Your imagination is how you make things real
What you can imagine is real.
Every single human made creation you can think of started with someone’s imagination.
One of the most important abilities any of us has is the ability to imagine, visualize, and dream. We each literally make stuff up, every day of our lives. We think of new things, see images in our mind’s eye, and visualize, often without being conscious that we are doing this. It’s not difficult, we do it naturally all of the time.
Someone tells us a story, and we imagine it. Someone describes an event, and we can see it, even if we weren’t there. We hear the news and imagine all kinds of images and scenarios. We see an unusual flower that inspires us to imagine something new. We hear a song that we can deeply feel, and it sparks our own creativity. We have always done this, our whole lives. When we share our most beautiful imaginings with others, we give to each other.
It’s fun to dream up new ways of creating and healing, find a solution to a question or problem, or generate a new idea or invention. If you feed your imagination with interesting images, stories, sounds, and ideas, it will work differently for you than if you feed it on a steady diet of negativity, bad news, violence, and angry invalidated people.
Imagination gives us a beginning, a place to start. We don’t have to imagine a complete creation perfectly. Sometimes my imagination helps me find an emotional answer, a self healing solution, or a way to lighten up by laughing out loud at something silly that pops into my head. You do this too, it’s part of being human. We don’t have to explain it to anyone else or make sense of it for it to be real.
Imagination comes from within us, from the spirit.
Curiosity and imagination are allies, best friends in a way. The questions we ask, like ‘what if’ and ‘I wonder what would happen’ and ‘wouldn’t it be fun to try this’, all lead to inventions, new creations, and more imagination. Like any other creative ability we have, our imaginations work more effortlessly for us when we use them.
Much like intuition, the best way to kill off your imagination is to try to convince others of your wildest dreams and inventions. If you need someone to validate or approve of the creations you’re dreaming up, and if that person doesn’t trust their own imagination, you could feel deflated by their response. Imagination needs free reign to play, without judgment. If you depend on invalidated people for support of your ideas, you’ll handle some negative energies in your creative space.
When you have something new and different to share with others, some people will automatically reject it out of hand because of their own fears about taking the risk you are taking by sharing your new work. Maybe someone said something hurtful or invalidating to them about something they created. Anyone who hasn’t done the work of healing their own imaginations cannot validate, see, or help you with yours.
When you validate your imagination for yourself, others will show up who can have what you are doing.
If you’ve been surrounded by unimaginative people, or people who insist on following all of the rules laid out for them by their groups, families, religious leaders, books that were written and rewritten by humans hundreds and hundreds of years ago, it might feel sometimes like your imagination is wrong, bad, or pointless. Actually, your imagination is the most powerful part of you.
Imagination is all about playing, asking what if, and inventing a whole new world.
Children generally tend to have much more permission for their imaginations, as many adults have been programmed into believing that imagination isn’t real, and therefore not worth ‘wasting’ time on. Let’s put our focus and energy on solving problems and making lots of money. Serious adult stuff only please! Leave all of that world building to the experts.
We are all experts. Creatives of all kinds are playing with their imaginations a lot, so are healers, inventors, and people who want to create new ways of communication, interaction, and being able to connect with other people. The thing about regularly exercising your imagination is that it starts to work really well, and by that I mean you trust it more. Rather than dismiss a new idea as dumb or not feasible, you can imagine it. Instead of judging, the question is what if? What if I did start writing that story, what if I allowed it to not be perfect, what if there was space and permission for it to go somewhere I can’t imagine just yet.
While going for my morning walk today, I made up a whole story. Walking along, I wasn’t thinking of much at all other than how happy I am that fall temperatures have arrived in Georgia, what a gorgeous month October is here in the south, and how grateful I am that it’s too cold for mosquitos now. All of a sudden and quite unexpectedly, an entire illustrated book popped into my head. I pulled out my phone, which I always take along on my walks in case I see something to photograph, and today used it to make an audio recording of my idea so I could remember it as I did in the moment I thought of it. When I listened later, my enthusiasm was obvious in my voice, as well as the amusement I found in this story. The energy of the idea came through, and then I wrote it down in my writing notebook. I may start working on it next week.
I trust my imagination because I depend on it in my daily life. I don’t dismiss it, and so it shows up for me. I am fortunate that I was raised in a home where creativity was valued, as was reading books. I am grateful.
Our imaginations build new worlds.
We have always done this. Can you imagine the kind of world you want to live in, even if it bears no resemblance to the one in which you currently live? What would this world include for you? Now, imagine that everyone dreams of new worlds daily, happier more equitable kinder worlds.
Capitalism as a system wants to rob us of our imaginations. The demand to solve money and survival takes a lot a lot of energy from the imagination. Granted, tough times have a way of inspiring many new amazing creations. I am in awe of the many incredible inventions coming from all corners of the earth, most of them outside of a science laboratory or art studio. Creating a new world from non-violent creativity is far more powerful than many people imagine it can be.
Once money becomes a factor in our creativity, it adds a whole other weight to that creativity. Imagination has its enemies too. But if you are working on your own new imaginings, you won’t be as invested in the pictures of possible reality sold to you through the current system in which we live.
In my world I imagine, art, dance, music, performance, gardening, cooking, meditation, reading and writing - are all priorities in how we educate young children. Also, talking about emotions in an honest way. Students are encouraged to listen, and to share, to express themselves freely, so long as they don’t harm others. Everyone can paint, sing, write, dance. These are human abilities, not things to be held in reserve for the deserving few who are good at it.
I want all creatives and their works to be valued and validated, and paid for their labors. As a culture, we have so much wealth in the form of the creativity of the people, regular everyday people. Creativity is our true essence, our very core truth as human beings.
