Imagine that you can make yourself incredibly small and travel inside the body and repair its cells structure and balance its flows from within.

Imagine you can travel across time and visit a younger self and provide the counsel and mentorship that younger self needed in a time of ordeal.

Imagine you can communicate with your Self on a higher level, and get a wiser perspective on all your issues – and return with a road map that will get you where you need to go.

Imagine that you can reduce pain with your mind, and can develop this ability to the point where you can dispense with meds even when undergoing root canal work.

Imagine you can go to a place where you can review your soul’s contract – the set of lessons and tasks you may have agreed to undertake before you came into your present life experience – so you can now remember and complete your true life mission.

Imagine a workplace that is no longer toxic or stressed out because people make space every morning to share dreams and check whether an innovative solution or a fun idea has come to someone in the night.

I have seen all these things accomplished, through the power of imagination. What we can imagine has a tendency to become real in our bodies and our world. So let’s imagine peace and healing. Let’s imagine a world in which humans hear and respect the voices of trees and oceans, and join in conscious community with all that shares life with us in the fragile bubble of the ecosphere.

Let’s imagine more than consensus enforcers believe possible. As Ursula K. LeGuin argues in The Wave in the Mind, “The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.” By offering “an imagined but persuasive alternate reality” we can move the mind from “the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way to live.”

The poets give us the best practical guidance on how this works. “Everything we formulate in the imagination,” said William Butler Yeats, “if we formulate it strongly enough, realizes itself in the circumstances of our life, acting either through our own souls, or through the spirits of nature.”

Let’s remember and live by the open secret that Rabindranath Tagore expressed, with a poet’s clarity: “The stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results.”

Related workshops:

 The Temple of Shamanic Dream Healing, 5-day adventure at Mosswood Hollow, Duvall WA, July 16-20

Healing through the Imagination, weekend workshop in Chicago, September 8-9

The Temple of Shamanic Dream Healing, 5-day adventure – and perhaps the soul vacation of a lifetime – at Kalani in Hawaii, January 27-February 1, 2013