Retrieve it; hold it in your hand seeing it become a clear, crystal heart, clean and clear. See coming into this clear heart one or many of the people you have loved, smiling and laughing as they come in and know that you are united with them forever. See your heart as the clear crystal reflecting as a prism all the colors of the rainbow. Your heart now becomes your flesh and blood heart and you hear the lub-dub, lub-dub, that now sounds also like love-dove, love-dove. Replace your clean and pure heart back into your chest cavity, continuing to hear the lub-dub and knowing that your heart has healed. Gently rezip your chest wall. Then open your eyes.

Client Example: Heartbreak at 30

Recently, a 30-year-old professional man came to see me after having a heart attack. He has given me permission to share his story. Nevertheless, certain details have been changed to protect his identity. There was no family history of heart disease, and he had none of the so-called risk factors except elevated cholesterol that was determined after the attack. The day of the attack, he was working out in his home, developed severe chest pain, and his mother who was visiting heard his cry for help. She called his wife, who is a physical therapist. She came immediately and took him to the nearest hospital, told them he was having a heart attack, and they did nothing but have him wait on a stretcher. No words, no aspirin, no nothing. He was experiencing extreme terror. Sometime later, he heard them saying, "we're losing him." Three days later he woke up in the CCU, having had 3 stents put in as well as an implantable defibrillator, due to a lingering arrhythymia. His personal experiences with the health care system remain ambivalent since on the one hand, lack of attention possibly almost cost him his life, and on the other hand, he is also celebrating the advances in cardiac health care that probably allowed his life to be saved.

Life after Death

I started seeing him shortly after he began cardiac rehab. He was told he had "died" due to ventricular fibrillation, but was revived with defibrillation. He understandably had an enormous fear of "sudden death" with much anxiety and frequent panic attacks. I thought that it was amazing that none of his health care providers had asked him what was going on in his life at the time of the attack. But then I realized that rarely do any of my physicians ask me about what is happening in my life either. When I asked him, he cried as he told me that the night before, after having been influenced by his father's continuously voiced concerns, he had told his mother that he thought she was bringing her various physical illnesses on herself, and that he thought she was killing herself and that was killing him. Now, he felt so grateful to her for what he called "saving my life." He told me how she came to the hospital every night for 4 weeks. She told him that his ideas about her "physical" and "mental" health had not changed her loving feelings toward him. Now, a few months later, he feels the universe sent him several powerful messages. One is that what he told his mother was not about her, but rather was an expression of old unresolved anger on his part; he is making reparation for this with her. Another is that there really is no such thing in this world as predictability, and therefore, security, certainty, safety, and permanence are actually illusions. This awakening, of course, was experienced by many after 9/11/01, and has been experienced in times of terror by many for millennia. Although unpredictability is a tenant of Rogerian science, we can choose to live in the present rather than the past or future and choose to powerfully create thoughts, feelings, and actions conducive to our individual definitions of unitary well-being. Recognizing that only the physical body is impermanent and that there is no such thing as death of the unitary human being comforts many.

Mantra: It's Not An Emergency

In health patterning sessions, this young man is learning to think by analogy. For example, he has often been "in a flutter" "taking care of everything," from age 16 after he had to go to work to help support the family. The arrhythmia that this client experienced could be viewed as a hyperarousal state of living in an emergency state. He hadn't really been aware that he needed to feel safe, which he hadn't most of his life. I used an analogical approach, suggested by Epstein (1994, 2003) in working with him to get to "the heart of the matter," along with imagery exercises and exercises of will, such as stopping techniques to use when frightening thoughts intruded. He learned to image washing the thoughts away with a firefighter's hose and when picking up the phone to pause and say, "I am safe; there's no emergency." Saying "it's not an emergency" is a good mantra for all of us to use to calm ourselves when we become anxious and go into fight or flight overdrive.

What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted?

At the beginning of the 2nd session I played the CD of Jimmy Ruffin singing, "What becomes of the broken hearted?" He began to cry. I asked him what had broken his heart. He said he felt as if he was still trapped in past happenings in his family of origin and remnants of what he described as growing up in an insane asylum. I gave him an imagery exercise where I asked him to go into the library of his life and throw out all the old stories. Those old stories played a role in breaking his heart and he doesn't need them anymore.

Resonancy Exercises Using Different Colors of Light

Our work is ongoing and as I help him explore his own heartbreak, I continue to learn about mine. I believe that every client who crosses my threshold comes to teach me something about myself. He has many issues with family, finances, and health that he now sees as triggering his heart to be "in a flutter." Resonancy exercises using different colors of light have helped synchronize field pattern manifestations of his heart and brain and that has quieted his life. He was habitually experiencing being out of sync with his environment with alternating overactive and underactive rhythms. Low frequency, long waves representing the red end of the light wave spectrum in general energize people and high frequency, short waves represent the violet end of the light wave spectrum and in general calm people. I most often use blue, green, yellow, violet and white light, although this varies with the individual person's momentary experience.

Therapeutic Touch Turns Off the Emergency State

When I first offered TherapeuticTouch (TT) to him, he said he'd try it, but he wanted to be upfront about the fact that he was very skeptical. I told him that TT is a way to turn on and tune into the universal healing energy all around us. I reminded him that TV and radio waves are all around us, but nothing happens until we turn on the TV set or radio, and tune into a channel. When he saw that TT helped him to just "let go" of anxiety related to his concerns, he welcomed it. During TT, he often does cleansing imagery such as bathing in a rainbow of light or standing in the ocean cleansing himself with a pumice stone made of sand or standing under a shower head gently spraying him with sparkling cobalt blue light. The heart attack was a turning point to turn toward the truth of his life and to turn off the emergency state he had lived in much of his life. To help him heal issues with his family, he found the healing the family exercise helpful. You might find this useful if you have any heaviness in your heart related to family members, whether they are living on earth or have passed on to a different existence.

"Healing the Family"

Close your eyes and breath out through your mouth with a long, slow exhalation. Breathe in through your nose taking only half as long as on the out-breath. Breathe out a stream of gray smoke; breathe in blue light. Breathe out releasing pain and breathe in courage. Go to your heart. Fill it with love. Stand in a middle of a circle with your family members standing around you. Tie a red satin ribbon around your waist and then extend the ribbon outward to each of your family members. Send a message of love along the red ribbon from your heart to each of them. Know that through your heart you are healing them and yourself as well. Receive a message back from each of them along the red ribbon. See each of them peaceful and manifesting well-being.