How the Active Imagination Can Help Your Healing Journey

Overview: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE’s) are what we repress, avoid, and deny so that we do not have to have that experience again.  Our desire to avoid these experiences drives us to Negative Coping Patterns, Addictions, and Limiting Beliefs and are called Originating Events because they perpetuate our harmful and limiting behaviors.  In the Peer-Pods Process we journey through active imagination to find and resolve these Originating Events as a way to bring awareness and healing to these ACE’s.  As we resolve these Originating Events the need to avoid these experiences diminishes and this reduces the need for Negative Coping Patterns, Addictions, and Limiting Beliefs.  As we bring awareness to these patterns their unconscious energy declines and so the force of their unconscious hold on us also declines. To find and resolve these Originating Events the Peer-Pods Process utilizes a journey process into the imaginal realm through the use of active imagination.

Inner work journeys include connection with blocked or distorted energy in the body and follows it to an encounter with an originating event where this the block was formed.

There are many ways to begin this journey process including through feelings and sensations in the body, dreams, physical, or emotional wounds, illness and others. 

Through active imagination and a dialogue process The Worker engages with the characters in this inner setting asking what is needed for resolution. Often this process will lead the Worker to a resolution, but if not, the Worker is encouraged to, “Call for help from The Mystery.”  

At this point the Worker steps deeper into the imaginal realm and, with their attention turned toward The Mystery, they will interact with a series of mythic, archetypal, and psychic experiences that will provide energy and information that can be considered, in most experiences, to be a symbolic gift from non-ordinary reality, the unknown, the field of infinite possibilities... or as we like to call it, "The Mystery". 

This gift or symbol is considered a “Seed Symbol” or “Seed Metaphor” that can be used to create a Renewal Story for the Worker.  Meditating on this “Seed Symbol” between weekly Pod Calls enables the Worker to explore how this new experience may be a gift from The Mystery. 

The “Seed Symbol” opens the door to a larger engagement with The Mystery beyond the limitations of ordinary egoic identity.  Week after week, what the Pod Mates need is revealed by this ancient technique. 

Encountering The Mystery in this ritual setting facilitates a psychological death and rebirth transforming the Worker beyond the limitations of ego and, at the same time, provides all the Pod Mates with mythic and symbolic tools for dealing with trauma and restructuring identity.  

In this way The Mystery is kept alive and personal through direct experience.  Turning towards the wounds becomes a path to uncovering our unique gifts.  In the Peer-Pod Practice, week after week, The Mystery becomes a living presence supporting the healing process for all the Pod Mates and energizing the healing capacity of the Peer-Pod.