Dear Reader,

Have you ever had a meal prepared for you in a, perhaps South-East Asian, restaurant where it’s not clear what the meat is in the dish?

As you start to contemplate that it might not be chicken or beef, but could be dog, cat, or snake, suddenly the whole puke reflex kicks in.

This is one simple example of how what we imagine affects our body, our expectations, our perception, our mood, and the possibilities we see. Actively interacting with your personal self-generated imagery - those internal images that appear only to you and are YOU - reveals them as sources of your actions.

Your inhibitions are reflections of how you see yourself, so that which you see in those images is YOU, while - and here’s the opportunity - you are also the seer.

When we are stuck we identify singularly: we experience only from within the image and fuse with it completely.

Yet a quality we possess as humans is to realize that you are the one who is seeing that image. You can actively interact, engage with that image - and so just as with your physical body in the physical world you can move in that image, observe the environment within it, and at some point … start to look through it.

And so, what can happen in those images? What I’ve seen in my work is that certain areas in the landscape someone presents are dark, and you could say these dark regions are the ones we would prefer not to venture into.

Sometimes they are the locations of doing the right thing, looking towards what’s right. Often the pattern seen in people who work deeply with metaphors or actively use them is that those right-side regions in their images are darker, with shadows, muddy, stink or dark woods not easily seen.

It can be very revealing to actually spend some time there, to go towards the dark, to look into the dark, to learn to lighten up in the dark, like the hermit not depending on external light but holding his own lantern.

Lightening Up From Inside

This will reveal to you what is in the dark in you, what you are preferring not to see, which can then be very telling about what - under the line of consciousness during the day - is directing and often limiting your actions.

All these areas you see in your inner landscape can be explored, actively engaged with, and will often mirror to you what is going on: why you are stuck, what you are stuck on, what is limiting your range of thinking, why you are constantly looping in the same thought pathways.

In essence, it gives you a kind of painting of your current state - where you are currently standing, which landscape do you arrive at when you look right now.

Grounding Your Feet

What is going on?
How am I?
From which base am I experiencing life, seeing, looking, projecting, hiding right now?

The beautiful thing is as you start to make moves in that very personal, completely personal landscape, those moves will start to affect or plasticize your reality.

You will start to move, as one of my teachers said, “from looping in mind more and more to being,” which is more of an actively engaging open state.

You are able to, as Cypriot mystic Stylianos Atteshlis said, “get disinterested in your negative thought forms” or, in this sense, pathways and attachments in the landscape that you do not want to nourish anymore with your attention.

You get an enormous modality in the sense of moving!

“I think it’s nice to realize
there is no other way that
you can change the universe
other than simply moving.”​
- Karl Friston, most cited neuroscientist of the last decades

Seeing the image shows your base of operation, your point of view, your constellation that you see yourself in, your attachments, your entanglements, the containers in which you are fixed, which will then also affect your beliefs, your behavioral rigidities, etc.

Now, what all this points to is that we realize the imagination acts, and so if we don’t have an active relationship to our personal images, we are missing out on an enormous potential for cognitive plasticity.

A beautiful thing that I heard in a discussion with some of the leading neuroscientists is: “if you reduce the precision of your prior preferences,
you become more exploratory.”

Becoming Stable in Solitude

In order to do all of this, which might seem overwhelming initially, and it often is, the state of the nervous system can be key.

Learning to actively relax, or learning to relax as a skill - basically getting completely disinterested in your worldly duties, the attachments for a moment, and allowing your body, your parasympathetic nervous system, to activate, to settle deeply into allowing the ground to support you - can be, in many traditions, also seen as a cleaning practice, a preparatory practice to deepen active imagination work.

The obstacle in our society is that the restlessness, the amount of imagery that is externally consumed, the constant states of tension, the fear-mongering through the media, are not really supportive of deepening interiority.

There is an initial practice path of, on the one hand, not denying that all of that exists, but on the other hand, getting completely disinterested - also on the physical, bodily level - from what is going on in the external world for periods of time daily.

Such practice does not mean that you lose responsibility, but that you can return with more energy to your responsibilities after. You don’t work from a belief system that says it is not allowed to completely disengage for moments each day from the outside world.

When your body has learned to deeply move away it's easier to engage with the images. It’s easier to become stable when moving in your metaphors.

You will also get different images; you will have a lower frequency of thoughts, and so your images will become a bit more harmonious.

As Emerson said, there will be less goblins in the mind - you will start to get fooled less by the seduction of those internal tricksters who know your weakness so well.

That is where consistent physical practices that are not willpower-based come in.

You’re frequently checking in complete presence and honesty: am I here? Am I looping in one of the old stories? Through myriad approaches, which can then help if you to become more and more stable, sobered up and better in the old stories - for when would want to go and do deeper imagination-inquiry.

Excuse the length today. This is one of the areas in my work and personal practice that excites me most.

Holy Disinterest to Awaken Your Compass

No time today to read?
Here's the practice summary:

1. Learn to physically relax deeply, completely disengage from the outside world for a set time
2. Sit yourself down in a comfortable, active posture (not slouched)
3. Ask yourself, that whole story of what’s going right now in me “what is it like?”
4. Allow an image to appear and enter it, observe as you’d observe any other external environment

As one of my teachers told me, before I really understood the practical application:

“Pay attention and see
how many metaphors you have.”

IN SEARCH OF ...

Jan Taal, psychosynthesist:

Itsuo Tsuda in his The path of Less:

Thomas Pollak, neuropsychiatrist

THINGS HAPPEN WHEN YOU TRY

Join an upcoming event?

• Move Beyond Your Mental Patterns at Urban Reheat Antwerp:
  March 28, 2026, 9:00–12:00, Studio Carwash, Antwerp –
  Morning immersion with playful games to dissolve mental loops into presence. Book Your Spot​​
• Moving in the Athlete’s Inner Game with Metaphors:
  May 8, 2026, 15:00–16:15 CEST, Online –
  For athletes & coaches: Turn inwards with body & metaphors to release tension and cultivate presence in performance. Register Here​

Wishing you grounded exploration,

Olivier

​

Sint-Janstraat , Borgerhout , Antwerp 2140
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​

Sint-Janstraat , Borgerhout , Antwerp 2140
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​