Link to Article: https://www.sdicompanions.org/media/presence/presence-28-4-december-2022/active-imagination/

Recently, I completed a practicum to learn to direct the 19th Annotation of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. It was a wonderful and sometimes challenging process, as in this practicum we were called to increase our understanding of the Exercises in wildly expansive ways. I gained a deeper appreciation for how Saint Ignatius created the Exercises as a response to his own experience with God and in service to support others to grow in union with the divine, thus igniting their own, uniquely personal transformation.

In the Exercises, Saint Ignatius invites the participant, or retreatant, to many forms of prayer and encourages them to experience the fruit of deepening, disciplined daily spiritual practice over the course of approximately thirty-four weeks. To make the Exercises requires dedication to this work, and during it, Saint Ignatius invites us to experience for ourselves how God, Jesus, and the Spirit are moving within us and the world around us. Over the course of these many weeks, our spiritual muscles are stretched and exercised until we truly begin to experience our own, direct understanding of God, the unseen world that supports us, and the divine power that lies within our very own souls.

As I grew more conscious of how Saint Ignatius constructed the Exercises, I began to contemplate why he directs us to use our active imagination and spiritual senses as tools of transformation. Over time and study, I realized that Saint Ignatius knew that for us to achieve authentic inner metamorphosis when making the Exercises, we must not only recite prayer and read scripture but also engage our imagination in an active, conscious way.

Saint Ignatius believed that the imagination is a “faculty of the soul” and a way for God to communicate with us. Thus, in the Spiritual Exercises, he guides us to use these aspects of ourselves, telling us: “By the imagination, the soul can render an object present and, as it were, see it, hear it, taste it and so on. So that to apply this faculty of the soul and the five senses to a truth of religion (according as it is susceptible of it), or to a mystery of our Lord Jesus Christ, is what is called application of the senses” (Salai, 119).

It is through this encouragement to use our active imagination and “spiritual senses” that Saint Ignatius invites us to a deeper understanding of who and what we are. We are invited to see in new ways and to take off the blinders that we may have been wearing, allowing us to find healing and restoration, thus becoming integrated, wholesome humans capable of following the example of Jesus and becoming disciples of God.

The Importance of Imagination

Imagination, in our modern culture, often receives a bad rap. People do not believe their imagination is real, nor do they think it is connected to them. Somehow, as our culture has evolved, we have been directly cut off from a key aspect of our soul. We have lost the understanding of who we truly are. We have lost a direct way to communicate with the God who loves us. We have lost communication with the unseen imaginal world that supports and loves us. I find this deeply sad and consider it often as I witness what is happening in the world right now. If we were not so disconnected from ourselves, the world would look vastly different from how it does today. The invitation to draw inward and reconnect with our souls, our imaginations, seems like the most important work we can be doing to help save the earth.

Imagination is also a doorway to the unconscious realms of our being that are often directing how we behave, think, and live in our world. When we can access the deeper aspects of our being through active imagination, we are in fact working toward integrating unconscious, lost parts of ourselves back into our consciousness. As these parts are brought to the light and healed, we are restoring the wholeness of our being.

Spiritual Senses

Saint Ignatius offers us a path into our active imagination by encouraging us to engage our spiritual senses. For someone who is not used to working with the interior world, the suggestion of using our five senses—seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting—is a tangible place for most of us to start using our imagination. For example, if we are directed to begin to imagine the Nativity scene and apply our senses to it, we may find we can engage more deeply with the scene as a lived experience if we ask ourselves questions like:

·       What do I smell as I sit here with Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus?

·       What can I hear?

·       What do I see as Mary holds the beautiful baby Jesus?

·       What might happen if I touch and hold baby Jesus?

·       What is Joseph asking me to do?

Suddenly, we may find ourselves actively engaged in the scene and can notice what is happening and arising within ourselves. If we become skilled enough to notice and not analyze what is taking place, we begin to receive new, immediate, and illuminating information that we did not have access to even minutes before.

As we consistently practice this skill, we may notice that a whole world begins to open for us. The divine characters we are guided to encounter may begin to act and move on their own, and the scenery may shift in ways we never would have expected. Aspects of our lives (past, current, and future) may start to reveal themselves to us. We may start to act, think, and notice something about our own selves in relation to Jesus, Mary, and others that we had never considered before. We may start to see parts of ourselves in action, in our imagination, that we had never really paid attention to. We may see aspects of Jesus and our relationship to him that had never occurred to us. Instead of seeing ourselves and our lives in relationship to Jesus and God in the same old way, we experience new perspectives in real time in our active imagination.

