As children we see the world with eyes of wonder, mystery and beauty, but somewhere along the way that sense of magic and optimism gets lost. We learn to take things at ‘face value’ and increasingly define ourselves and the world around us in terms of an ever-growing list of concepts and limiting ideas. This leads into a very habitual and automatic way of responding to the world, and life in general. We are taught that being adult means to deny that ‘childlike’ view of the world, to be ‘realistic’ as they say, but the word shouldn’t really be ‘cynical’ and it seriously limits our potential for happiness and freedom. We have so many gifts, talents and hidden possibilities, but how to access them? Well, using imagination to picture a better, more capable, happy, and successful version of ourselves. If we do this enough, an interesting thing begins to happen – the fixed reality of who we think we are becomes less rigid and eventually grows to include the ‘imagined’ version of ourselves. This might sound like fantasy, but when imagination is wilfully directed it moves from passive fantasy to active creative visualisation – a conscious act. Ignorance of this means that over time we accumulate limiting, fixed ideas of who we are, to the point that it feels impossible that there could be anything beyond them, that they are made of stone, but creative visualisation is like the water that wears away the rock, reshaping even the most stubborn mountains…