PBP: Week 20 Journeying, Visualization and Making Stuff Up

I do a lot of inner work. I do my share of physical work, but my practice has a lot of work that is done without a lot (or any) outward actions. There have been times in my life where the vast majority of my work was done in the inner worlds. And yet for a long time I was vastly confused by the terms used for a lot of the very practices I was using.

Astral projection was my bane for many years (notice it's not in the title...more on that in a bit). I was fascinated by the thought of projecting astrally. I read everything I could find on it, tried more techniques than I can remember, and never had that profound moment of looking down upon myself. For a long time I thought it was just going to be one of those things that I wasn't going to be able to do. And throughout this time, I was doing inner work.

What do I mean by inner work? I started with visualization. Well technically I started with making stuff up. I have always had a very active imagination. I was an avid reader as a child, and as an only child I often entertained myself, playing with toys or reading. Play is a great tool in my opinion, I love toys as tools! But when I played or read, I exercised my imagination. I created playmates to play with me, or acted out whole stories with my toys. When I read, I saw what was being described in my mind.

As I grew up, I started making up my own stories. I don't remember if it was something that I started doing for school (creative writing exercises) or if it was something I did to avoid boredom (I definitely remember spending a lot of time imagining things while riding in cars). Either way, I spent a lot of time creating stories. Some of these stories got written down, some didn't. Sometimes I imagined alternate events in my own past or future, sometimes I created whole new people to imagine being.

In high school, I started rehearsing things in my mind. Sometimes it was just idle fantasies: imagining what it would be like if the boy I liked asked me to dance. A rifle coach I had at the time introduced me to using imagination as visualization for a purpose (the same coach taught me to use affirmation statements, though strangely he was a pretty hard core ex-marine). I learned to visualize my way through a rifle match, seeing each shot as perfect.

When I began my personal path, I embraced all things visualized. I did a lot of physical work, probably more than at any other time in my life, but I also did a lot of visualized work to augment it. I met another Pagan, who was in the military at the time, and did all his work visualized due to a lack of space and the ability to keep his tools on hand. It was a novel concept to me, that I could visualize the exact same things that I could do physically.

It was only a couple of years ago, when reading about some more shamanic techniques, that I read a definition of journeying that clicked something in my head. Much of what I had read about shamanic journeying involved entering into altered states. But this one focused lesson how to achieve the trance state and more on the things you could do with it.

I realized that a lot of what I did and considered visualization, could also be considered journeying, and even astral projection. I firmly believe there are other realms of existence beyond our physical plane, and that we can experience these planes in different ways. And not just the traditional planes that many mystic traditions accept (astral, spirit world, lands of the dead), but really a true multi-verse, where even imagined worlds can be explored (and I do think that a lot of the more well known fictional places such as Dante's depiction of Hell or the Tolkien's worlds have built up their own substance over the years).

This brings up the question of what is real. When I journey, are my experiences real? I think that 'real' is a poor standard to judge things by. I prefer to look at what value do my experiences bring. Reality is a strange creature, and often my 'reality' can be very different from someone else's, even if we were at the same place at the same time. Just ask two people who were at an event to describe it and you will often get a very different description. Sure, one or the other could be lying, or could just be remembering wrong, and if you had video of the event you could check some of the facts and see who was more accurate...but in their own minds, each person would have a very different 'real' experience.

Value can mean different things. I don't go into every session of inner work seeking the same things, and so what is valuable one day may not be another. Sometimes, I am seeking a mirror, a way to look deeper into my own self and see how I am doing. Sometimes I have a problem and I am seeking an answer or solution. Sometimes I wish to meet new friends. At the end of the day, if I get what I was looking for (or if I get something else that I might not have even known I wanted), that to me makes the practice worth it, even if my 'real' might not mesh up with everyone else's.

The lines between journeying and visualization in my mind are pretty blurry. With visualization, it is much more about the creation for me. Typically, when I visualize, I am seeking to create something in the inner worlds, whether it is a guardian, a spell to send forth, a shield or a sanctuary. When I journey, I am more exploring. I am going forth into a place, whether it is known to me or not, and seeing what is there. I also tend to be more focused on place and surroundings with journeying. If I am visualizing, I may not have a defined sense of place at all.

I've read a lot of visualization guides that use the words visualize and imagine interchangeably. Honesty, I don't have a problem with that except for one thing. I think that the Pagan community has a hard enough time with people who think the things we do and believe are crazy and made up, that I think that imagine is too close to imaginary and just creates a connection that doesn't need to be there. I don't really like that some people explain learning visualization as 'fake it until you make it' or 'use your imagination at first and then eventually visualization will come', for the same reasons. We are imagining because we are (most often) using sight to create an image of something. I think the best visualizations include as many senses as possible, but for many, sight comes first. So in a way, the progression is often from imagination (sight only) to visualization (with many senses).

All of this inner work has been written about so often in such specific terms, that I think more people are good at doing inner work than think they are. I don't get the traditional sensations mentioned in almost every astral projection guide, and I don't use any of the astral projection methods to journey, and yet I get distinct sensations of movement and I can explore the world around me as well as other worlds. I don't always visualize in images. I actually experience sound easier than I do sight. Sometimes I can get a clear experience of a thing without any visual clues at all. But pretty much every beginner visualization exercise starts with 'seeing' colors or shapes, so if you struggle with visual clues, then you might never make it to a sense that you are good at.

Inner work is a powerful tool in my toolbox, and it has the benefit of being invisible! I can do inner work pretty much any where at any time. I do a lot of inner work at night before bed. It is a time I know I will have every day, and will be undisturbed (because I do tend to sleep every night). I can also do inner work when on vacation without having to worry about getting tools through airport security or keeping them private while staying with family. I can do inner work while sitting in a waiting room or when riding in a car...time which otherwise might be wasted.