We also may notice that our external senses draw us into a world where there are true “spiritual senses.” We begin to see with the eyes of the heart. Hear with the ears of the soul. Touch and talk from somewhere within. We learn to engage our soul. Our subtle body. An internal communication system. The true mystery of who we are. This is not easy to become aware of and requires practice and dedicated conscious awareness to what is happening internally. The length and intensity of the Spiritual Exercises creates a container for a retreatant to consistently use their “spiritual senses” to the point where, prayerfully, they begin to recognize how the internal senses arise and provide soulful messages—communication from God and the imaginal world.

What Is Active Imagination?

Albert Einstein famously said, “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.”

He meant that whatever situation we are facing, we need to rise up to a new level of consciousness to solve it. Active imagination offers us a vehicle to this level. We can transform from being deeply unconscious beings to those who are more conscious, awake, and aware—able to follow more closely the example of Jesus through use of this faculty of the soul.

How this works, of course, is mysterious and the work of our soul with God. Which makes it hard to even begin to ponder or write about, but let’s try.

As a culture, we love to talk about transformation. We love to think about it, read about it, Instagram about it. We talk about it on innumerable podcast shows. However, unless we do the conscious work of entering the deeper parts of ourselves, transformation will not happen. We cannot transform from the same place we are in, looking at ourselves from the same linear view. We must look deeper. We must see from different perspectives. We also must engage aspects of ourselves we may not want to see and parts that need to be healed. By inviting us into active imagination, Saint Ignatius sets the stage for increasing our ability to go into these deeper places more consciously and freely.

Perhaps Saint Ignatius wrote at great length about active imagination somewhere, but I have not found anything yet. I suspect that his awareness of this ability was a gift from God—a true understanding of reality and human design. To help me articulate active imagination to a modern audience, I found myself gravitating to the teachings of Jungians. The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung spent an enormous amount of time working within his own active imagination and studying active imagination in other people.

As I did my research, to my surprise, I discovered that Jung studied Saint Ignatius and the Exercises at great length. He analyzed the process and wrote about Saint Ignatius’s use of active imagination. Jung “commented on the Spiritual Exercises precisely as a system of transformation through active imagination” (Becker, 34) and talked about how “psychic life consists of unconscious and conscious together. . . . So in active imagination the conscious ‘I’ needs to step into the fantasy unrolled by the unconscious, not to control or fabricate it, but to interact in it with whatever is happening” (Becker, 35). This is, of course, precisely what we do when we make the Exercises. Jung commented that the Exercises are transformational because “letting the unconscious work and come into consciousness, giving it permission to share one’s life in a peaceful way, is already a step in healthy, healing psychic life” (Becker, 36).

Thus, I turn to a Jungian for a modern definition of active imagination. In his book Inner Work, Robert A. Johnson writes that active imagination is “a dialogue that you enter into with the different parts of yourself that live in the unconscious. In some ways it is like dreaming, except that you are fully awake and conscious during the experience. . . . Instead of going into a dream, you go into your imagination while awake” (138). What makes active imagination active is that we consciously enter our own imagination. We are not daydreaming, which is passive and mostly a waste of time and energy. We are choosing to enter a specific realm of our imagination to actively participate in whatever arises. We intentionally use our imagination in a targeted and powerful way to spark inner transformation.

Thus, Saint Ignatius invites us to directly interact with God, Jesus, Mary, and the Gospel stories in our active imagination to help us become more conscious of the divine and our reactions to it. Our intentional interactions in our imagination create emotional connections that perhaps we never had before. As a result, we open up possibilities to witness our own behavior and patterns as we interact, often finding a desire to change as we become more intimate and closely aligned with divine beings—in particular, in the Exercises, with Jesus.

Things to Consider When Working with Active Imagination

“Through Active Imagination it becomes increasingly clear that the images that appear in imagination are in fact symbols, representing deep interior parts of ourselves. Like dream images, they symbolize the contents of our unconscious. Because these interior beings have ‘minds of their own,’ they say and do things that are new to us—startling, often enlightening, sometimes offensive to our egos” (Johnson, 139).

