Imagine an apple.
You can see it, touch it, smell it, and remember its taste…

Now, imagine an illness.
What shape can you give it?
What sound does it make?
What is its texture to the touch? Or its taste, or smell…
You might associate it with the part of the body it affects, or the symptoms it causes… Even with the virus that transmits it.
But you will never form a complete picture of its origin—of the root cause that triggered the ailment, the dysfunction, or the emotional blockage disrupting your harmony.

Finally… Try to put a face to the unconscious.
Impossible.

Since the dawn of civilization, ancient healing sciences—namely medicine and magic, in their manifold forms (alchemy, shamanism, spirituality, surgery, herbal medicine, etc.)—have harnessed the most powerful faculty at the human being’s disposal: imagination. They used it to compensate for a lack of tools and gaps in knowledge.

Symbols, archetypes, deities, religions, fantastic beings, and demons have embodied fears and diseases, traumas and memories, giving a soul to everything that exists, from flowers to stars…

This is not the place to explain practices like meditation or hypnosis in depth, but let’s try to dispel a few myths, understand where they lead us, and see what they are actually for.

To do so, let us start again from the very element we cannot imagine: the unconscious.

We are all more or less aware that the mind is generally considered to have three divisions: the conscious, the subconscious, and the unconscious. While various traditions and schools of thought define them differently, we can broadly say that the conscious is the aware part—our ordinary state of consciousness; the unconscious comprises everything deep within us of which we are unaware; and the subconscious is the intermediate region—a “buffer zone” acting as a link between the other two.

Okay, we have the theory, but in practice, we haven’t solved anything! We lack an image of these regions or states of mind; we lack a vocabulary of places, words, or sensations to help us identify and classify them, thereby enabling us to access them.

It is precisely here that the disciplines of mental coaching, meditation or guided visualization, and regressive hypnosis come into play.

Starting from a conscious state, light hypnosis and guided visualization techniques help the mind relax, leading the practitioner to an imaginary location known as a “safe place” in psychology and a “Sacred Garden” in shamanic tradition; it is an environment where the meditator feels at home, at peace, protected, and in harmony. Typically, it is a place immersed in nature—such as a forest, a beach, the seaside, a riverbank, a mountain lake, and so on…

It is the mental representation of the subconscious—the bridge to opening the portal that leads to our unconscious, to that deepest, otherwise inaccessible realm which harbors traumas, blockages, and ancestral memories.

Throughout the session, the practitioner remains fully alert and can describe what they are seeing; the hypnosis is never excessively deep. It is simply a method—comprising various techniques such as voice, breathing, visualization, and subtle energy—designed to guide the mind into a light trance state, making it intuitive, receptive, and open to the flow of images arising from consciousness…

• But what is it that we are looking for?

SYMBOLS AND CLUES

• About what?

Of what we do not know—or do not wish to confront—about ourselves.
Of the aforementioned root cause of our malaise.

Deep trauma can be internalized by the amygdala without our conscious awareness, and its consequences will manifest in our behavior or health whenever the environmental, emotional, social, or familial conditions defining it recur.
This small structure, located in our temporal lobe and part of the limbic system, acts as an emotional alarm center capable of warning us of danger and prompting us to act accordingly (the instinctive “fight-or-flight“—or “freeze“—response mechanism), as well as processing emotions and storing memories linked to intense emotional experiences.
However, the amygdala possesses its own memory—one of which we are unaware—and, regardless of our conscious will, certain patterns will always trigger specific impulsive responses: if a threat is deemed “credible,” the amygdala will register danger based on what is happening around me or others, not merely as a result of direct personal experience.

This is where imagination comes into play: through the representation of the subconscious and the unconscious—of the Sacred Garden and the “world beyond the portal”—I will be able to relive that trauma, that specific situation, within a symbolic context, thereby distancing myself from it and grasping its evolutionary function—a “functional psychosis or transpersonal crisis.”
A powerful emotion will then emerge, capable of overwriting the negative memory stored in the amygdala.

But the single most important factor is this: the amygdala cannot distinguish between a real experience and an imagined one! If it evokes a powerful emotion, then it has achieved its purpose!

For this reason, we do not need to regard the symbols we see as real, nor do we need to believe in a particular religion or in reincarnation.
What matters is allowing the flow of images—which are creating the world I need for healing—to move freely, without the rational mind intervening.

Everyone carries within a map capable of guiding them toward healing and the achievement of their goals.
Sometimes, the only step required is to rely on the right tools—letting go of resistance and fear—and to find the courage to turn one’s gaze inward.

Have a good trip…