The project connects a wide range of leaders and creatives who are propagating a new paradigm that includes the imaginal realm as a fundamental aspect of reality.
We are creating systems, practices, tools and knowledge that unlock a new way of being.
Here are a few of us and what we’re up to.
Rosa Lewis
Rosa is a mystic, meditation guide, artist and thought-leader. She envisions a world where both culture and science come to understand the ways that the imaginal realm is a core part of experience and reality. She founded the Imaginal Realm Project with this purpose in mind.
She has created a modality – Shared Imaginal Practice – which gives people direct embodied experience of the imaginal realm. In her Vision Document for the Imaginal Realm Project, she defines mechanisms, ethics and value metrics for imaginal practices.
She is writing a book, ‘Being Buddha Nature’, which lays out what reality is when the imaginal realm has been fully integrated into experience. It includes technical descriptions of the underlying nature of experience and outlines an approach to contemplative and psychotherapeutic practice that allows people to experience the world in this way.
In her podcast, Creative Adventures, she has recorded interviews about key facets of the imaginal realm including, the shape of time, heart awakening and psychedelics, amongst others.
She coaches teachers and leaders, facilitating awakening and self-actualisation, in particular for people interested in the imaginal. She also teaches imaginal and meditation practices, with the goal of helping people awaken for the benefit of all beings.
She is collaborating with HeartBond, to measure how hearts connect and sync up with each other during relational imaginal practices.
One of her future dream projects would be to photograph and interview modern-day mystics, to create a new cultural understanding of mysticism.
Joost Vervoort
Joost is an Associate Professor of Transformative Imagination at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He writes about themes related to the imaginal and is leading a project called ‘Infrastructures For Mystery,’ which is researching what structural conditions are necessary for people to be able to access the deep mystery of life. The project is running public facing events and has been featured in national news.
Previous projects include creating the Creatures Nine Dimensions, a framework for evaluating how art and creative practice stimulate societal transformations, which was presented to the UN.
He is developing a video game, All Will Rise, which is ‘an inappropriately joyous game about saving the planet’.
Joost runs a meditation group, called Dharmagarage, and guides regular meditations. He is an artist and the lead singer in a metal band – Terzij de Horde. Joost is interested in exploring how music, imaginal practice and activism can be combined to unlock new experiences for people.
Joost and Rosa record a podcast, Nouveau Shamanic Cinema, where they watch films as if they are portals into deep meaning and invite the listeners into this way of engaging with film and media.
If you are interested in imaginal practice and futures, he has collated a list of people to follow on Bluesky.
Joost describes the impact that integrating the imaginal realm has had on him and his work (written in September 2021):
“I’ve been working closely with Rosa for a little over a year and her guidance has pretty much transformed the way I live, and, importantly, the way I work and lead. Her influence on my practice, experience and worldview is pervasive and highly multidimensional, so this will be oversimplifying the impact of my work with her.
Perhaps the biggest impact on my practice and life has been through imaginal practice. Working with the interaction between body, heart, mind and ‘soul’ (or the sense of interconnected meaning and storylines for anyone less inclined to this language) – to engage with the imagination in a complete and embodied manner.
I have been an imaginative person all my life, and my imagination is now a large part of my profession as a researcher and lecturer focused on more sustainable futures. I have also been a meditation practitioner for my entire adult life. But the integration of these parts of my experience and skills has been an enormous catalyst. It has made my imagination and thinking more embodied and integrated – and it has made the ways in which my embodied experience is naturally supported by my imagination much clearer.
As a result, I am better able to work with various faculties – imagination, empathy, reflection, and the facilitation of these processes for other people.
I’ve become better at recognizing and allowing space for my best traits and talents. For instance, the notion of ‘dark joy’ – being playful and joyful in a way that is allowed to have a shadow side, to have wildness, to break societal expectations.
The importance of safety has been another theme; realizing how important a sense of safety is for people to be able to take risks and do complex things has made me better as a teacher and mentor in my various roles.
I’d like to give one interesting concrete example. Inspired by a court case against my pension fund to get the fund to divest from fossil fuels, I am building a video game inspired by a popular Japanese game series called Phoenix Wright, which is set in a courthouse. The game will inform people how to go about high stakes climate cases – as well as raise money for actual court cases. The idea is attracting lots of interest across the board.
This example demonstrates how I am mobilizing what I have learned through this approach to practice.
I could very easily bring up many examples of how my life has been impacted – in my work, my relationships, in my own guidance of others in meditation practice, in my artwork, and my music. I think the possibility space for this type of inclusive, multidimensional practice, with a strong focus on imaginal skills, is enormous.“
River Kenna
River is a writer, mythopoetic guide and teacher. His foundational courses, on Imaginal Journeying and Somatic Resonance, make the imaginal realm accessible to anyone who is interested in developing an imaginal practice.
He is a public advocate for integrating the Imaginal Realm into experience and can be found on Twitter and at various events across Europe and further afield. He runs an online community for people who are interested in rewilding their life.
He’s interested in the maturation of individuals and culture, along the lines of Bill Plotkin’s Soul-Centric Model of Development.
He recently released a digital book – a collection of essays titled ‘We’re Here to Renew the Sacred‘. It acts as an introduction to (or an important reminder of) the value of being in touch with the imaginal realm.
Jane Miller
Jane works with the crossover between the imaginal, energy work and death care.
The imaginal allows for a connection to the mysterious, expansive and metaphorical nature of both death and the body – recognising the ways that the subtle body is imaginally always in a life-death cycle creates greater possibility for embodied surrender and the space for new things to emerge.
She has done a series of interviews with healers and teachers to understand the particular genius of their approaches. She also writes about her energy work practice.
She ran a research project, called Sun and Water, exploring how medical and energetic approaches to healing could be synthesised.
She facilitated a community of imaginal practitioners for a year alongside Rosa, including leading Shared Imaginal Practice sessions. She runs regular online and in-person events, including Death Cafes and Energy Work demonstrations.
Sam Hinds
Sam is passionate about sharing the importance of how the imaginal isn’t just an individual experience and how the practice of collective imaginal attunement allows people to feel the collective currents in the imaginal.
He has developed a collective imaginal practice that gives people an opportunity to experience this called Communal Reverie. He completed a PhD on ‘Communal Reverie: Toward a Formulation of Imaginal Aperspectivity and the Integral Participatory Imagination’.
He is interested in how Communal Reverie as a practice could be used to assist people with creative visions beyond modernity, in a way that values mystery, allows for things to have a life of their own and isn’t bound by rigid logic and linear unfolding.
Sam writes comprehensively about the depths of the imaginal realm. He also recorded a podcast with Rosa – What is the Imaginal Realm? – which amongst other things explored the potential connection between the imaginal realm, bio-energetics and spiritual concepts like the Samboghakaya.
Sam is a poet. He is also a psychotherapist and offers ketamine-assisted therapy and serves as adjunct faculty at the California Institute for Integral Studies.
Events
The aim of the Imaginal Realm Project is to create a scene where people can cross-pollinate, find mutual inspiration, share knowledge and skills, collaborate and have fun, while also developing the frameworks, tools, languages and cultural capital to influence the paradigm on a global scale.
Peer-led retreats and events create the opportunity for more of this to happen. We have held retreats in the Netherlands and France. Some of us also attended the Respond network retreats, organised by Nathan Vanderpool and supported by the Vervake Foundation.
If you would be interested in financially supporting a retreat or conference, please get in touch.
Photos are from the Soul-Making retreat organised by Tucker Walsh and Cheryl Hsu, at the Life Itself farmhouse