Those of us who have made the Exercises can probably relate to the above statement. I know I can. In my earlier years of working with active imagination and not really knowing what I was doing, I was often deeply surprised by what arose to be seen. I often found it shocking and disturbing to witness what was lying just under the surface, and I wondered at how on earth these images and symbols were seemingly just waiting for me to pay attention to them. I also wonder what my life would be like if I had not paid attention and they were all still there, driving my unconscious behavior in ways that weren’t useful.

1. The Imagination Offers a Lived Experience

I had a retreatant of the Exercises who knowingly suppressed her imagination most of her life. She was taught that dreadful things can happen in the imagination. As a result, she had a tough time accessing her active imagination in our sessions. However, in one surprising moment during the Exercises, she found her imagination actively engaged. She found herself in a scene with Jesus in a boat, with a storm brewing. The disciples were wondering if they should wake up Jesus. She watched the disciples argue over this. She couldn’t believe how nauseous she felt being in a boat and the real terror she felt at the coming storm. She saw that Jesus was sleeping, and she noticed she did not want to wake him up. She waited for the disciples to wake him and was very startled to witness Jesus yell at the disciples.

As she relayed this experience to me, her whole being was lit up with the real and lived experience of being in the boat with Jesus. This vivid experience, in effect, woke her up to realizing she might not know Jesus or the situations he was in as well as she thought. I noticed how this changed her from thinking she knew everything about Jesus and the Gospels to realizing she might have more to learn and see. She opened up to new possibilities.

It was incredible to witness this retreatant experience the power of her own imagination. In this moment of lucidity, her imagination was so vivid and fluid that she was able to see her behavior clearly. She questioned why she was so timid in the face of danger while in the presence of Jesus. She clearly saw an aspect of her unconscious patterns that were affecting her ability to move forward serving God. She was able to identify a deep belief that was blocking her and decided to consciously make a choice to be less timid, to be bolder, so she could be more available to actively serve God.

I do not think that we could have talked or prayed that desire to change into existence. She needed to see, experience, feel, and commune with Jesus and the disciples to witness where she was blocked. She truly lived the experience through deep engagement of her spiritual senses. For her, the experience was so real in imagination that it became real in life. That is the power of active imagination.

2. Allow for Space and Time When Working with Active Imagination

In my own experience working with active imagination, I realized there were parts of my younger self that were buried, hidden, covered in shame. It took quite some time to let them come to the light to be drawn back to the self with love.

It can be startling when we start to work with the imagination actively. It can be hard at times to see what needs to be seen. I know I often had periods when unconscious aspects of myself required a lot of my energy and time to be brought up to consciousness. Saint Ignatius must have known that this can be destabilizing, and perhaps that is why he often kept people in the preparatory stage (disposition days) for quite some time; he wanted to make sure they were stable enough for this work. Perhaps it is also why it is recommended we move at the pace of the retreatant. The first stage (First Week) can be overwhelming if one has not ever tapped into the unconscious realms. It is an extremely hard place to be when called to look beneath the surface. I am incredibly grateful that Saint Ignatius encourages us to see a merciful God when doing this work. It makes all the difference when we begin to churn the tides of our souls.

As a spiritual director just working to write this paper, I am reminded to tread gently with this tool, as the onion needs to be peeled back slowly. We don’t want to destabilize; we want to support healing and transformation. Jung himself recommends that “independent active imagination is for those whose egos are well established and who now want or need to recover the unconscious dimension which they may have had to ignore in developing their conscious lives” (Becker, 38). This makes our observation of a retreatant feel even more important in the disposition days and First Week. Do we feel that our retreatant is ready to dive into the unconscious via active imagination, or do we think they might find it too overwhelming? I find this line of questioning useful and sobering. The imagination has been so fully discarded in our culture that it is easy to not respect its full power.

We must respect its power.

As spiritual directors, we are in a unique and sacred position of witnessing inner transformation through active imagination and building awareness of the “spiritual senses.” What a blessing and a responsibility it is. I know that when I am engaged with active imagination with my spiritual director, I can be overwhelmed by a sense of vulnerability as I share what I am experiencing. I often feel like the words coming out of my mouth sound crazy. I say this to remind myself that this is probably how our retreatants feel too. The openness and exposure can feel raw. It feels important to cultivate softness, tenderness, and deep caring for what is being exposed—and to realize that such deep vulnerability can lead, equally quickly, to a shutdown when the system is not ready for such revelations.

