Retter College logo
072-3931244עבריתStudent login
Guided imagery audio

What is guided imagery, and how does it affect the mind?

Guided imagery is a unique therapeutic method that uses the language of images and a state of deep relaxation to reach the subconscious. Through purposeful verbal guidance, it lets you bypass the defense mechanisms of the conscious mind, ease physical tension, release emotional blocks and create fast, effective, long-lasting behavioral and physiological change.

This powerful tool offers an answer to a wide range of challenges: from freeing yourself of anxieties and fears, through building self-confidence, to improving your health, your relationship and your parenting. The most effective way to experience guided imagery is through regular self-practice with recorded imagery sessions, or through a precise, personal fit to your own unique needs within therapy.

Want to start practicing right now?🎧 Jump straight to the library of ready-made recordings for every purpose

Can't find the exact guided imagery for you?

Sometimes we are looking for an answer to a specific difficulty, but the recordings out there simply don't hit what we need at that moment. That is exactly why we created the Guided Imagery Guide (in Hebrew) – to help you understand the principles that work on the subconscious, so you can tailor the imagery exactly to you.

Want to take it one step further? Find out how this wonderful toolbox becomes a life-changing therapeutic tool as part of the NLP studies program for practitioners at Retter College.

Guided imagery – first video
Guided imagery – second video
Guided imagery – third video

We would all like to live full, healthy, fulfilling lives.

To be in a healthy, happy relationship, work in a profession we love, enjoy physical and emotional health, be meaningful parents who raise happy children, live without financial worries and environmental pressures, build good relationships with family and friends, fulfill our dreams, and live meaningful, satisfying lives.

But our lives are so complicated, and so often our wishes don't come true. Despite our best intentions we feel stuck, not moving forward in one area or another. And so many people carry a deep sense of dissatisfaction and frustration with them, which can be tied to any area of life: romantic relationships, career, livelihood, self-image, weight, health, parenting, relationships in general and so on.

The good news is that, despite all the difficulty and complexity of life, there is a tool that is available and accessible to each of us, one that can help change the situation – and this powerful, wonderful tool is called “guided imagery.”

Common uses of guided imagery

Cancer treatment
Oncologists refer cancer patients to guided imagery therapy, which increases the success rate of the healing process.
Marketing and sales
The most successful salespeople and business owners use it to reach their goals and targets.
Improving physical performance
Athletes use guided imagery in their training to improve performance. Coaches use this tool to help their clients create reality and change in every area of life, and to gain confidence in their abilities.
Emotional and psychological therapy
Many therapists use guided imagery to help their clients untangle emotional knots and heal the wounds of the past.
Treating children
Children respond wonderfully to professionally guided imagery processes that help them cope with social, emotional and physical difficulties.
Treating test anxiety
Guided imagery is also excellent before exams, and for coping with social problems and learning difficulties.
Helping children
Parents use guided imagery too, to help their children when they are sick or wake up at night from a bad dream, and to strengthen their confidence.
Overcoming addictions
Smoking, drugs and alcohol, sugar, and even negative habits.
Relief from anxiety, relaxation and calm
With professional guidance, guided imagery is also excellent for treating depression and trauma.

A sample video for relaxation with guided imagery – the ball of light

At Retter College we recommend practicing guided imagery with a professional guide who has studied the field in depth. That said, you can close your eyes right now, settle back comfortably and enjoy a short relaxation example that uses guided imagery:

Relaxation with guided imagery – the ball of light

What exactly is guided imagery, and what is so special about this tool?

A guided imagery process combines relaxation and calming techniques with guidance that makes use of the powerful force of the imagination, in order to achieve goals or solve a variety of problems.

The relaxation and calming techniques quiet the thinking mind, so that the resistance, fears and blocks that usually keep people from moving forward do not jump in and sabotage the process.

Another advantage of the process is that we do not approach the clients' problems intellectually. As we all know, there are plenty of things we understand with our minds but cannot actually adopt and do: we understand that the fear we feel is not real at this moment, yet we still cannot convince ourselves to calm down.

We know that the cigarettes we smoke do nothing for our health, and still we cannot stop smoking. These are exactly the tangles that guided imagery processes know how to bypass in order to reach the subconscious directly and work with clients at a deeper level.

Access to the subconscious allows clients to receive meaningful messages, release inner blocks and find new solutions to the challenges they face in life, drawing on the inner strengths and resources that already exist within them.

Professional guidance focuses the client's imagination and leads them to the desired picture of reality. That picture affects the client, who can sense it through all the senses, and like any inner movement, it creates ripples and waves that spread outward and turn an inner reality into an outer one.

Many people know guided imagery in its simplest form: the client sits comfortably or lies down, sometimes even dozing off, while in the background the guide speaks and leads the session. But such processes can be more complex, when the guide holds a conversation with the client during the imagery. The conversation takes place from a state of altered awareness, and very deep and meaningful material comes up in it.

Right now you can experience the closest thing to guided imagery in a therapy setting:

A collection of recorded guided imageries

Here is the link to a series of guided imageries for everyday use in challenging life situations. Everything is available to you, one click away, right now:

Just step in,
find a quiet place,
put on headphones
and disconnect…

Enter the collection of guided imageries that will move you toward your goal

The winning combination: NLP with guided imagery!

The winning combination: NLP with guided imagery

Studying guided imagery together with NLP – an even more comprehensive and powerful process

At Retter College we teach how to lead therapeutic and healing processes with guided imagery, combined with NLP tools, to create a comprehensive, powerful process that produces significant results that last.

We emphasize a gradual process that takes into account the stages of getting acquainted and building the relationship between guide and client and, in parallel, the client's stages of readiness to meet themselves and various material from their life.

When the processes are delivered this way and built step by step, the results are surprising and far-reaching.

