"After two decades of research in quality of life and rehabilitation psychology, this programme is my synthesis of what the evidence supports, and how I think it might be put into daily practice."
I built this because I went looking for it and couldn't find it. There is a great deal of research on motor imagery, on the rest cycles the body moves through, on what the mind can do during quiet states, but very little of it had been gathered into something a person could actually sit down and use. So I gathered it. Not as a clinician handing down a treatment, but as someone who has spent years reading this literature and wanted to put it within reach of the people it might matter to most.
I won't promise you an outcome. I can't, and anyone who does is selling something. What I can tell you is that the practices here are built honestly on what the evidence supports, that they cost nothing, and that you can stop at any time. If they give you something, even just a calmer few minutes in a difficult day, that is worth having.
Jeremy, developer of the Guided Imagery Programme
A spoken introduction to what's on this page — what the programme is, the research behind it, and how the practices work — for a listen instead of a read. Around 24 minutes. Useful for yourself, for a family member, or to share with a clinician.
This overview is AI-generated: two synthetic voices discussing the material on this page, not Jeremy's own voice and not his direct recordings used in the five practices below. It's offered as an accessible way in, not as a word-for-word reading of the site. If anything in it seems to go further than the written page, the written page is the accurate version.
The Guided Imagery Programme is a free, self-directed practice for people living with spinal cord injury. At its centre is a simple idea: that focused mental imagery, directed toward a specific part of the body, can influence what happens in the brain's motor circuits, even when the muscles themselves can't yet execute the movement. You don't zone out. You learn to direct your attention, deliberately, toward the part of the body you want to work with, and to hold an image of it functioning well.
Everything is free, and everything is here on the page. The longer practices each take about 20 minutes. There is no schedule and no enrolment: only the practices, and your own rhythm with them. Later on this page you'll find guidance on weaving brief moments of imagery into your day; for now, it's enough to know the longer practices are where the work begins.
Is this proven? Not yet, and the honest answer to that question deserves more room than a line here. The research these practices rest on, what it supports, and where it stops, is set out on its own page: The Research Behind the Practices. This page is about what you actually do.
"The imagination is one of humanity's oldest and most underused resources. It cannot promise an outcome, but it can be brought, deliberately and patiently, to the work of living well in the body you have."
How the Practices Work
There is a name for what this practice is, and it is a useful one: directed daydreaming. Relaxation comes first; imagery follows. You enter a quiet, receptive state, and then you turn your attention deliberately toward the body — toward the part you want to work with — and you hold an image of it functioning well.
Imagery, in this view, is two-directional. It is both a potential cause of bodily change and a record of it: shifts in mood, posture, or health leave traces in the imagination, and mental images may leave traces in the body. You are not trying to force anything. You are working with a feedback loop that may already be running.
A four-part structure, the same in every practice
All five practices are built the same way, whatever function they're working with. Once you've done one, you know the shape of all of them. Part I and Part IV are the same imagery, opening and closing the practice; Part II and Part III sit in between, moving from watching a whole body at ease to following one specific pathway inside your own.
Every practice begins the same unhurried way. You bring your attention to the breath, and let it slow. A soft light enters the top of your head with each in-breath and stays with each out-breath. Nothing is asked of you here beyond arriving.
A busy, stressed brain can't focus on mental practice; slow breathing creates the receptive state the imagery needs. This is what Parts II and III are built on.
A figure appears in front of you. It might be Jesus, or the version of you who feels strong and whole, or a being made of light — whoever feels right. The figure shows you the thing you're working toward: performing the movement easily in the motor practices, or simply resting undefended in the spasticity practice. You watch them at first. Then they step into you, and you become them.
Your brain has mirror neurons that fire when you move and when you watch movement. Watching switches those circuits on; becoming the figure makes it stronger still, because now you feel the movement rather than only seeing it.
Now you zoom in, and follow one specific route through your own body. In the motor practices that's the signal travelling from brain, down the spinal cord, along the nerve, into the muscle that does the work — and then you gently attempt the movement itself. In the spasticity practice the pathway is a different one: the vagus nerve, which runs outside the spinal cord and stays intact after injury, carrying signals of calm.
