The Healing Imagination

I am passionately in love with this book. In fact, I've decided to put myself on a diet that includes at least one Ann and/or Barry Ulanov book a year. Yes, they are heavy-duty Jungians, but the prose is lucid and luscious and I always come away feeling nourished to the core.

THE HEALING IMAGINATION is my favorite thus far. Imagination, according to Jung, is the primordial channel between the divine and humanity. The images the come to us in our fantasies, dreams, imaginings, and I would add memories and experiences, are communications from our source. They are the wellspring of our insights, a healing balm, our call to awakening. I leave this book more convinced than ever that nurturing and developing the imagination is key to spiritual maturity, psychological awareness, and a rich and fulfilling life. I also leave this book wishing for a spiritual community that reveres the imagination like the Ulanovs do.

I'm so grateful that the Ulanovs have helped me reframe my work as a writer and teacher: I now consider myself an imagination professional. What noble and worthy work!

Here's a taste:

Through [the imagination] we achieve our firmest participation in being, reaching as far as the dual-nature of the God-man. In that hypostatic union of spirit and flesh, we know our citizenship in the world of country and nation, of jobs and taxes, of lovers and friends, of children and society. … The special joy of the imagination is that with it we can reach to the source of both time and timelessness and find that support which will be the greatest of healing forces in our life.
We need to unite our egos with our imaginative selves, to put our time-centered parts in touch with the timeless source. … We are, in many ways, like hybrid creatures seeking unity.
--Ann & Barry Ulanov, The Healing Imagination 148