Here are the four main stages that make up the process:

Stage oneRecognize your existing strengths and reinforce inner resources

To make a change we need inner strength, and for therapeutic processes to succeed we need to build trust with our clients.
That is why, in the first stage of treatment, while the therapeutic relationship and trust are being established, the guide helps the client recognize and strengthen the inner strengths and resources that already exist within them. This is done with various images that direct the client to look for inner sources of nourishment, so that they can draw on them later in the change process. The resources can be self-confidence, courage, determination, self-acceptance, seeing the good, love, perseverance and so on – these are the nutrients from which the client will draw strength and energy in hard and challenging moments, and from which they will receive the strength to continue the change process.
The trust that the client builds in their own inner strengths grows together with the trust built in the therapeutic process, and together they ensure a smooth start and strong foundations for change.

Stage twoLet go of what is no longer needed and bring back the spark from the past

Once the therapeutic relationship is established and trust has been built between client and guide, it is possible to begin revealing meaningful details from the client's past.
At this stage the process has two goals:
1. To locate the roots of the problem: to look for what weakened the client, and for the event that created the problematic patterns that keep them from moving forward today, to where they want to go.
2. To meet, and restore to the client, strengths and qualities from childhood, such as creativity, energy, wonder, the ability to do things in a surprising, playful way, and to be enthusiastic about everyday life again.
To achieve these goals, the guide uses images designed to turn back time, with the aim of closing circles from the past, leaving behind whatever holds us back, and opening the gate anew for what is good.

Stage threeChange begins in the imagination. Now.

Change begins in the imagination. In fact, everything created in life existed first in the imagination – and what is true of the inventions that have changed people's lives throughout history is just as true of the habits and changes in people's private lives.
So, once we have prepared the client for change, we turn to the imagination again. The aim of the guided imagery process at this stage is to introduce the client to the new reality they want to create in their life, and to use the imagination to bring about the desired change in reality.
This is a wondrous stage, and very often we witness what people call “miracles”: cancerous tumors that shrink, people who lived alone for years suddenly meeting their partner, addicts who break free of their addictions immediately, shy children who come to feel confident and manage to stand in front of a whole class without panicking – and there are countless more examples of clients who behave, think and feel differently.

Stage fourLiving the change for many years to come

Many of us know the situation in which we manage to rally and make a change – lose weight, stick with exercise for a while, communicate calmly with our children and so on – but, to our disappointment, after a while things go back to the way they were.
To anchor the change and preserve the results, the process includes a session (a single one – no more are needed) in which the client experiences themselves in the future, as days and months pass, years go by, and the change is a natural part of their life. This stage cements the change, lets the subconscious take responsibility, and helps clients embed the change at the deepest levels and actually keep it going for many years.

Studying guided imagery combined with NLP

The difference between wanting change – and knowing how to make it happen

Imagine having an accessible tool that lets you bypass the thoughts that hold you back, release blocks from the past and anchor new habits that last for years.

We invite you to turn imagination into reality: to upgrade your personal and family communication, to guide others to breakthroughs, and to build a successful, empowering career in therapy.

Fill in your details in the box,
and we'll get back to you with all the information about studying guided imagery in its winning combination with NLP:

Frequently asked questions about guided imagery and relaxation

What is guided imagery, and how does it affect the mind and body?

Guided imagery is a science-based therapeutic and mental tool that combines a state of physical relaxation (a slowing of the brain's electrical activity and a shift to alpha waves) with the language of images. This combination temporarily quiets the critical, logical mind and allows direct, effective access to the subconscious. Because the human brain responds to vivid inner scenarios in the same way it responds to events in external reality, the process makes it possible to create deep change in thought patterns, reduce physiological tension and improve performance in a focused way.

In which situations is guided imagery recommended?

The method has been found especially effective for reducing stress, tension and anxiety, easing chronic insomnia and relieving pain. In the modern world it is also widely used as a tool for mental preparation (for athletes, business people, or ahead of exams and interviews), for emotional support and building self-confidence in children, and even as a complementary tool in medicine to support and ease natural pregnancy and childbirth.

How does a deep change process work with this method?

Unlike purely symptomatic treatment (which works like a temporary painkiller and may cause the problem to migrate somewhere else), in Retter College's approach deep work connects three timelines. We begin by locating and healing the emotional root formed in the past, move on to building solutions, releasing blocks and focused relaxation in the present, and finish by anchoring and embedding the new reality in the future, which ensures that the results are preserved for many years.

Can anyone practice guided imagery, and is it safe?

Yes, the practice is suitable and safe for almost everyone. Even people who feel they “have no visual imagination” discover that they are able to connect with the process through physical sensations, emotions or sounds, since the language of the subconscious varies from person to person. The process is completely safe because the mind's natural defense mechanisms do not allow material to surface as long as the client is not ready for it. Healing is always done gently and only after strong inner resources have been built. The only contraindication is for people whose reality testing is impaired (such as people with a mental illness in acute states), for whom the method is not recommended.

Where can you study guided imagery professionally?

It is important to know that guided imagery is a powerful complementary tool, a built-in and inseparable part of the comprehensive training program in NLP studies for professional practitioners. During the program, students acquire the “Calm Language” – a structured system of verbal grammatical rules that leads the client into deep relaxation and bypasses intellectual resistance. The synergistic combination of the worlds of NLP with the depth of guided imagery creates the most complete and sought-after therapeutic toolbox on the market.

Daphna Retter - Retter College

Written and professionally reviewed by Daphna Retter

One of the founders of Retter College. She brought the NLP method to Israel in 1994, with decades of clinical experience and the training of thousands of therapists. A certified member of the worldwide GTC community through NLP University, and holder of the rank of Certified Master Trainer of NLP from the ABNLP organization (view the certificate).