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 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, to 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 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 disturbing problem as a threshold where the known expands, unfolds, opens into the unknown, as an opportunity to dismantle habituated understandings and shape new possibilities.

Using specific Imaginalbody practices, you attune to the pulsating stream of images just below your fingertips. You learn to vessel the intense thoughts, emotions, conflicts, and compulsive instincts that arrive with the disturbance. There is a necessary corruption of your innocent identification with the affliction and its story, and a dismemberment of what you know yourself to be. Like in prayer, a loosening of attention and relaxing of intentions means 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.

As the holding practice harmonizes your energy body, it regulates the physical body, clearing the sticky addictive stuff that matters too much, and increases your capacity for heightened voltage. You come to know your essential pattern of desire and inhibition, mattering and unmattering, closing and opening, that informs your every breath. You feel it as a penetration of the creative soul from within. You realise you are nothing and take refuge in her as no thing. Connection to the angel of soul gives you an integrity with which to 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.

Attuned to the impersonal soul and her value and deeper pulse, and with the architecture of consciousness that JSJ offers, you enter the imagination of the heart to unfold the symptom as poetic and mythic images shaping your life. Using tools for differencing vibration, 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. With loving attention, you meet their luminosity and know their danger. They become imaginal guests. In heartfelt relation with them, you dialogue and negotiate, 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; they become real presences, enlightening your darkness by their beauty.

In this reality, the difficult symptom becomes a precise image in flesh through which you can find a different grounding in soul, if you can reverence change itself and surrender to move more fluidly with her.

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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 from 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.
• Create 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, 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.

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

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