Trust your instinct
Playing with instinctive collage and chatting with your inner wisdom
Back in December I wrote a post about creating collage to explore death and rebirth. Here’s the post if you want to refer to it or haven’t read it. https://mavericksoul.substack.com/p/lets-have-a-ripping-time
Today I’m going to share a collage process that tunes into the instinctual in a slightly different way.
Carl Jung said that the soul speaks in images. Images are powerful, which is why so much time, effort and money is expended on visual marketing. Try this next time you are watching the TV or reading a magazine. Notice what attracts and repels you visually and also pay attention to the feelings that arise and where in the body you feel them. Is there any inner chatter that accompanies the feeling?
This year I have started a practice of keeping an instinctive collage journal – a dedicated book that is purely for imagery. I like to use an A4 notebook for this, but you can use any size. I don’t add any words, and if I want to journal on what I have created I do that in a separate notebook for observations and reflections. Here are some of the collage pages I’ve made in January.
The process is simply to flick through old magazines, old books, or your collection of ephemera and select images that call to you in that moment. You don’t need to know why you are drawn to that particular image, just go with your instinct. Keep gathering images until you know you are done. Then arrange the images on your journal page and stick them in. Once you have completed this process, you can then start a dialogue with the collage.
First gaze deeply into your collage with soft eyes. Take in the whole collage without focusing on any particular area. Notice what arises – it might be a feeling, or you might hear sounds or voice.
Then you can gaze at the detail. Notice what arises or feels alive for you in details of your imagery.
The next step is to enter your collage. Step into it and feel the energy, the mood, the intention. Notice where in your body you feel this.
Imagine you are in conversation with your collage. Let it speak to you or through you “I am the one who….” Listen and speak aloud or write down whatever comes, while also noticing the qualities of the voice and where it is located (inside the body, outside the body, in the gut, head, heart, left, right, etc).
When you feel ‘done’ take a few deep breaths and have a good stretch, or better still go for a walk.
You can return to your collages again and again, repeating this tuning in and listening process. I recommend that you do because the messages and insights will evolve and grow over time with you.
You can also ask questions of your collage. For example:
What do you represent for me today?
What insight do you have for me today?
What are you asking of me today?
Who are you today?
What do you want of me?
What do you want me to know?
The more you create instinctual collages, you’ll find your own questions, or ways of conversing with them. That’s all part of the fun. And you will be developing a deeper conversation with your inner self, your instincts and insights.
Once upon a time we were all much more finely attuned to our instinctual self and our inner truth, this is a beautiful practice to reconnect to that and to trust it.
A few pointers to note:
Don’t start reading the articles/books while you are collecting images. Bookmark the article or page to go back to later.
Don’t add words or headlines to these collages as it is all about the images. Words will limit or distract the insight from the imagery.
Words tend to activate our more logical, rational centres of the mind and we want to bypass that and let our instinctual self be heard and felt.
Go play, have fun, and share your collages in the comments if you’d like to. I’d love to know what you discovered in the process of playing with collage in this way.
Until next time….
Thank you for sharing this.