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I’ve been thinking a lot about imagination’s role in perception and sensation—the workings of what you might call the body-mind. Because the more time I’ve spent training in somatically-informed coaching and therapy spaces, the more I’ve sometimes noticed an implicit thread of fetishisation for a kind of purely physiological reading of embodiment.
Which, I get. Getting out of the thinking brain back into the body is the whole point of this kind of therapeutic work; an antidote to our modern Cartesian mode of thinking. The healing potential, individually and collectively, of embodied knowledge can’t be overstated. Yet, I wonder if privileging the only material “five senses” over the imagination means subtly upholding a world-view we intended to break down. Or means people with interoception issues (not always sensing, or having words for one’s bodily cues, sensations, or emotions) feel left out or broken.
My wondering comes from two places, both personal to me but maybe you can relate. First, being neurodivergent and living with chronic pain via migraines, fibromyalgia, and arthritis. And therefore needing to accept that I might have different modes of experiencing and knowing, and adapting therapeutic advice accordingly. And secondly, being a spiritual person with a philosophy of panentheism that necessarily includes animism. From both of these perspectives, the imagination isn’t just a friendly ally to the body’s felt senses, like touch or smell; it is a sense. It’s the body-mind’s antenna, applying language and transmitting meaning regarding the known and beyond-known of immediate experience.
In the intricate web of sensation and perception I have felt, and am continuing to feel into, imagination has an important place as an adaptive, resourceful, inseparable extension of grounded, earth-centred, and embodied awareness. For me, coming to imaginary associations is a natural result of sensing into my body. In waving my hands up and around my body, I can feel the cool sea breeze on my skin. I can let my fingers twinkle and stroke the air like water. I can imagine them as dancing strings, as tentacles reaching out to touch. I can imagine lengthening out my reach, as an octopus would, extending beyond what my physical body can physically allow. And I can extend my embodied sensation, in turn. By playfully enlisting my imagination as an (equal to and within, if somehow beyond) physiological sense, my other senses are heightened.
At least one study has shown that divergent thinking (that is novel and imaginative modes of thought) are higher in autistic individuals. In allowing, rather than blocking imagination in the process of listening to and responding with our body, we can embrace an instinctually embodied form of natural adaptation, perceptual and linguistic. And by extension, the “as-if”ness of the imaginal can also emerge in relational contact with another—human or otherwise—and deepen or enhance our exchange and the possibilities that might arise within it.
Recently, I felt like I utilised the imaginal sense as an adaptive strategy to articulate and further sensation in coming to know a place, and my relationship with it, through some creative play. The place being a natural ocean pool that I frequent often but have only just felt brave enough to enter when no one else is present, on account of not being a strong swimmer. Despite my anxiety, my body craves the soothing sensations of this body of water and the enchantment that interacting with its many fish brings me.
By noticing the immediate sensation of the cold paint on my fingers and palms, its vibrant colour, its smooth, slippery texture on the paper, I felt into inner sensation too; my heart rate increasing, my muscles stretching as I spread the paint and my arms wider in movement, an echo of the sensation of the same motion in water, a dare of both physical discomfort and the visual/emotional excitement and found under the surface. “I’m swimming.”
In creating in this way—without any care for the outcome—I gave myself time to play, to commune with nature and magic/God, and I gave myself an opportunity to practise a certain feeling and shape that I valued and sought to learn to embody on a cellular level. I don’t think this would have happened if I limited my “knowing” to simply what I could feel in my body. If I hadn’t given the imaginal equal weight to the sensuous.
In this way, I was able to “coax the breathing body into a unique dance” as author David Abram would say, where I could listen more deeply to my present experience, as well as sense into and express its longings. In fact, experiences of creating something where I feel into my body and enhance my connection with the natural world in and beyond me via the imaginal, serve to trouble the fiction of what we might call the partition between the body-mind and the world itself. Or as Abram says, the boundaries of the body are indeterminate, “more like membranes than barriers, they define a surface of metamorphosis and exchange.”
When interacting with a fish, I notice its expression. It notices mine. We are in a vibrant dynamic, a dance of movement and action, for better or worse. I am in an exchange with every pigeon I step in front of on a footpath and every growing plant I pass on a walk. One’s nervous system is activated by me, one I breathe carbon dioxide into. One might annoy or delight me. One’s oxygen sustains me. It can’t be any other way. And it’s in noticing and sensing into these relationships, that I can imagine (know beyond knowing) these others as autonomous agents, like me—separate but entirely interdependent.
To participate in an intersubjective experience with another (any other) is to inherently inhabit an animist framework; one where the sensory body’s ecology is felt, and imagined emotionally, as deeply connected to that other, or environment. Or as Abram says, “mortal limits in no way close me off from the things around me or render my relations to them wholly predictable and determinate.” At the level of the sensory, we are all animists. Whether we like it or not.
