---

Go to the deeper, more primitive levels and magic happens

---

The Monthly Aspectarian: Please tell us how you came to do this work.

Belleruth Naparstek: I’ve been a psychotherapist for over thirty years. Any good psychotherapist is going to be working underneath people’s words, trying to help them capture and work with their own internal images, symbols and metaphors. It’s something of a natural fit for a psychotherapist to also be interested in imagery. That being said, twenty years ago a woman came to see me who had been diagnosed with terminal, metastatic breast cancer and she was very interested in my providing imagery for her to help her with chemotherapy. I had been starting to experiment with making individualized audio tapes for my clients who felt stuck, were frustrated, or just wanted to delve deeper using some of these right brain immersive techniques. This woman with the breast cancer had heard about it. She was kind of a bossy type so she started by requiring me to make her a specific tape for her chemotherapy procedure. I tried to demure. I told her I really didn’t know a whole lot about cancer. She said, look, I’m going to die anyway; you can’t kill me any sooner. Just do what I want.

So we worked together on the tape. She brought it with her to the chemo and did incredibly well with it. Being a bossy sort, she started demanding the nurses on the unit listen to this tape, too. I wound up making a tape for that unit. I got really intrigued with how you can work with the unconscious and the deeper part of the body-mind to promote change, wellness or emotional healing. I just dove into it more and more.

TMA: It’s interesting how life throws these kind of changes at you.

BN: The trick is to be paying attention.

TMA: You said she was terminal; she didn’t survive?

BN: She didn’t survive, but she lasted two years longer than anybody thought she could, with incredibly good quality of life. She was whooping it up with her pals, and shopping and bossing them around up until some very bad family news happened that immediately put her into a coma. She died of a brain tumor. But up until that time, she was kicking butt having a great time.

TMA: So this started you on a whole course of action.

BN: It did. I’d taken a lot of hypnosis courses. I’ve always loved that imaginal realm and understood its power, but then I got seriously into it. Because then people started asking me to please make a tape for my uncle who has MS, please make a tape for this and make a tape for that. I finally got to a point where I thought I really needed to either start using this in a more serious, methodical, organized way, or I just won’t have any time left in the day. That’s when I approached a greeting card business in Cleveland. I thought this would be a good audio get well card. They said no, but sent me to the head of a business school, who introduced me to a philanthropically oriented, creative businessman in town who became my business partner for all these years. He liked the idea and thought it could help people. He had absolutely no feeling it would be a good business, but he felt it would be a lovely philanthropy. So we started making tapes for specific health conditions—cancer, heart disease, MS, arthritis, depression, asthma—stuff I knew had a significant psychological component. I felt that at the very least these tapes could help people cope better, motivate them to stay on track, and at best they could actually help them fight the condition or disease.

TMA: Talk a little about the mechanism, how does it actually work?

BN: You can look at Guided Imagery as kind of a depth charge that drops beneath consciousness, deep into the body-mind. It just sort of reverberates again and again, pinging again and again below the surface. It drops deep into primitive spots of the brain. The parts of the brain that respond are really old. It’s the primitive brain and the midbrain. All of these “survival” pieces of the brain. As a result, it can cohere the entire being around a set of goals or intentions. Because it goes so very much below cognition, verbal ability and thinking, people are always stunned at what it can do. You don’t have to think it works for it to work You don’t have to have any great expectations.

I just spoke with a woman who works with the Rescue and Recovery Healing Center for the World Trade Center, and they’ve been using our guided imagery for post traumatic stress. It’s a perfect example. They’re dealing with these sanitation and morgue workers. These iron workers that are old Vietnam Vets, firefighters who are the most resistant to any type of technique that you would ever find anywhere, and of course the NYPD and all of these construction guys. She said, “they’re blue collar guys that won’t have anything to do with therapy. We get them because we’re screening them medically. These folks—when they’re sitting in the office listening to guided imagery—the results are incredible. I was so scared to introduce this stuff to them, I thought they’d laugh, but they are transformed. They are so moved, they feel it’s the turning point for their psychological healing.” I know this is true.

TMA: Is there a hypnotic quality?

BN: Yes, it’s very immersive. Although it officially is not called hypnosis, it is definitely a form of self-hypnosis. There’s music that has very long chords. There’s a tone of voice that’s actually very plain and undramatic. Both the music and the voice are designed to not interfere with the person’s process. It’s just a platform to that process.

TMA: Did you start out this sophisticated or did it evolve?

BN: Oh, it evolved but the early tapes are not bad. I listen to them now and think, not bad for someone who barely knew what she was doing. We have gotten more sophisticated. Thank heavens for the internet because we get feedback all the time. What people loved, don’t love, responded badly to, and we keep making adjustments. Probably the most sophisticated and deep going guided imagery is this post traumatic stress imagery. It is built on everything we’ve learned from everybody.

TMA: A lot of people, especially our readers, are familiar with the whole “Think and Grow Rich” kind of thing: What you think, happens, and so forth. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that you can think positive all you want, but if you don’t feel positive as well, you don’t get the results.

