Advanced Psychotherapy Training

Immersion: The Practice to Engage Your Imagination

For those who Invent and Ponder with Passion. For all of you who Create, Aspire, and Inspire, we invite you to explore how your imagination fuels your inventive, expressive, athletic ability.

• Artists, Athletes, Authors
•  Musicians, Mind-Body, Movement Specialists 
• Story Tellers and Creatives Who Speak through Silence
• Photographers, Poets, Playwrights
•  Philosophers and Physicists

Courses and Consultations

Our non-therapist courses and consultations are for you, at every level of your creative path.

To be the best version of yourself in your field, you access coaches, courses, and mentors to train and guide you. There are specialists to help refine your skills. And psychotherapists and specialized counselors to help you balance life, goals, emotions, challenges, loss, and achievements. What else is there? Your Imagination!  

Your imagination is at the very core of who you are, what you do, how and what you create, what you achieve. Your life story, all that is beautiful and challenging, is nested with images and emotions in your imagination. There lies your potential for the best version of yourself.

Immersion is the term we use to refer to getting inside your imagination, finding those parts of you that need nourishment, empowerment, clarity, and validation.

Immersion is a process. Not coaching, not counseling, not skill-advice giving.

The Why

Immersion opens your imagination and enhances your insight into your creative depth. Immersion is a way to access parts of you that you may not be aware of, that can sabotage or lift your endeavor. Immersion is how you can access those parts, bring clarity and discernment. 

Immersion engages your imagination, the seat of your focus, flow, motivation, tenacity, the ability to sort out the what and why you do what you do. Your imagination is the seat of thinking way outside expectations and shame, to ground mental endurance, determination, perception and perspective.

The Process

In any endeavor, the mind and body are not our only source of energy and insight. Immersion is a practice that connects mind, body, with the depths of imagination. Our immersion courses and consultations adapt approaches from psychology and expressive therapies to individualize your experience. 

During the immersive process participants use small objects to create a drama-in-miniature – a diorama. When activated, this three-dimensional landscape of one’s imagined world opens unseen possibilities. Figures and pathways, blocks, and burials, the language of the imagination opens a different perspective from conscious thoughts, unrecognized emotion, staid patterns of thinking.

Engagement within the invented landscape allows symbols to voice perspectives and potential that we are unaware of.  Engagement enhances and extends insights and clarity. A theme emerges, beyond the original inspiration, with new understanding, new ways forward with your art form, your athletic endeavor, your life. 

We witness what the imagination holds – what is in the scene that constrains or gives freedom, what is in the drama that has long been unseen and unspoken. We ask, where is there hope and a way forward to create and extend oneself, to reach potential?  This is the value of immersion. Honoring your imagination whatever your endeavor. Giving yourself permission to be who you are authentically, protecting the little genius within you that holds your gifts, the gifts that are truly unique to you.

Validating You

Your imagination is where everything starts. Focus for a moment on a goal, imagine an achievement, pause on a stimulating idea that catches your attention, in that moment you are at the center of your creative potential. The book you write, the music you create, the art you design, the athletic achievement, professional expertise, all these potentials are nested in your imagination.

Consider four pillars to whatever you want to create. Initially, you are inspired and consider an interesting idea — a wish. You plan and organize. You get support from coaches, teachers, and friends. The fourth pillar is your imagination, the complex tapestry that holds your potential. Nested deep in your imagination, lies inspiration and hopes, voices of permission and limiting injunctions, constraints and freedom, fear and hope, the wild and the possible. What you imagine is surrounded by this complex of emotions and unknowns. In the depths, non-verbal images, voices, assumptions, and expectations influence what and how you actualize what you imagine. Accessing your imagination, engaging with those voices and images, is the practice of immersion.

Immersion is practice.  We must actively engage imagination to access what is real and inspiring, beyond wishing, thinking and planning. Immersion reaches the complex of unconscious musing, not accessible through thinking. Immersion involves the whole brain, connecting the body, brain, and imagination – this frees potential.