All treating the imagination as a sense does, is give us the language to expose this animism present in our body’s knowing—and signalling its apparent but not-yet-known—before words and meaning can. And for those of us who currently associate exploring the body’s own sensations with danger, it allows us to commune with another/all in adaptive ways that tap into our awareness and ground us.
Noticing five things you can see/touch/smell/hear/taste in the present moment becomes magical when we sense into the relational space between ourselves and these things. “I notice a tree” might expand into “What message do I notice that tree is sending me, if I listen? How can I use my felt sense to find out? What response would I like to send back? How can I do that with my body and imagination i.e. energy?” This is how we experience connection and kinship as a lived, constantly created reality. A way of doing life by noticing, and firming up, webs of relationship. Of mutuality, both creative and destructive, both supportive and antagonistic, both give and take. All ultimately reciprocal and integral.
Connecting with our felt senses and their wisdom from an embodied place can only aid us in coming into right relationship with ourselves, each other, and the natural world we’re a part of. And it’s urgent to our survival, and thriving, as a species. Considering the imagination (however unquantifiable) as a sense as vital as hearing or seeing, can only amplify and unsettle, if not outright decolonise, this process.
Because it takes suspending everything we think we know about the material, the rational, the measurably correct, to find that we can come to know what was sensed there all along. And what so many non-Western and Indigenous voices have told us again and again. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith says “decolonisation must offer a language of possibility, a way out of colonisation.”
Living as if our creative consciousness, our imagination, were an equal part of the body-mind’s senses allows us to experience our very being as a manifold, interconnected, rhizomatic network of responses. Our imagination isn’t just the tool of dissociation we’ve used it as in the last 300 odd years. It can help us to make art, to listen, to speak, and to see the world as alive with magic.
Your imagination, when accessed as a sense, as grounded as hearing or tasting, can help to disclose to you a “wild-flowering proliferation of entities and elements, in which humans are thoroughly immersed”, as Abrams says. Like everything, witnessing and being deeply present with our bodies (including our experience of the imaginal) doesn’t look the same for each of us. It shouldn’t. If the language you’ve inherited doesn’t fit your experience, find a different one.
A collective will towards grounded imagining might even make for an animistic, ecological paradigm shift toward (back to) living in right relationship with the world in and around us. I hope so. It starts with remembering that you are no less a relational, entangled (eco)system of body-mind processes and responses—from the physiological to the beyond-knowable—than a rainforest or desert or estuary. Feeling this to be true with every fibre of your being will allow you to see everyone and everything as diverse, inter-species kin. Bringing you into greater presence and awe.
Tarot card of the week: The Hanged Man
This week is ripe with profound perspective shifts, should you want one. Of course, not many people do when they necessarily come on the wings of discomfort or else outright suffering. The Hanged Woman (the name for this card in my deck, Neo Tarot) is the very picture of uncomfy, reminiscent of something somewhere between a jester’s uncanny upright-down play and a saint's (or witches’) slow and painful execution.
In many martyr stories, the perspective of the persecuted runs counter to all notions of consensus reality. Saint Lawrence, when being roasted alive by Romans, mockingly called out “Turn me over, I’m done on this side!” Even the historical Jesus’ “cry of dereliction” whilst being crucified (interpreted by the church as his suffering in taking on the “sins” of the world) was a direct quote from the first line of David’s Psalm 22. In other words, he was singing a song of lament that many in the crowd would have known as well as him. That song goes from expressing pain and fear, to fortifying one’s trust in God’s will. A teaching moment, for sure.
Suffering is an emotional doorway. Whether or not we walk through it is a matter of perspective. To have things not go our way is to shatter illusion. And that is a gift; a great Mahakali of bubble-bursting insight. And it’s one most of us in the tidy and sanitised West will do everything we can to shelter ourselves from. The Hanged Woman says: what if instead of struggling in vain, you surrendered? What if you looked beyond dualistic notions of good fortune and misfortune, and tried seeing everything as divine? How would you act, who would you be? What would you create? And can you try that perspective on, right now? Even if it’s just for 20 seconds.
The idea of transcending suffering is edgy and radical. It often goes against everything we’ve made of ourselves. It doesn’t seem possible. Maybe it isn’t for many, many lifetimes. And yet, spiritual figures the world over corroborate that it is. And they all outline a similar path of practice: renounce illusion, let go, be still, surrender, trust. Dip a toe in this week by journaling on the questions above and adding a few more of your own! If you get stuck, lean on gratitude lists and go from there.
Xo Jerico
P.S. I don’t normally do this, but in celebration of the Summer Solstice, I’m offering during-business-hours live tarot readings for the next week or two only, for those of you in the USA. I’m available from 9am—5pm PT while I’m on the West Coast, so book now if that applies to you! After next week, I’ll go back to being available for live readings in the evenings (US), mornings (Europe), and daytime (Oceania), and recorded video readings are always available, anytime. <3