Imagery and guided meditations are tools in every metaphysician’s toolbox. We use imagery to foster intuition, divination, psychic connection, mediumship, past life regression, inner child work, physical healing, animal communication, manifestation and many other things.

Our ability to hold a picture in our mind, and to breathe into a particular part of the body, determines our success in our ability to unlock and decode the influential energies around us.

The more we become aware of the energies that surround everything, and the more we work with visualizing them, the more we become able to actually seem them.

For example, after years of smudging my home, I finally became able the see the gray clouds of energetic shmutz that cling in the ceiling corners.

Likewise, after years of doing energetic exercises with my hands – pulling energy between them, rolling it into a ball – I finally began to see the strands of energy with which I was working.

I am amazed at the number of naïve spiritual seekers I meet who describe, in great detail, the things they see. To me, this is often proof of both the veracity of their claims and of the standard visualizations which we are all taught.

It’s easy to believe that the chakra images are based on truth when a person with no prior knowledge of chakras asks me why they see purple light shooting from the heads of some people, or a glowing blue light on particular foreheads.

Some people are naturally gifted with an ability to see energy. Other need to consciously work with energy for a while before they are able to see with their eyes what they have been trained to see with their mind’s eye.

Working with the mind’s eye, that is, visualization and imagination, sometimes feels counter-intuitive, because we want our spiritual work to be real, rather than imagined.

It’s important to remember that the third eye, or brow chakra, is the seat of eyesight, psychic ability, and imagination. It’s impossible to use your psychic awareness, or to work with energy, without using your imagination.

Recently, I’ve notice a connection between tarot and yoga. A lot of great tarotists are enthusiastic yogis. Now that I am becoming enthusiastic about yoga, I wonder how I read tarot for 20 years without it!

I think this connection exists because yoga works with energy, as well as with the physical body. When we engage in psychic work, healing or magick, we are also working with energy and the physical body.

Much of our exploration of energy can be intuitive and accidental. Recently, I realized I always do the same visualization when I want to connect with my Higher Self in divination. I imagine rolling my eyes up and back, so I can see my third eye from the inside. When I do this, I always perceive a bright blue light, and feel a connection to spirit that becomes obvious in the reading.

You might ask if I am imagining that light, or if I am really perceiving the brow chakra. My question is, as long as the psychic connection is made, why does it matter?

Hermetic wisdom teaches “as above, so below”. This is key to the concept of imagery and visualization. If we can spiritually, with our imagination, visualize something into being, it can truly come in to being within the material world.

Energy can be made manifest. Energy can create healing. The more we work with the energies around us, and the more clearly we can visualize them, the abler we become to direct those energies to the purposes of healing, divination and manifestation.