Visual imagery is a flow of thoughts you can see, hear, feel, smell, or taste.  An image is an inner representation of your experience or your fantasies - a way your mind codes, stores, and expresses information.  Imagery is the currency of dreams and daydreams; memories and reminiscence; plans, projections, and possibilities.  It is the language of the arts, the emotions, and most important, of the deeper self.

Visual imagery is a window on your inner world, a way of viewing your own ideas, feelings, and interpretations.  But it is more than a mere window - it is a means of transformation and liberation from distortions in this realm that may unconsciously direct your life and shape your health.

Imagination, in this sense, is not sufficiently valued in our culture.  The imaginary is equated with the fanciful, the unreal, and the impractical.  In school we are taught the three R's while creativity, uniqueness, and interpersonal skills are either barely tolerated or frankly discouraged.  As adults, we are usually paid to perform tasks, not to think creatively.  The premium is on the practical, the useful, the real, as it should be - but imagination nurtures human reality as a river brings life to a desert.

Without imagination, humanity would be long extinct.  It took imagination - the ability to conceive of new possibilities - to make fire, create weapons, cultivate crops, construct buildings, invent cars, airplanes, space shuttles, television, and computers.

Paradoxically, our collective imagination, which has allowed us to overcome so many natural threats, has been instrumental in creating the major problems we face on earth today - pollution, exhaustion of natural resources, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.  Yet imagination, teamed with will, remains our best hope for overcoming these same problems.