What Is Active Imagination? A Jungian Approach to Healing and Self-Discovery
Early on in my healing journey, some friends encouraged me to attend something called a trance dance. A shaman was in town facilitating it. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. We gathered at a house beforehand and set intentions together. Then we all drove over to a yoga studio, put on blindfolds, and began moving… Or maybe unraveling is a better word.
For at least an hour, we danced, crawled, stretched, and wandered through the space to a wildly varying playlist of music. The experience felt like a ritual, kind of chaotic, and dreamlike in moments. My intention going into the experience had been unity. At the time, I thought I meant unity in my relationship. I thought I was seeking connection with another person.
What I didn’t expect was to have an imaginative and deeply embodied experience of unity within myself and with existence itself.
I imagined that I became the sky. Then the clouds. Then the rain. Then the grass. Then snakes and crawling beasts moving across the earth. I encountered different emotional parts of myself- my sadness, my fear, my love, my gratitude, and they began communicating with one another in a way that felt beyond ordinary cognition. It was symbolic, emotional, bodily, and mythic all at once. Afterward, we sat in a sharing circle and spoke about our experiences.
And for years, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I couldn’t stop thinking about how something so simple- movement, music, imagination, the body- had unlocked something so profound from within myself. Years later, while sitting with one of my mentors, the sentence suddenly came out of my mouth:
“I want to bring trance dance to people.”
He simply replied:
“Then do it.”
That moment became the seed of what I would eventually call Otherworld Movement Method.
Other World Movement
Otherworld Movement Method is a group movement practice that I offer to yoga and treatment communities rooted in blindfolded free movement, altered states of consciousness, symbolic experience, ritual, music, emotional processing, and depth psychology. Participants move without choreography or performance. The blindfold creates a temporary withdrawal from the external world, allowing attention to turn inward toward emotion, imagery, sensation, memory, intuition, and unconscious material. Over time, I began to understand that what I had experienced in that first trance dance had deep parallels to something well established within Jungian psychology: active imagination.
Carl Jung developed active imagination as a way of consciously engaging with the unconscious mind. Rather than merely analyzing thoughts intellectually, active imagination invites us into direct relationship with the symbolic and imaginal world arising within us.
Carl Jung once wrote, “Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.” He believed the unconscious was profoundly creative and self-organizing when approached consciously rather than repressed or dominated.
In active imagination, we allow unconscious material to emerge through images, symbols, movement, fantasy, dialogue, art, sensation, dreams, or spontaneous emotional expression. Instead of dismissing these experiences as meaningless, we enter into relationship with them- we ask questions of them.
Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson described active imagination as “dreaming with your eyes open.”
The goal is not to escape reality or indulge fantasy for fantasy’s sake. The goal is to create a bridge between the conscious and unconscious mind so that deeper truths, conflicts, emotions, and possibilities can emerge into awareness. And importantly, active imagination is not passive daydreaming. There is an interaction involved.
Active imagination can happen a lot of ways: through movement, dance, art, journaling, visualization, dreamwork, role play, or entering into dialogue with different “parts” of the self.
Sometimes in therapy, active imagination looks surprisingly simple.
I might have a client close their eyes and imagine speaking to a younger version of themselves or perhaps with their anxiety as though it were a character sitting across from them. I may invite a grieving person to imagine a conversation they never got to have. Perhaps a trauma survivor allows their body to complete movements that were frozen during overwhelming experience or client who feels emotionally numb begins drawing images that carry emotion before words can.
What matters is not whether the imagery is “real” in a literal sense. What matters is that the psyche often speaks symbolically long before it speaks logically. And many people are starving for symbolic, imaginal, embodied experiences in a culture that overwhelmingly prioritizes rationality and productivity.
We are taught to think our way through suffering, to analyze ourselves, but the unconscious does not primarily communicate in spreadsheets and intellectual conclusions. It communicates in images, sensations, symbols, emotions dreams.
This is part of why active imagination can be so powerful therapeutically. It allows people to access material that may be difficult or impossible to reach through purely cognitive conversation alone.
Jung believed that healing involved more than symptom reduction. He believed it involved individuation: the process of becoming more fully oneself. Becoming oneself requires relationship with the unconscious, not domination over it. I think this is part of why that first trance dance affected me so deeply all those years ago. For a brief moment, the rigid boundaries of my ordinary identity softened. Something ancient, symbolic, emotional, and deeply alive moved through me. I experienced not only insight, but participation. Connection. Mystery.
And perhaps that is part of what active imagination offers us- a way of remembering that there is more within us than the conscious mind alone can access. When we are willing to enter that conversation with the deeper self, something inside us begins to move toward healing on its own.