I moved to Korea when I was 23 to get away from myself and to be a different person. One of the scarier moments of my life was being left alone in my apartment in Korea and realizing with a stone certainty: This is the room where I kill myself. I probably don’t survive this year. It was pretty terrifying for me.

I started erratically trying a bunch of stuff – meditation, yoga, shamanic journeying. I was casting about to see if there was someone else I could be. It turns out that there was not anyone else I could be.

I started with a bunch of the usual meditation stuff, and it just kept me in my head. A lot of the instructions are all about the head – watch the space between your thoughts. Let your thoughts be spacious. Your thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, just very focused on the thoughts.

I found my way towards somatic meditation after trying everything else that did not work. I ran into Reggie Ray’s stuff and he was a last Hail Mary. I went through one of his programs, and that got everything moving.

With Reggie Ray, there was not much attention paid to thoughts. It was like: Can you feel your big toe? Can you stay with your big toe? Can you notice that there’s a quality of personality or atmosphere in your big toe? Can you notice some grieving maybe in the big joint of your big toe? Can you feel that? Can you allow that to notice itself? Not you noticing it from the head, but letting it be with itself. Now move that out to the whole foot, to the ankle, move through the whole body with that type of care, attention, and awareness. It didn’t mention thoughts much at all.

From his somatic meditations, I became increasingly able to choose: Do I want to have an inner monologue today, or not? Let’s go with no. Seems like a good day to not have one. I can just do that.

That alone was pretty much life saving. I think all the energy just drained out of my head and into the body and it finally had a place to go and be stored. It was wonderful.

I started feeling like: My inner monologue isn’t constantly going a thousand miles a minute and trying to kill me all the time. I can feel my body and walk around through the day. There isn’t a sense of void, purposelessness, and depression. I’m making friends and can be around people – it turns out I’m good with people when I’m not in abject despair all the time! It’s nice not to be in abject despair.

One of the weirder effects that I had from somatic meditation was that images started coming up. Sometimes it was just memories. Sometimes it was imaginative scenes or emotional textures. At a certain point, I was unable to ignore them.

I had to figure out: Who knows about inner imagery? Am I going insane, or is this a thing that I can work with? The Buddhists were aggressively unhelpful. I went to a couple of Vipassana retreats, and they were like: ignore inner imagery, stay away from it. I’m now pretty mad about that, because I had some insane imagery at those retreats. It would’ve been so good to work with. There was so much juice there, and they just cut me off from it.

Luckily, I found more shamanic stuff, western esotericism, and most importantly, Jung and the Jungians. I remembered that the Jungians had talked about some of this stuff, so I went back to look at them with a vengeance. That was when a lot more stuff started taking off.

Looking at inner imagery and dreams from my body was a completely different world from remembering dreams and thinking about them in my head. It was full body and full self sensing of the images and all of their latent textures and latent information. Being with it, playing it, letting it continue to move and unfold.

What shifted from this was entirely unbelievable to me. It kind of still is. I can’t explain it a lot of the time. The imaginal work started shifting things weirdly intensely, and weirdly quickly. I started wondering: Why is no one talking about this? This stuff is just available and free. Even the Jungians don’t really talk about Jungian active imagination these days.

There was a particular dream of a bison that I had. I later on went back to the dream in a trance state to check out what else was going on there, because it felt like a very powerful dream. I worked with it and stuff happened. Coming out of that dream, within days, these knots and blocks and issues that I had had around self-trust and authority my entire life, that had largely dominated my life and how I organized myself in the world, just dissolved. They just went away. That was insane to me. Even a couple of weeks later, I would look around and notice that I could trust myself and my own being. I didn't need to look for anyone else’s authority to fix me or make the person I need to be.

That would have been impossible my entire life up until that moment. Ever since then, I’ll do some imaginal work and at a certain point, the knot just gives, and this thing that’s been with me my whole life just disappears or transforms into some other way of being.

I still don’t get why no one is talking about imaginal work. It’s wild.

There is no standard imaginal work. Not even on the individual level. My session-to-session experience changes constantly. I’ve done a lot of teaching and guiding people, and person-to-person, it ends up wildly different.

The core instruction is to call up some image. We use that word, but it really doesn’t have to be visual at all. It can be an emotion. It can be a felt sense. It can be whatever. ‘The journeying object’ is another phrase I like to use for it.

You call that up. Not just into your mind and mind’s eye, but the sense of it, your felt sense, your embodied sense of it, any emotional textures or whatever else is present. Call that up. Make it all present. Take your time. Let it really be present in your space, and invite it to do what it wants to do, to continue unfolding.

I think Jung used a phrase like: Dream the dream forward. With dreams, you can call back up the dream and invite it. You can keep dreaming onward like, where else would you go? And then follow it. In Jungian active imagination, it's mostly observational. You can step in a bit and talk to figures if it feels helpful, but mostly you just watch it unfold.

The way I do it, it usually starts there, but then I step into a more navigational role. It’s not quite that I'm doing something. I like the metaphor of playing or improvising music – you can’t do whatever the hell you want in a musical improvisation group, you have to follow what the music wants. It’s more about each of your ability to sense where the music wants to go and what wants to happen now. The same type of ability is present in imaginal work. You’re not just doing or imagining whatever, you’re sensing where the Eros is – where the energy wants to go – and moving with it. You skillfully find ways to go with it and urge it on in the directions it wants to be urged on in.

