<aside> 💡 With the term “Journeying Object,” I’m playing on the common term “meditation object.”
Just like there are dozens of things you could use as a meditation object (breath, body, flame, mantra, love, open space, awareness itself…) there are dozens of things you could use as your journeying object.
In Volume 2: Mythosomatic Dream Return we’re mostly practicing imaginal journeying by taking dreams as the journeying object — but there are many more possibilities.
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I often use the word “image” for the journeying object, but as I’ve said elsewhere, that word doesn’t necessarily refer to actual visual images. And even when there is a primarily visual element, there’s always a host of secondary multi-sensory elements — sounds, emotional atmospheres, somatic activations, “auras” of color or texture, information that seems to be plucked out of the air like radio waves… the reality of any given “image” or “object” goes way, way beyond what these words can actually express. But, we have to use some words, so “image” and “journeying object” will be our go-to options.
On this page, I want to look at a couple common versions of journeying objects, how to expand them and work with them, and then point towards other possibilities that you can experiment with.
Dreams are a very common and very useful journeying object. There are a lot of reasons for this, but a big one is: they provide the multi-sensory elements for you, and make it much easier to find your way back to it. Dreams tend to have very memorable visuals, tied to memorable emotional atmospheres, tied to memorable relationship dynamics and narrative dynamics… everything we need, pre-packaged and ready to go.
Plus, if we think of journeying as a way of seeing the shape of the wind (dropping images into unconscious currents to see how that current moves them), dreams have the advantage of originating in the unconscious already. All in all, you couldn’t ask for a better pre-packaged journeying object than a powerful dream.
If you already did the Imaginal Freestyle exercise, you’ll have an idea of how we worked with this. Using some phrases with a lot of power and baggage to them (Higher Self, Deeper Self, True Self), we allowed an image to take form, noticing how we imaginally responded to those phrases, and then leaning into those reactions.
Using phrases that feel powerful to you, you can repeat the same process. Say the phrase, soak in it, let it resonate through you — notice how it shapes your awareness, what feelings and images and memories come up. Let yourself notice, consolidate, and weave those together into a multi-sensory journeying object, and then go through the The Root Instructions **with that object.
It’s less pre-packaged than dreams, but there’s still a very workable process here for noticing the inner landscapes that already exist, and then finding your way to that landscape.
You might be familiar with practices like Internal Family Systems (IFS), where you can work with an emotion by, more or less, sensing into the personality and personhood behind it, and communicating with that part of yourself 1:1, in as clear and kind a way as possible.
Maybe you’ve even modified the practice, like some people I’ve known, allowing those emotions to take form as a location, landscape, scene, or narrative, rather than something more person-shaped.
These are all viable options, not only for using an emotion as a journeying object, but for anything else you might use. Let the object try on different shapes, communicate with you in different ways. It can be truly clarifying to see a certain scene — maybe a furious, storm-tossed sea, lit by flashes of lightning — and then to let that same scene cohere itself into a person. While the scene at first looks like an expression of anger, you can talk to the person and realize that actually, it’s an expression of terror and helplessness.
Getting more views on an object is rarely a bad idea — as long as you don’t overdo it.