I am reminded of a recent session I had with a spiritual directee. She had told me, about a year previously, that she had an unconscious part of herself that she knew was driving certain aspects of her life. She asked me if there was a way for her to heal it, and we discussed some ideas. In our session the next month I was prepared to do the work we talked about, but my spiritual directee did not bring it up.

Almost exactly one year later, she brought it up again, and we were able to work with it. It took her a year to be ready and strong enough to work with this unconscious, angry part of herself via her active imagination. I am extremely glad that I did not push it. I am grateful we allowed time and grace and God to prepare her in whatever way was necessary before we engaged her active imagination as a healing tool. I will carry this lesson with me always.

Is the Active Imagination Real?

One of the questions I hear over and over when working with retreatants and active imagination is “Is this real?” I know that I also used to ask this question, and then I would follow it up straight away with “Am I crazy?” I would experience things in the imaginal realms that I had never heard another person talk about. They hadn’t been taught in church. They weren’t something I had ever read about. So how could they be real? It has taken me years of engaging the imagination consciously to no longer ask that question.

Yes. It is real. The imagination is a reality that exists just like waking life and night dreaming. It is through our imagination and dreams that our unconscious is expressed. Thus, both imagination and dreams are particularly important in personal transformation. Active imagination can be the most powerful tool we have to work with our unconscious because we can use it deliberately and in a targeted manner. Saint Ignatius directs us to use active imagination with the Gospels and insert ourselves into the scenes that most of us know so well. We enter direct communion with Jesus, Mary, the disciples. We are directed to develop our relationships with Jesus, Mary, God. We deliberately dive into these scenes and relationships to uncover what we previously could not see and, perhaps, what we previously could not believe.

In colloquy, a form of heartfelt conversation Saint Ignatius directs us to engage in with God, Jesus, and Mary (which I believe ends up being a form of active imagination), we dialogue with these divine beings. We engage in these relationships through our imagination, and in return we are given immediate information. We experience depths of emotional connections not felt before. This new information and the deep soul connections allow us to become more conscious and begin to see ourselves and the world in new ways.

How Can We Make Active Imagination Even More Real?

In the Exercises, Saint Ignatius does not just leave us to our imagination. He instructs us to write down what we see and discuss our experiences with a spiritual director. This is an important part of making the insights garnered in the imagination more real. We must bring the unseen world into the physical world so that it can be worked with here. If we do not ground what is seen, discussed, or learned in the imagination, it can run the risk of being lost. The whole experience would be lived in the imagination, in our souls, and never make it into the world that so desperately needs it.

To journal what happens in our active imagination helps us to transform ourselves. It becomes a physical, tangible reminder of our divine encounters. Of course, the physical record of our experience can go beyond writing and speaking. The imagination can be painted, danced, or sung into the world too. In doing so, we are bringing all the new information into ourselves and embodying it—right within our muscles and bones. This is what makes it real on earth. We draw the unseen into the seen. This invites even deeper transformation.

In my own experience making the Exercises, roses became an integral part of what was going on in my active imagination. They became so deeply important and symbolic to me that I cleared out all the gardens around my house and began planting rose gardens. I will be planting more roses this spring. No one around me knows why I am suddenly planting rose gardens, but I do. They are devotional gardens that signify my deep reverence for what I have been given and seen in my active imagination. These gardens are a physical representation of what is going on between me and the unseen world of holy ones. (And now all of you know my secret.)

How Do We Know When We Are in Real Communion?

Here is another question I ponder and often am asked: How do we know when active imagination becomes true communion with reality itself? With God? With the Holy Spirit? With Jesus? The saints?

My teacher, Lama Lar Short, would tell me that when it switches from me doing the work of the practice to its being done to me, Grace is at work. When I search my own experience, I can say this is true. The experiences I draw up that I feel were authentic experiences with God arose unexpectedly and not through my effort. There was engagement of the true spiritual senses. I saw with the internal way of seeing—the eyes of the soul. I heard with the ears of the soul. There was a sense of crossing into the imaginal realms—realms of existence that are outside ordinary seeing.

