Empathy Unveiled: Introduction to ImageWork Workshop with Dr. Dina Glouberman

Script: Improving Relationships

One of the most powerful uses of imagery is to learn to fully inhabit and understand the perspective of others. In the exercise on Improving Relationships, we will not only speak from our own position, but also step into and embrace the position and perspective of the person we have the relationship with, as well as the position of someone who could love, understand and respect both of us. Once we have fully understood ourselves, each other, and the relationship, it is possible to resolve issues that were impossible to deal with before. This session is also a training in being able to fully inhabit other positions and perspectives, and indeed to experience first-hand what it is like to walk in someone else’s shoes.

If you can imagine it, you can create it. ImageWork is an invitation to learn to imagine better.

This course is an introduction to working with ImageWork, the cutting-edge approach to harnessing the power of the imagination to promote positive change. Whether focusing on health and healing, creative achievement, transformational insight, or practical wisdom, practitioners worldwide use ImageWork to multiply and deepen the effectiveness of their work.

The course is open to practitioners, including psychotherapists, counsellors, consultants, coaches, supervisors, spiritual directors, and health professionals, and also to those who are not yet practitioners but wish to explore the possibilities of working with the imagination for themselves and for others.

Imagery has been shown to be particularly powerful in

• accessing early experiences and deep emotions,
• bringing unconscious processes into consciousness,
• enhancing intuition,
• influencing not only thoughts feelings and behaviour but even the autonomic nervous system,
• and helping people move through stuck areas of life to make possible a new beginning.

Much of what is referred to as neuroplasticity is actually the neuroplasticity of the imagination. The practice of ImageWork is so effective because it builds on this plasticity of the imagination to uncover dysfunctional brain maps, and create new ones that support positive choices and profound changes.

Indeed, any change process must involve imagery, because tapping into and transforming underlying images is always part of any fundamental change, yet the nuts and bolts of working with imagery have often been overlooked as a specific focus of training. Most practitioners would agree that the more vivid is the image or memory picture that emerges in a session, the more powerful is the potential for transformation. Yet how do you make sure that you are getting the image to work at its powerful best? This training aims to remedy this gap.

ImageWork focuses on three aspects of the imagination: the Healing Imagination, the Creative Imagination, and the Transcendent Imagination. All three will be sampled in this course.

Students will find it invaluable to accompany the course with Dina Glouberman’s comprehensive training book for practitioners, ‘ImageWork: The Complete Guide to Working with Transformational Imagery‘ (PCCS Books, 2022) All of the scripts in this book are also available as audios to download and experience in your own time at https://www.dinaglouberman.com/audios/.

Course Sessions

Each session focuses on one script or exercise, which is not only an important experience in itself, but is also a window to one of the powers of imagery and to one of the skills needed for facilitation. The learning is interactive; you will experience being guided through the exercise, and working with a small group of others to enhance your learning.

1. Unlock Your Imagination: Transform the Images that are Running (or ruining) your Life—and have a truly New Beginning. Script: Image as Life Metaphor;

2. Empathy Unveiled: Use Imagery to Discover the Hidden Perspective of Others. Script: Improving Relationships

3. Heal from Within: Access Your Inner Consultants and Healers Through Imagery. Script: The House of Healing

4. Future-Proof Your Life: Imagery for visioning the Future you want and Finding Out How to get there. Script: Space and Time Ship

5. Living Spaciously, Finding Freedom: Imagery for a Renewed Relationship with Life. Script: Living at the Centre of Your Life / The Boat

ImageWork exercises and scripts will become essential parts of your toolkit to get to the heart of difficult problems, and offer insight and transformation. More than this, as you guide yourself and your clients into the extraordinary world of the imagination with confidence and joy, you may well discover a deep sense of coming home to yourself.