-IBIS-1.5.0-
rx
imagery
do it again lamb
psychospiritual approaches

definition

image: Close your eyes. Breathe in and out three times. Let your mind begin to dwell upon your itches, discomforts, hungers and restless feelings. Take your time and explore each degrading and unpleasant sensation as it comes up, while doing nothing to send any of them away, or relieve yourself, in any manner. Relax and let your body lie perfectly still. Let these unwanted sensations grow terribly intense. Then pick one and let your imagination go wild, as if to answer the question: Where have I felt that way before? Let the resulting fantasy be anything it wants to be, set in any time or place that it wants to be set. Your childhood. A pirate ship. Starvation in the desert. Your earliest infancy. Your parents fighting. Being murdered brutally, far away and long ago. Life on a space station as a member of an alien race. Anything at all, that comes up naturally from within. Let the fullness of the experience wash over you and notice how this fantasy or something quite like it has run your life. Imagine that you are partaking of your favorite vice, no matter how severe or mild, frowned upon or socially acceptable and notice how its use erases your awareness for this discomfort. Take in turn each unpleasantness, its resultant fantasy and each of the self indulgences that you use to cover up. Explore the totality of these relationships within you and notice how this is the way you have made a slavery of your life. Take a moment to concentrate upon the loathsomeness of slavery, then consider that you yourself have been both enslaver and enslaved. Then let yourself go on to realize that now that you know the connections that lie between your discomforts and what they seem to mean to you and the mechanisms of cover-up, you now have choices open that you never knew before. Allow yourself to consider those options carefully and with gratitude and then choose among them and free your life, to whatever extent you really feel that you are ready. Then take a moment to congratulate yourself upon these choices and see upon the screen of your inner eye, what they may indeed mean for you as you live your ongoing life. Then allow your eyes to slowly open once again. (Chavez)

uses: addictions of all kinds; alcoholism; eating disorders; obesity


footnotes