When I experience a moment of truth, I know it because I just know it. I’ve seen this in my spiritual directees too. Saint Teresa of Avila, a contemporary of Saint Ignatius, tells us the same thing: “God presses himself so fully against the inside of the soul that when she returns to herself the soul has no doubt whatsoever that God was in her and she was in God. This truth remains with her forever” (Saint Teresa of Avila, 123).

I look to the Jungians again to articulate this with a more modern twist:

When such a truth comes up spontaneously from the depths of the unconscious, when one sees it as an image produced from within, one feels its truth. One no longer needs to hear it from others or to try to prove it to anyone. . . . This is perhaps the essence of the meaning of these visionary experiences, as it is really the heart of Active Imagination itself; it is a way of learning from your own experience those profound truths of life that can’t be transferred from one person to another with words but can only be genuinely known through one’s own connection to the collective unconsciousness. (Johnson, 218)

Some might call this our collective connection to the divine force that is moving through all of us.

Yet here’s the rub.

We are not to actively search for these moments of truth. If we start to grasp for them, we are most certainly not going to attain them. This seems to be the great paradox of spiritual work. The more we strive, the less we achieve. I know this from my own practice. It is not hard to begin to manufacture imaginings that we want to have happen. We can begin to convince ourselves that we are having peak spiritual moments. In doing so, we can develop spiritual ego. This can happen in our spiritual directees too. This is important for us to recognize before it goes too far.

In these matters, it is best to just humbly go about our internal work. It is best to dive into our active imagination consciously but allow the images and symbols to arise effortlessly and without any engagement of our own will. The moment we start trying to make something happen, we are trouble. In this, we must be honest with ourselves and discern. We must ensure our spiritual directees are also discerning their experiences carefully.

As spiritual directors, to be as useful as possible in helping our retreatants discern these matters, it seems we need to stay practiced ourselves in using our active imagination and spiritual senses so we can be grounded in and sensitive to what is happening with our retreatants. If we shy away from using active imagination or spiritual senses in our own practice or in the Exercises, then what happens to our retreatant and their potential for deep transformation? Do our limits place limitations on their experience if we can’t go there?

It is my prayer that this paper highlights the transformational potency of active imagination and spiritual senses so that we, as spiritual directors, are encouraging the use of these God-given powers and understand why it is so important to do so.

The Invitation Extended to Us by Saint Ignatius

Saint Ignatius invites us to deepen our intimacy with Jesus, God, and our own souls through the targeted use of active imagination. We learn to follow Jesus as our example as we get to know him in our hearts and deepen our emotional connection with him. Over time, if we surrender to the process, we fall so deeply in love with him that we desire to transform and embody his divine spirit here on earth.

As our bodies, minds, and hearts heal, our usual doubts about how to move in the world fade away to be replaced by certainty and clarity. So much of what we thought was important falls away when we become clear and focused and full of faith. We may find ourselves galvanized and on a mission to serve God in ways we never could have believed before making the Exercises. Perhaps, as time progresses and we stay engaged with our spiritual senses and connected to the imaginal through active imagination, we become an unstoppable, wildly creative holy force that spreads goodness around the earth that so desperately needs it.

Imagine that.

Saint Ignatius must have known that the proper use of active imagination would open us up into new ways of being that are impossible to achieve without access to a new level of consciousness. He points us back to the faculty of our soul that has been truly forgotten or dismissed. In doing so, he helps us reclaim our God-given power, for “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline” (2 Tm 1:7, NRSV).

The key is to trust the process of the Exercises, be diligent in practice, use our active imagination and spiritual senses, and, most of all, trust that God is guiding us in the right direction. In doing so, when making the Exercises, we are invited by the loving guidance of Saint Ignatius to transform and fulfill our divine potential here on earth.

REFERENCES

BECKER, KENNETH L. Unlikely Companions: C.G. Jung on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. MPG Books Ltd, 2001.

JOHNSON, ROBERT A. Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth. New York: HarperOne, 1989.

O’BRIEN, KEVIN. The Ignatian Adventure: Experiencing the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius in Daily Life. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2011.

SALAI, SEAN. The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius with Points for Prayer from Jesuit Spiritual Masters. Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, 2020.

TERESA OF AVILA, SAINT. The Interior Castle. Riverhead Books, 2003.