Emotions, Sensations and Images.
Emotions, Sensations and Images.
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The key to the process of imagery meditation lies in the connections between emotions, sensations, and images. People commonly think of emotions as consisting only of feelings such as happiness, anger, satisfaction and sadness. We see emotion more broadly, as our movement to stimuli. Emotion literally means “movement from”.
Therefore, emotion equals movement, and movement is the essence of life, our elan. Sometimes our movements take the form of inner feeling such as happiness, anger, satisfaction, and sadness, feeling states that have duration over time and that reverberate within us; sometimes they take the form of physical action or reactive outbursts such as displays of anger or surprise, which are discharged immediately.
To our way of thinking, there is no life without emotion - that is, without the movement experienced in response to stimuli. Emotion is life, and emotion has both the outward form of action or reaction and the INWARD form of feeling.
Emotions are intimately connected with images. Every emotion can manifest itself as an image. There is a simple way you can prove this to yourself. Simply ask yourself to “see” any feeling that you have. If you are happy, ask yourself what your happiness looks like; if you enjoy sports, ask yourself what your enjoyment looks like; if you do not like stupidity, ask yourself what stupidity looks like. In every case, I assure you, an image will come to you.
This is your image. No one else in the world has precisely the same image. It is the visual form of your feeling. Images give form to emotions.
Sensations
Sensations
An image is the mental form of a feeling. But there is also a physical form - sensations. A feeling has certain physical sensations associated with it. When you are angry, for example, you often feel a constriction in your chest. When you are happy, you often experience a sense of lightness throughout your body. Just as a feeling has physical sensations associated with it, so does an image. There are no images without accompanying sensations.
In imagery work, you use your images to change your emotions or your sensations. In essence , you use images to create and affect your experience. This is how you do it: As you work on your images and change them, you simultaneously change and create the sensations and emotions that accompany them. Once the image changes, so does the emotion, and so do the sensations. Like the sides of an equation, emotion and image are equal, two expressions of the same reality, and sensation is attached to both. When you change the image, you change the whole equation. Then you will see that the images are indeed a road to good health, both physical and mental.
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