image is the language of the unconscious
Stable Diffusion XL prompt: weariness alchemized into hope, in the style of queer pride
“During the second quarter of the 17th-century, Jesuits and Hurons engaged in a debate over the importance and centrality of dreams. From the Jesuits' perspective, dreams were peripheral and often opposed to Christian theology. For the Huron, dreams were a central feature of their religious practice and a primary source of both personal knowledge and social empowerment.”
Contesting world views: Dreams among the Hurons and Jesuits_
Once upon a time, it was 2018. I was leading research at Coda, where everyone called me Nagle.
And I had a bodywork practice from my home in Berkeley, where everyone called me Michael.
One day I made a post to a community message board I was part of about my bodywork practice . I was particularly interested in my client’s tendencies to have active, REM-sleep style visions while on the massage table.
I tried to express this interest into the message post. “I don't know what it is exactly, but it seems clear that between the existence of dreams, DMT, ayahuasca, etc., that the visionary capacity is likely very real and inside of each of us.” I wrote.
I had 40 interested replies in my inbox in a matter of days.
Why had I gotten so many genuine replies? The Bay has no shortage of young healers trying to find a niche for their services.
It felt like I’d hit a nerve.
One client came to see me. They drove all the way across the bridge from San Francisco.
“The thing is,” they said on arrival, “I can’t be touched.”
You drove an hour to see a bodyworker, but you can’t be touched, I thought.
Huh.
“That’s ok,” I said. I was mad improving. “There are other ways we can work. You know, a lot of experience processing” - a softer way to say trauma healing - “can happen through imagery.”
I was working things out on the spot. The email I’d sent out was in fact all about imagery. Dreams. Visions. Something other than just bodywork.
In the protocol I’d just learned, the approach was to start with free association. The client shared that they have a pet at home. They gestured as if they were petting them.
“Can you see your pet in your imagination?” I asked. Not with any expectation. I was very much off my map of what I knew worked.
“I can!” They said, audibly surprised. “That actually feels good.”
Their relaxation was physically visible.
The session continued on. For me, the revelation was that an effective session could happen working through image and gesture, rather than directly through touch. I felt like I’d been bailed out of a mild emergency, being a bodyworker - who works primarily through touch - needing to work with someone who couldn’t be touched, with no prior warning.
The more I looked for it, the more imagery I found in the realm of the unconscious. Image as a pillar of art therapy. Image as the language of dreams. Image as the language of fantasy. Image as the language of psychedelics. Image as the focus of visualization practices, both for performance gains (e.g. visualizing winning a race) and spiritual exploration (e.g. visualizing mandalas and deities in Tibetan Buddhism.)
What came to me was that fundamentally, any deep healing art is working with reorganizing the unconscious, and image is the language of the unconscious.
Then from a healing point of view the question becomes: how do we learn to speak to imagery, the language of the unconscious? How do we establish a lingua franca between verbal communication and imagery?