Imagine If…..
I recently read a quote from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” It got me thinking.
As human beings, we struggle with the unknown. We have a built-in propensity for imagining the worst, the catastrophe rather than the triumph, and we are constantly in a battle with the world to stay safe. This is part of the enigma of life: we long for freedom and the open road, and at the same time we strive for comfort and safety.
But what if the happenings of life were not put there to knock us down, but, like the grit in the oyster shell that creates the pearl, were put in our path to allow something new to emerge? Imagine if the difficulty were actually a possibility.
I want to be careful here. Not every difficulty feels like a gift, and some pain is simply pain. Often the meaning only arrives much later, if it arrives at all. But I have had a few chances to test this out, and it is just as Kierkegaard said: so much easier to see in hindsight.
There was the time a house sale fell apart, again and again, at the last moment. I felt disappointed and hard done by. Only later was I grateful for that knock-back, because new possibilities opened up. Instead of moving, we built an extension and made better use of the space we already had. Or the time I failed exams and had to sit with a shame that felt like crawling out of my skin. Learning to tolerate that humiliation made me a much more empathetic person, and that feeds into my work today. Or the disappointment of not being chosen for a role, and the choice to work with trust, asking whether this too might be for my evolution rather than forcing me into regression.
It is a conscious act to decide to work with the imagination as a place of potential rather than from a place of fear and stasis. This is central to my work as a psychosynthesis therapist. Psychosynthesis is an approach that sees each of us as more than our problems or our history, and as having a deeper sense of self and purpose that is always trying to emerge. Transpersonal simply means we make room for that deeper dimension, alongside the everyday work of understanding what’s hurting. In sessions, imagination is something we use deliberately, as a way of meeting what is difficult rather than escaping it.
This is why bringing your fears into the therapy room can be such an act of self-love. Before we can look at the possibility, we first need to be with the belief that it is impossible, and that takes time. Slowly we begin to look at the knot and tease it apart, until a thread appears and the question of what to do with this piece of string opens up. It could be a ribbon. It could be the tail of a kite.
Imagine the possibilities…
If there’s a knot you’ve been carrying, you don’t have to untangle it alone. My sessions are a space to bring the fear, the stuckness, or simply the question, and to see what possibility might be hiding inside it. I work both in person and online, so wherever you are, we can find a way to meet.
Your first session is a chance to see how we work together, with no expectation to commit beyond that. If you’d like to get a feel for me first, I offer a short, free call to talk through what you’re looking for and answer any questions.
