Imaginalbody Therapy Verified listing

A symptom bears a gift from the unconscious as powerful as any dream. Through pain or illness, the body collaborates with the soul to lead us to images, disowned or buried inside.

My name is Nan. I work with my hands to harmonize the light energy in the body, releasing tensions and blockages that, from one perspective, can be perceived as the cause of symptoms, and with another, as the imagination of the symptom.

I combine the hands-on and time-tested healing art called Jin Shin Jyutsu ® Physio-philosophy with psychological and mythic reflection, in the tradition of Archetypal thinkers such as Henry Corbin, Carl Jung and James Hillman. Together with you, we explore the disturbing symptom as the rupture required to push you toward an expanded state of embodied soul.

Without warning, thresholds can open directly before you... Imagine, if in the ecstasy or agony of that moment, you could attune to that quiet pulse of original light that shines in your heart.

This is the practice of Imaginalbody Therapy.

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Jin Shin Jyutsu approaches the body as a vibrating system of electromagnetic circuits. It uses touch to stimulate the flow of light energy within these pathways in a way similar to how jumper cables spark current within a battery. An underlying premise is that applying specific holds to the body brings this flow of energy into harmony with a silent pulse of perfect rhythm at the heart of us. This is perceived to be an original state persisting even when we are in distress. Bringing the body into resonance with this pulse, roots it through times of chaos and change. Harmony is not resolution or a cure. It is much larger, embracing contradiction and the many voices within the psyche in a coherent and healing dynamic.

While the hands-on practice excites cells to release energy for repair and regeneration, it also offers a practice of pause. This is a stillness that allows everything and is nothing. It occurs as the exhale empties into our becoming, and the inhale expands into our undoing, our being.

In this gap, you enter the problem with imagination and attune to the pulsating stream of images just below your fingertips. Like in prayer, there is a loosening of attention and relaxing of intentions - you stop grasping at the world. You come to feel that nothing is literal – nothing is only what it seems on the surface. Everything has depth, breadth, and extended reference. Everything glows with an inner light seeking its fulfilment through manifestation.

James Hillman describes the continuum of uncertainty that precedes and gives rise to reality as the imaginal realm. This quantum field of possibility is the true ground of imagination and exists between the sensible world of animal bodies that we know through touch and instinct, and the intelligible world of archetypes and gods that are unknowable except as poetic or mythic images. Henry Corbin called this middling realm the mundus imaginalis. It is not a place at all, but a mode of receptivity. Imaginalbody practices train us to become receptive to this vibrational world of subtle energy through the imaginal intelligence of the heart.

“Entry into the imaginal signals not a change of place, but a change in your mode of being. Just as finding one’s ‘soul’ is not the discovery of a thing but a deepening of experience, so entering the Imaginal involves a fundamental transformation in the condition of the world. It involves a kind of opening.” Tom Cheetam, Imaginal Love.

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Imaginalbody therapy is for anyone interested in exploring the hidden love within every problem or symptom. With care full attention, personal stories and suffering open into a dialogue between who you think you are and what is making itself known.

A session is 90 min and involves creative discussion, receiving a treatment and instruction to apply dedicated self-care practices. Artistic expression, movement, ritual, and walking into wild nature, are also offered as ways to deepen this work of open inquiry and immersion.

Over a series of sessions you will learn to:

• Pause.
• Harmonise the frequencies of the body and release tensions and blockages in the flow of mattering and unmattering in every breath.
• Regulate the nervous, endocrine and immune systems so you can meet that wider, more than human world.
• Perceive the vibrational reality through heightened sensory perception.
• Revision particular symptoms and personal hurts as imaginal movements.
• Understand the living maps of intelligence given by the body to realise a fluidity of consciousness.
• Hold the tension between conflicting psychic forces as a practice of middling.
• Sustain dialogue with the roaming intensities of the animate world, as they disturb and shape your fate.
• Give and receive love more generously, in touch with the mystery, harmony and beauty of the erotic and electric world.
• Create a more radiant, compassionate, and authentic life, as you ensoul and renew the world around you.

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Imaginalbody treatments can address toxicity, any form of physical or immune dysfunction, pain, fatigue, states of disconnect or overwhelm like addiction, burnout or mental health difficulties, struggles in relationships, dysfunctional behaviour patterns, creative blocks, illness, exhaustion, or stress.

It is also for those simply wanting to delight in a dialogue with the living soul.

When imagination is sparked, your aliveness may expand to robust and resilient health.

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Contact me for tea, if this kind of therapy interests you.

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UPCOMING EVENTS

THE EROTICS OF RUPTURE

Tracking archetypes of Eros and Rupture through touch and the imaginal body.

Join Nico Athene and Nan McAughey for a six day residential retreat into the imaginal depths of the body to explore your personal patterns of touch, connection and intimacy through somatic consent practice and contact improvisation. When we turn with love towards the images of soul that emerge through rupture, we discover deeper, darker ground from which to meet the divine in our life, the world, and the other.

“Any force that is powerful enough to influence and shape my life, without my having a say in whether I want this affect or not, we call that 'God' or ‘the gods’.” - CG Jung.

26 Nov - 1 Dec

Find out more 

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BODYING THE LIGHTNING BOLTS OF HEAVEN WITHOUT GOING TO HELL

Harmonising self-care tools to weather uncertainty and geomagnetic storms.

Join me for a weekend online class of teachings and self-care practices to harmonise the nervous system so you can meet, with love, the oscillating reality of the imaginal world, within and around us …

“The question is how a lost indigeneity—a lost sense of justice as  inextricable from the earth—can be found and what that would mean. Today,  everyone can hear the screaming of the earth. Indigeneity is the question of  who listens” Ben Spatz, Blue Sky Body.

26 & 27 October

Email me to find out more: nan@imaginalbody.com