Guided imagery has been used for thousands of years for healing. You can explore a wide variety of techniques that use guided imagery in different ways. You may go on a journey, fight a battle, remember a past event, talk to an imaginary character or explore inside yourself while you close your eyes, relax and listen to your counselor.
History
The earliest guided imagery was often part of a religious ceremony. Shamans as part of healing ceremonies might narrate a journey through a real or imagined landscape or portray a disease as an opponent in an imagined battle. The thangkas painted by ancient Tibetan Buddhists were often landscapes the aspirant might follow to achieve enlightenment. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung started modern scientific investigation of guided imagery for healing, and their techniques built upon early methods of mesmerists and hypnotists before them.
Uses
In the 20th and 21st centuries, interest among therapists, clinicians and spiritual directors has been increasing. In an article in Biological Psychology in 1980, C.R. Gillespie and D.F. Peck showed that guided imagery could significantly effect their measurements of fingertip temperature, adding credence to the idea that guided imagery could manifest physical changes in the body. Various studies reviewed in the Journal of Instructional Psychology in 2006 suggest sports performance and healing are significantly increased through guided imagery. Hypnotherapists regularly use guided imagery, sometimes with a technique called "pre-rehearsal," during which you visualize a new behavior to help it take hold.
Meeting Yourself
Uses of guided imagery in counseling fall into just a few general models. One may be called "meeting yourself." This can be an imaginary journey or conversation with yourself at various ages, or it can follow the model of parts therapy or other therapies where you talk to parts of yourself. In one system, you identify your id, ego, and superego as archetypal figures (you as a child, you as yourself today and you as an older or wiser and benevolent being). In another system, you may develop characters that express a particular combination of qualities. For example, one character may be your passion and creativity, another your tendency toward laziness and dissension. And in yet another variation, a counselor may ask you to speak to parts of your body, such as your stomach or your knees.
Winning a Gift
Both in Joseph Campbell's summary of the Hero's Journey and in Senoi dream therapy, there is a model for guided imagery that allows you to problem solve by going on a journey or fighting a battle and winning a gift. The gift represents the solution to your problems, and the journey or battle helps to get you to a workable solution because it included details or metaphors for the problem. You may not immediately realize the significance of the gift, but your counselor or time may help clarify the meaning.
Metaphorical Solutions
When you are participating in guided imagery, you may or may not be aware of the process of turning your situation into a set of metaphors. The counselor may start out with a story that just seems as if it's about someone else. But the further you get, the more the themes or details resonate with your own experience. Using guided imagery is frequent during hypnosis; if you are trying to quit smoking, for example, you might be asked to imagine the first time you smoked a cigarette, to bring back the burning throat and the coughing as a deterrent in the future. You may also be asked to transform your perception of cigarettes into some metaphor that you find really disgusting.
