I’ve heard it said that cultivating imagination is one of the greatest gifts you can give to a child.
I agree. And I also believe it’s one of the greatest gifts you can give to yourself.
If we were lucky enough to receive this gift as children, we may have lost it as we grew up and entered mainstream society. This is where imagination is potentially threatening to those people who want to keep us small, and in a box that is most convenient for them.
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere - Albert Einstein
What if we don’t want to live in that box anymore?
Breaking free is something that needs to be imagined before any real movement can happen. A wild horse would break free in an instant.
Unfortunately many of us have been tamed and broken. We don’t believe in our wildness anymore. We don’t trust in it to take care of us.
Creating space for imagination is one of the most potent gifts we can give to ourselves, and others.
Everything you can imagine is real - Pablo Picasso
If we can imagine our freedom, then we’re experiencing it here and now. We’re already free. It sounds so simple and yet it’s not always easy.
Perhaps we don’t yet believe that we deserve this freedom. That it could be a reality for us right now. And yet this is only true if we look to our past conditionings or wounding as evidence for our disbelief.
Who are we beyond this? If we allowed ourselves to feel the pain and transmute its energy, what might we discover beyond the wounding and conditioning? If we gave ourselves the gift of imagining for just 5 minutes a day, what is now open to us that we didn’t have access to before? What are we able to feel that we couldn’t feel before?
Practice: I challenge you to look at a specific area of your life that you are struggling with right now, and allow yourself to really feel the pain of it. Allow any feelings to come up to be released. Take as much time as you need, and feel free to journal around exactly how you feel. Give yourself enough time to do this, and trust that you will know when you feel complete. When you are ready, start opening yourself up to the reality of feeling differently in this specific area. It may feel extremely challenging at first, but don’t give up. Play some soothing music and set a timer for 5 minutes. Start imagining the best way things could unfold from now on. Even if it seems really far-fetched or out of reach, I challenge you to stretch yourself. If thoughts from the past come up, remind yourself that the past is the past. Imagine how you really want to feel, right now. When the timer goes off, stop and just notice how you feel. Spend some time journaling around these new feelings. Also notice what happens as you go about your life. Are new opportunities presenting themselves? Stay open and curious. Start gathering evidence for this new story you are writing.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand - Albert Einstein
