Re-Awakening the Imagination of the Heart: Personifying as Sacred Practice

Abstract

In his foundational text, Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman (1975) defined personifying as “imagining things in a personal form so that we can find access to them with our hearts” and stated that personifying “offers another avenue of loving” (p. 14). This study explores and demonstrates personifying as an applied, everyday practice of depth psychology—a way in which the many figures, within and around us, become acknowledged and related to, even loved. A way that needs not an intermediary or therapist, but reawakens the wisdom and brilliance of the heart’s imagination. Prominent among those with a deep familiarity of personifying are David Abram, Betsy Perluss, Dennis Patrick Slattery, and Patricia Berry. Interviews with these four people have been part of a lyric inquiry that explores if and how personifying can become an everyday practice of depth psychology, and what the gifts of such a practice may be. The result is a creative, polyvalent text that combines story, personal experience, and poetry with the voices and wisdom of those interviewed, with special attention given to the aesthetic value of the work. While certain practices are included, the study explores how personifying, itself, stands in defiance of prescribed practices. It is a spontaneous experiencing that happens, more organically, when certain inner conditions are cultivated and nurtured. This work identifies three inner conditions—emptiness, attentiveness, and sentiency—and provides insight and practices to cultivate each so that personifying can happen more often and originally in one’s life.