BN: Exactly, it’s whipped cream over garbage. First of all, I’m not particularly interested in that whole aspect of guided imagery that I call spiritual materialism. If I meditate every day, I’ll become beautiful, I’ll attract my soul mate and I’ll be very rich. Who cares? That’s not what I’m about. But I’m very interested in helping people access deeper levels of self. From that, whatever self expression emerges, and satisfaction and deep peace and good service work in the world. I get requests all the time to please make a Grow Rich tape, but you can find those tapes all over. I’m not making them. I’m not interested.

TMA: Your interest is more therapeutic.

BN: It’s more therapeutic and it’s more about finding balance and self expression. I feel that these are deeply spiritual techniques. One of the things that I love about imagery is that I consider it a form of prayer for the non-religious, people who for whatever reason have lost their access to their spiritual connection or sense of divinity. I think what this does is open up the heart in such a powerful way that it allows people to find that source of solace, power, comfort and healing. I like that. It doesn’t require that you necessarily subscribe to any particular religious paradigm, although it’s very compatible with any of them, and it’s very compatible with any form of psychotherapy, or counseling or coaching. It’s a very mellow, compatible, non-competitive technique that works with all sorts of things and allows people to re-connect with their spirituality, even if it’s not in so many words.

TMA: Prayer and meditation being much the same thing.

BN: Yes.

TMA: Do you use it yourself?

BN: Oh, yes. I couldn’t have created it if I didn’t use it myself. Every now and then I will have gotten away from listening. I will have been too busy or whatnot. Then, when I reconnect and start to listen again, it always surprises me how powerful they are. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s my stuff or somebody else’s, my stuff doesn’t sound like me to me anyway. I use it for things as simple as to combat a cold early, lose weight, get energy in the morning, help move through grief, for everyday purposes and just to start from a very peaceful but energized center.

TMA: Similar to what people might call the still small voice; it’s useful for mundane things as well as the big important things.

BN: Some who are used to mindfulness meditation can find guided imagery too noisy. It fills up too much space. It’s not still and small enough. But for people for whom that kind of meditation requires more discipline than they’ve been able to marshal, or it’s just too difficult, or they’re too tired to practice, it really will carry you. It will do a lot of the work for you. It’s a poor man’s form of meditation that’s very consumer friendly, so to speak.

TMA: A person in pain, for whatever reason, may not have the resources.

BN: Or a person who’s dying. The sense that stays the longest and actually gets a little stronger is hearing, when everything else starts to fade. It’s a wonderful intervention for someone who’s dying, in pain, fatigued, not particularly well educated or sophisticated ... it doesn’t matter. It appeals to such deep universal parts of the brain. You don’t have to be smart, rich, or have to have a Ph.D. to do this.

I had no idea how powerful this technique was until I started delving into it, working with people and getting a lot of feedback. The research is suddenly flourishing like mushrooms after a spring rain. I’m posting three or four clinical trials every week on my website, and even I am surprised at how it really helps people. I have a book coming out in September with Bantam Dell on Imagery and Trauma, because that’s what I’ve been working on the past couple of years, and I’m flabbergasted by what I’ve learned. I consider post traumatic stress to be the most devastating, anguishing, difficult, painful human condition you can have. It’s like replaying nightmares and high level terror and helplessness.

TMA: There’s very little support for it.

BN: It’s the worst, and therapists don’t know how to treat it. Most therapists use talk therapy, they work with cognition and language. But those are the parts of the brain that are impaired. You really need to go to the much deeper, more primitive levels and magic happens. All of these alphabet therapies, EMDR, and Thought Field Therapy and Somatic Experiencing ... all of those are image based for the reason that that’s the only thing that’s going to help. After 9/11, we have all of these people who are all traumatized at the same time, and we can watch the trajectory of their healing. We now know stuff we never did before.

TMA: What are you doing in your workshops?

BN: I talk about the post traumatic stress stuff, but I talk in a much broader way about guided imagery for healing. We have been blessed by the fact that three different pharmaceutical companies give out our guided imagery tapes free to cancer patients all across the country. So there are all these cancer survivors that are either still struggling with their healing or got better and want to stay better. We wanted to make a workshop available for them. There are also cardiac patients across the country that have been given our cardiac imagery for surgery or rehab or cholesterol levels, and those people also want support. So we thought we’d offer a guided imagery workshop for health consumers who are familiar with the imagery and want to go deeper with it, and for all the mental health and health professionals—nurses, doctors, social workers, psychologists, counselors and pastors. These workshops usually are attended half by professional people and half by health consumers.

---

Belleruth Naparstek’s workshop, “Healing Journeys: Using the Power of Imagery for Healing, Creativity & Change” will be presented on July 17-18, 2004, at Indian Lakes Resort in Bloomingdale, IL. For further information, call 888-517-7089 (9am-5pm EST), visit www.theconferenceworks.com, and see The Conference Works advertisement in this issue.

---

Next Article