by: Rev. Cameron Trimble, CEO of Convergence
Something is happening to the people we serve, and most of us feel it before we can name it.
They hold anxiety that won’t settle. Their attention fractures under the slightest pressure. They are bowed by grief that has no occasion, no funeral, no permission to be grief. People are arriving in our offices and our sanctuaries carrying a sense that their lives have come unmoored, and they are looking to us not just for comfort, but for a way through.
We are good at our work. We listen carefully. We ask the right questions. We offer frameworks that help people understand what is happening to them.
And then we reach the limit of what understanding can do.
Here is what I have come to believe: transformation does not happen primarily through insight. It happens when something is seen and felt at a level deeper than explanation can reach. The desert mothers and fathers knew this. The mystics built whole disciplines around it. Before there was psychology, there was a long tradition of spiritual direction that worked not with argument but with image — because the people who practiced it understood that the soul does not change its mind. It changes its sight.
We have largely lost that tradition. Or rather, we have kept the language of it while quietly abandoning the practice.
Eidetic Imagery is one serious attempt to recover it.
Developed over decades of clinical and research-based work, Eidetics is not visualization in the casual sense, not guided relaxation or creative visualization or anything you have likely encountered in a weekend workshop. It is a structured process for engaging images that arise from a person’s own inner life: images that carry information about the patterns, wounds, and capacities held in the body and psyche. The images are not constructed. They are uncovered. And when they are engaged carefully, they often reveal what conversation alone cannot.
For those of us who accompany others — pastors, spiritual directors, coaches, therapists, counselors — this is not a marginal curiosity. It is a way of working that can take us past the ceiling we sometimes hit with people who understand their situation clearly and are still stuck in it.
On May 27th, I am hosting a live online training with Jacqueline Sussman called Reclaiming the Power of Imagination.
Jackie has spent more than forty years as a psychotherapist, teacher, and leader in Eidetic Image Psychology. She has worked across clinical settings, organizational environments, and international leadership contexts, always helping people access insight that was already present in them but inaccessible through ordinary means. She is one of the most experienced practitioners in this field, and she is a genuinely gifted teacher.
In this 1.75-hour session, she will introduce the foundations of Eidetic Imagery and guide participants through a live process using mythic imagery, images that have carried meaning across generations and continue to speak to the deeper layers of human experience. You will not leave with a theory. You will leave having moved through the process yourself, which is the only way to understand what it actually does.
For those who want to go further, Jackie will lead a three-session Community of Practice on The Commons following the webinar, a smaller, more focused setting to practice the method and begin integrating it into your own work. And for those who find themselves drawn to serious study, she is also the founder of Inner Vision, which offers formal training and certification in Eidetic Image Psychology.
But that is all downstream. For now, the question is simply whether this is something you want to encounter.
We are living in a moment that is asking more of us than our current methods were designed to give. The people in our care need more than insight. They need help accessing the deeper intelligence already alive in them, the kind that images carry and arguments cannot.
Imagination is not a supplement to serious work. In the oldest traditions we inherit, it is the work.