You know that you must practice your art, your writing, your athletic skills. Yet we forget to strengthen the muscle of our imagination. When the imagination is not stimulated, opened, like any endeavor, we lose access, imagining disappears. Our ability to think beyond superficial constraints becomes dull. When we don’t work our muscles or don’t practice our music, movement, writing or special expertise, we greatly reduce access to the richness of our potential. When we lose imagination a part of us dies. Our gifts fade, and for too many individuals, depression, anxiety, and self-diminishment become a serious loss of self and a loss for communities.

Core Ideas and Skills

• To attune and integrate sensibilities to connect mind-body-imagination
• To access depth of insight, creativity, innovation, inspiration, invention, spontaneity, intuition
• To explore identity, intention, challenges, and hope
• To develop attunement, focus, flow, determination, immediacy, tenacity, resilience, responsibility, persistence, flexibility

Athletes: Athletes reflect our strengths and our limits. They inspire and motivate and connect humanity. Athletes channel our collective energy and press forward beyond expectations. Athletes show us what to do with potential. They show us how to dig into our depths and lean way into the power and joy of what we can be. Athletes reflect the triumphs and deep suffering that comes with leaning into the fullness of life, finding meaning, a dedicated purpose. Here in the act of will manifests a kind of power that can lift humanity with dignity. Athletes embrace courage touching the depths and heights of what can be, in the act of merging mind-body-will and imagination. We all have an inner athlete.

Through immersion into active imagination athletes open a channel to their deepest potential, enhance mind-body connections, explore mental challenges, practice thought experiments, rekindle inspiration and motivation, ground hope and expectations, explore freedom and resistance, and validate their identity as an athlete. Through immersion, athletes practice ways to shift energy from over-thinking to a more attuned presence, evaluate limits, and increase focus and flow. During the immersive process, activating their imagination, athletes converse with the small inner voice of the one who holds the dream, stand as witness competitions within oneself, confront distractions and detractors, and invite empowering supporters and guides. Immersion into the world of a sand scene, the world of imagination, athletes discover what is missing, claim resources not yet developed, and affirm and integrate the authentic athlete within.

Artists & Actors – dance, drama, music, photography, painting, crafting: The artist includes all those who create, who sew and bake, who act, move and mime, those who sing and those who sign, those who invent and teach, those who aspire to inspire others.

The artist has been present within each of us since birth. We develop; they wait. We express, and experiment; they inspire. The immersive process for the artist is a portal into their imagination, opening a gateway to their creative spirit, an exploration of possibilities. During this immersive process, metaphorically stepping into imagined worlds, the artist confirms their creative identity and confronts negative injunctions that imprison creativity. Through dialogue with the many little artists within, the artist extends the language of mind-body-invention into beingness. While immersed artists engage with aesthetic existential expressions, collaborate with internal archetypes and the inimitable. During immersion, the artist strengthens the culture of creativity within and connects with cultural worlds. They explore voice and vision, align imagination with being, nourish soul and inner child. Validating their experience, artists engage emotion and creative intelligence, embrace freedom, reclaim spontaneity, and honor an authentic creative self.

Writers: Writers gift us with the power of images through language. Writers give us letters and poems, novels and essays, stories in every form from folklore to fairytales. Writers reflect our deepest desires, hopes and fears. They help us understand ourselves. Writers reflect life back to us. Authors record our history, archive culture and counterculture, keep us connected with biographies, teach us how to think and help us to feel what we cannot express. Writers tease us with mystery and challenge our beliefs. They lift us and ground us; they teach us life lessons. Writers confront, cajole and comfort humanity. Writers give us truth.

Through immersion and active imagination, the writer opens to receive these gifts for themselves. They leave us for a moment, step into the space of their imagination where they engage with voices, images, and emotions. Activating their imagination, writers collaborate with symbols and figures in a miniature sand world exploring their own truth. Immersed, the writer explores layers of stories and perspectives within. In the depths of active imagination writers find the validation that sustains them. They dialogue with the writers and authors within them. Immersion opens a way for writers to reclaim their authentic writer identity. Immersed in their own three-dimensional world writers reinvent, reimagine, and discover old and new voices, question limits, and take away permission to unlock constraints and freedom, fear and hope, the wild and the possible.

Pricing Information

Sessions are offered in-person at the studio in Brandywine, Maryland, and virtually. Training onsite with you is available for an additional fee.

For more information or answers to questions, please email: admin@sandtherapytraining.com. Upon order, we will reach out to arrange scheduling.