What If the Key to Change Was Inside a Painting?

A Journal Entry from the Edge of a Trance

I wasn’t looking for another technique.

In fact, I think I’d forgotten what I was looking for.

Like so many of us in the healing professions, I had stacked up certifications like sandbags, hoping they would hold back the flood of human suffering I kept encountering. Trauma-informed, EMDR-trained, NLP fluent. I could diagram the nervous system and quote Bessel van der Kolk in my sleep. And yet—something was missing.

Not in them—in me.

There comes a point when you realize you’re managing pain, not moving through it. That no matter how many skills you’ve learned, the room still feels hollow after the session ends. You go home knowing your client smiled, nodded, even said “that was helpful,” but you can feel that nothing core really changed.

It was in that dry spell that I stumbled into the training with Mike Mandel. Or maybe “was led” is more accurate. A friend had urged me to go—one of those intuitive nudges you try to ignore until it becomes inconvenient not to.

We were learning about guided imagery. Not as a “tool,” really. More like a kind of invitation. Mike spoke of the unconscious like it was an artist locked in a basement—brilliant, half-mad, and desperate to be heard. He said, “People won’t change just because you tell them how. But give them a symbol… and they’ll never forget what it means.”

I remember that line. It hit me like a bell in the bones.

And then came the moment—the one I can’t shake. We were doing a demonstration. Mike was leading a volunteer through a gentle imagery process. It was light, playful even. Until it wasn’t.

“What do you see now?” he asked. His tone was quiet, but precise. Like he already knew something was waiting.

She paused. Her breathing changed.

“There’s a painting,” she said, eyes still closed. “A big one. And… there’s a door in it. It’s old. Covered in ivy.”

The room went still.

Not performatively still—viscerally still. The kind of stillness that means something important just showed up, and everyone else in the unconscious agreed to shut up and watch.

She kept studying the painting. You could feel it—something about that image was speaking to her. Not in words, but in something deeper.

I watched her breathing change—deeper now, slower. Whatever she was seeing in that frame, it was speaking to something old and tender.

She didn’t need to describe it. She didn’t need to explain. That’s the thing about the unconscious—it doesn’t explain itself. It just knows.

When she finally opened her eyes, something was different. Not dramatic—no fireworks, no catharsis. Just… lighter. Rearranged. Like something had been seen that finally let go of its grip.

And in that quiet shift, something in me rearranged, too.

That moment was a kind of initiation. A reminder that beneath all our clinical frameworks and goal-setting models, there’s something older at work. Something archetypal.

The human mind heals in metaphor. It’s always been this way.

We dream in symbols, not spreadsheets. We grieve in stories, not statistics. Even in the earliest myths, transformation doesn’t happen when the hero gets better advice—it happens when they cross into the forest, talk to the old woman, or descend into the cave.

The unconscious doesn't care how clever we are. It listens when it feels safe, and it speaks when we stop demanding answers and start offering symbols. Guided imagery is one of the rare forms that honors that.

Since that training, I’ve stopped trying to “fix” people. I stopped seeing myself as the mechanic. Instead, I create the frame. I follow the story. I ask questions like, “If that fear had a shape, what would it be?” or “What’s the weather like in that memory?”

Sometimes we find a lighthouse. Sometimes it’s a locked drawer. Sometimes they don’t want to go in at all—but they can circle it, and that’s enough.

I’ve watched people put down anger they have carried for decades, not because they processed it, but because they buried it in an imagined field and saw it turn to seeds.

I’ve seen people rescue their child-selves from burning houses. I’ve seen shadows that once stalked a client turn into guides. Not because I did something clever, but because their unconscious knew how, once I got out of the way.

So no, I wasn’t looking for another technique.

I was looking for that.

For awe. For meaning. For the moment when a client’s breath changes and you realize they just walked into a painting, or a memory, or a metaphor that’s been waiting decades for them to arrive.

And more than that, I was looking to remember why I began. Why I ever sat down across from another human being and said, “Let’s find out what's true.”

Guided imagery gave that back to me.

If this stirred something in you—if part of you knows there’s more to this work than techniques and scripts—there’s a place for you in the MMHA Elite Guided Imagery class. It’s not about more techniques.

It’s about listening deeper. It’s about trusting the door. And finding out what’s inside your own painting.