Guided imagery engages all of your senses, allowing you to create vivid and immersive mental experiences that can influence your body and mind in powerful ways. While imagery certainly includes what you see mentally, it also consists of what you hear in your inner ear, sensations and emotions that you feel inside, and even what you smell and taste in your imagination. Some people imagine vivid visual images with color, sound, smell, and sensation, while others may experience sounds, songs, or thoughts in their heads without any pictures.
By using imagery, you can influence and stimulate changes in bodily functions typically thought to be beyond conscious control.
Imagery of various types has been shown to affect heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory patterns, oxygen consumption, carbon dioxide elimination, brain-wave rhythms and patterns, electrical characteristics of the skin, local blood flow and temperature, gastrointestinal motility and secretions, levels of various hormones and neurotransmitters in the blood, and immune system function. International Review of Mental Imagery, vol. 1, ed. A. Sheikh (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1984).
Imagery is a natural language of a major part of our nervous system.
Imagery can help you, whether you have simple tension headaches or a life-threatening disease. Through imagery, you can learn to relax and be more comfortable in any situation, whether you are ill or well. You may be able to reduce, modify, or eliminate pain or other symptoms. You can increase or decrease blood flow, muscle tension, or modulate your immune system response.
Other major health problems including heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and neurological illnesses are often complicated by stress, anxiety, and depression. The emotional aspects of any illness can often be helped through imagery, and relieving the emotional distress may in turn encourage physical healing. Good medical care for the serious problems mentioned above is essential and perfectly compatible with imagery.
If you choose to have therapeutic treatments of any kind, acknowledge them as your allies in healing and include them in your imagery. If you are taking an antibiotic or chemotherapy, imagine the medicines coursing through your tissues, finding and eliminating the bacteria or tumor cells you are fighting. If you have surgery, imagine the operation going smoothly and successfully and your recovery being rapid and complete.
There is good evidence that this type of preoperative preparation reduces recovery time and complications from surgery. Comparative treatment strategies and their interaction with locus of control in the reduction of postsurgical pain and anxiety,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, vol. 50, no. 3, 1982, 439–441.
Imagination plays a far more important role in our lives than most of us realize.
For imagination sets the goal “picture” that our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of “will,” as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.