Call up an image, follow it, urge it forward, and see where it takes you. A lot of the time, it’ll just be like: okay, that was weird, there’s my 40 minutes, I’m done. And then other times it will be like: my entire body exploded into multicolored cosmic sparks and I had to sit in meditation another 40 mins just to ground the energy and bring it back into my system. And now suddenly I feel like my heart center has forgiven my mother.

There’s a long tradition of people having imaginal teachers, spirit guides, and spirit teachers – including Carl Jung. Jung’s primary teacher was Philemon in his visions.

Towards the end of his life, Jung said that there was only one person who had given him the feeling that his work had actually been understood and had landed well with someone – that was Henry Corbin. Henry Corbin was a scholar of Iranian mysticism, particularly Suhrawardi. He considered his primary spiritual teacher the long dead mystic, Suhrawardi. For both of these people, their teachers were not living people hanging around. This is one of those things you can’t unsee once you see it.

In all these stories, even religious stories, people were taught in dreams or by imaginal essences. The term ascended masters does not strike me well for many reasons, but people use it to apply to this.

I was being guided by dream figures and guides, including a vast cosmic sky bison who just hung out. I had the presence of a bison behind me for two or three years. He was just always behind me and to the left ever so slightly. I could check in with him anytime. There were several others, too.

The dream material and the images themselves were often primary teachers. I would come out of imaginal journeys and realize: I’ve been going about things all wrong; this, this, and this need to shift. The knowledge was there, it had just unlocked and bubbled up.

In the early days, my experience of imaginal work was extremely fragmentary. I had a lack of self-trust and wanted someone else to tell me what was correct. The image in my head was a conveyer belt of enlightenment – I needed someone to take me and put me on the right conveyer belt, and push me through the right texts and practices. I was casting from this tradition to that tradition, this teacher to that one. On a deeper level, what my soul actually appeared to be doing was collecting three dimensional information from many different angles.

Shamanic journeying is a particular angle on imaginal journeying. That angle was important to see, especially before getting too deep into the Jungian stuff, because otherwise something would have been too rigid in the Jungian stuff.

There’s a different cosmology to shamanic journeying. They believe different things about the universe, which makes different types of practice possible. If you’re living in a very rational brain culture, it’s not even worth trying certain things because it won’t work. But when you do believe in a particular shape of the world, different things work. A lot of navigating realms came out of the shamanic work.

The shamanic cosmology is that reality is alive and it’s fractal. Reality is one giant fabric that is alive and breathing and moving. And within that, there’s humans, there’s animals, there’s a bunch of weird stuff we don’t understand. To some extent, it is extremely useful to treat many things as beings that have personhood and a personality.

In the imaginal workshops I run, that’s one of the first rules. I don’t care what you believe, I don’t care if you think it’s ridiculous. While you are practicing, every experience that you’re having and every image that you come across has personhood.

Hold that with you, treat it as if it is something to love, respect, and interact with. People have a lot of trouble with that if they’re coming from a rational place. So I say: Only believe it for 30 mins every couple of days when you’re in the practice, but believe in while you’re the practice.

I now believe in what I refer to as ontological ambignosticism – mostly just to be annoying, cause it’s an annoying term. The idea is: I don’t know, you don’t know, no one knows. A lot of my beliefs around this are drawn from Mary Midgley, a philosopher of science. She points out that the concept that there are different layers of reality that build on top of each other (e.g. physics and science as foundational, psychology at the top that is less sturdy, etc) doesn’t make sense. Instead, all things come together and hold around a center. There are certain things that have to be treated as real in biology that don’t necessarily need to be treated as real in physics. There are different gravitational centers.

This affected my view of imaginal reality quite a bit. Like, I have no idea if shamanic cultures are correct about their cosmology, or if Hinduism is correct and there are shivas hanging around somewhere. But I’ve met Shiva, I’ve met Kali, they seem separate from me, they seem to have personalities and wants and desires. There’s a ‘planet’ there, there’s something I’m interacting with that has its own rules.

I’m not saying it’s real and foundational. Just that there’s something there that I can interact with and that has its own rules. In another sense, all that exists is physical material reality and its interactions. And the materialist planet can be a useful planet to go to sometimes. But around all of these planets, the vast empty space of “I don’t fucking know, man”.

A few of my friends and I did a soul making retreat in France at Life Itself a few months ago. It was lovely – nine of us that we know and trust spending a week in the French countryside doing imaginal work with each other.

There were a few big takeaways, but one of them was the reality of what is in the space between people and how we can all perceive it. Someone will ping your energy body and others will notice it. All of this is straightforwardly real and not a metaphor or phenomenological tinkering. Some people can just put their hand on your head and say, are you ready for a shower of golden sparks? And then suddenly you are just pouring with golden sparks for a minute and a half.

Playing with the space together was really cool. You could pick things out of the room – like, I’m perceiving this, and four other people are like, oh yeah I was just thinking about that.

Having a full container where everyone you’re talking to day to day is on that wavelength was incredible. If that’s what it’s like for 10 people to take a week together, I literally cannot imagine what a society of people living that way would look like.

I think it would be indistinguishable from magic. If you went as a tourist there and just watched what happened, how people interacted, the level of personal maturity, collective responsibility, and ability to respond to each other in the world, it would just appear like magic.