Imaginalbody Therapy Verified listing

Are you overthinking and underfeeling your existence? Does your body scream for a heart response to its ailments and dreams; a different way of imagining life?

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 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 activate body intelligence to explore the disturbing symptom as the rupture required to push you toward living an expanded awareness of the embodied soul.

• What if the hurts and confusions that plague your nervous system are the exact corruption and contaminations you need to break out of the self-enclosed and single-minded world you habituate?
• What if those huge emotions that ride you indiscriminately are god forces compelling you to know the world through a diversity they usher in?
• What if your unproven but vivid intuitions and instincts are a portal, a sensual intelligence, that can bring you back into living relationship with the wild and wise forces of the universe?

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, and in the harmony of vibrational potential, know ethical action.

This is the practice of Imaginalbody Therapy.

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Jin Shin Jyutsu (JSJ) 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 subtle energy into harmony with a signature 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 harmonises your energy body, it also regulates the physical body, clearing the sticky addictive stuff that matters too much, and excites cells to release energy for repair and regeneration. All this occurs as you stop, go within, and listen. Within the pause, the exhale empties into your becoming, building body in time and space, and the inhale expands into your undoing, dispersing what you know yourself to be, back in to the dreaming body of soul.
In this movement of mattering and unmattering, the disturbing problem becomes a threshold where the known expands, unfolds, opens into the unknown, as an opportunity to dismantle habituated understandings and shape new possibilities. With a loosening of intention and will, you stop grasping at meaning or explanations. You come to feel that nothing is literal – only what it seems on the surface. Nothing is fixed and no thing needs fixing. Everything has depth, breadth, and extended reference. With every breath, you enter the wild and precarious middling reality of the imaginal.

James Hillman describes the continuum of uncertainty that precedes and gives rise to reality as the imaginal realm. This is a quantum field of possibility that exists between the instinctual world of animals that we know through touch and our senses, and the intelligible world of archetypes and gods, that are unknowable except as images. Henry Corbin called this middling realm the mundus imaginalis. It is not a place at all, but a mode of receptivity.

“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.

Opening to the world of the impersonal soul with her deeper value and pulse, and with the architecture of consciousness that JSJ offers, the symptom unfolds as a poetic and mythic image shaping your life.  With loving attention, you discern a multiplicity of sensuous intelligences that reside within each organ and system of your body, and within the world. You come to know the host of spirits, tricksters, demons, ancestors, guardians, and gods, moving through and around you at this time. They become imaginal guests. In heartfelt relation with them, you participate and imagine, seeing through their messy, erotic and electric ways, perceiving what they provoke in you, and taking responsibility for what you attract. Watched by them, loved, remembered;  the difficult symptom becomes a precise image in flesh, enlightening your darkness with its radical beauty.

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Imaginalbody therapy is for anyone interested in connecting with the hidden love within every problem or symptom. With care full attention, personal stories, identity and suffering open into a dialogue between who you think you are and what is making itself known. It engages you in ethical and imaginative response to the transitional, transgressive, promiscuous, and entangled world.

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

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 of psyche 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 relationship with fate.
• Give and receive love more generously, in touch with the mystery, harmony and beauty of the erotic and electric world.
• Imagine a more radiant, compassionate, and authentic life, as you give body to soul 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, identity confusion, 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.

Find out more about Nan.

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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.

October 2025

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 earth chaos.

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 … Learn to work with overheat, lethargy, ungrounded or frozen states, and with fluidity, for a more response-able participation with shifting and extreme conditions.

“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.

25 & 26 October

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

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