Accurate, specific imagining activates the brain more strongly than vague imagining, and attempting a movement — even when nothing visible happens — produces a stronger signal than imagining alone. Each practice page includes a labelled illustration of the pathway it follows.
Every one of those pathways is a thread inside a much larger network. If it helps to see the whole thing first, Innerbody hosts a model of the nervous system you can rotate, zoom and look around before you go anywhere near a single route.
Explore the nervous system in 3D Opens on innerbody.comYou return to the breath and the light you began with, and you rest there. Part I and Part IV are the same imagery, deliberately — they frame Parts II and III rather than only following them. A soft return, carrying a little of the ease with you.
The closing rest gives your brain space to consolidate what just happened, the way a writer leaves space between drafts. Nothing is owed, and there is nothing to complete.
Each part prepares the one after it. You can't productively rehearse a specific pathway (Part III) in a nervous system that hasn't slowed down (Part I), and the felt sense you build by becoming the figure (Part II) is what gives the pathway work in Part III something real to work with. The order isn't arbitrary; each part is doing something the next one depends on.
Five guided practices to explore
Each practice applies the same four-part structure to a different target. All five are free to use, and each takes about 20 minutes.
Each can be used independently, and there's no default starting point that suits everyone — that depends on your injury and what matters most to you day to day. The simplest way in is whichever function you'd most like to work with. Start there.
How Often — and the Best Times
Once a day is a good, realistic start. Three to five times a week is the amount linked to real results in the studies. But the full session isn't the only time you can practise. There are three natural moments in every day when your brain is especially open to it — and even a few breaths of imagining during those moments add up, with no extra session needed.
Before you grab your phone, fully open your eyes, or roll over — your nervous system is at its softest. Spasticity is usually at its lowest, and your busy thinking mind hasn't kicked in yet. Whatever you imagine in those first sixty seconds sinks in deep.
As you're drifting off, the line between deliberate thought and free imagining blurs. Whatever your mind is holding in these minutes tends to get rehearsed while you sleep. Your brain keeps working when you're not — and imagining before sleep gives it something to work on.
Every ninety minutes or so, your nervous system dips into a short rest phase. You might notice it as a wish to pause, a drop in focus, a pull to close your eyes. Most people push through it — but it's actually a moment when your brain is extra open, so use it.
These windows don't need a full session. Just two or three breaths returning to the main image from your practice — the feeling of your hand closing, the warmth in the belly, the light at the crown — is doing real work in your brain. The longer sessions teach you the image. The windows are when you put it to use.
The longer practices teach the vocabulary. The windows are when that vocabulary is used.
Most people miss these moments entirely, pushing through them with willpower or caffeine. Once you start to notice them, you'll find you have more practice opportunities every day than you imagined — and you don't need the longer sessions to stop for that to be true. Without the longer sessions, you don't yet have a vocabulary to return to. Without the windows, the longer sessions stay confined to themselves. Both are part of the work.
Your First Four Weeks
One practice, done once through, is a fair way to see whether any of this is for you. But the research this programme draws on doesn't rest on single sessions. It rests on repetition: the same imagery, returned to regularly, over weeks rather than days. That is how the successful motor imagery studies were actually run, and it is the honest answer to the question how often should I do this? Not intensely. Just regularly, for a while.
Here is a simple way to give the practice that regularity. It asks little: one longer practice a day, at roughly the same time, for four weeks. Nothing about it is compulsory, and there is no wrong way to adjust it to your life.
Choose one practice to begin with — whichever function matters most to you day to day. If more than one feels equally relevant, any of them is a reasonable place to start; the four-part structure underneath is the same throughout. Do it once a day, at a time that already has a natural quiet to it — first thing in the morning, or last thing before sleep. This week is only about getting familiar: learning the shape of the practice, not judging it.
Keep to the same practice, same time. By now the imagery should be coming more easily; you may find you no longer need the audio to follow it. If you'd like to work on more than one function, this is a reasonable point to add a second practice on some days — but let each one keep its own daily repetition rather than rotating through all five at once. Depth comes from returning to the same image, not from variety.
The longer practice stays daily. But now the imagery is in your memory, and you can begin using the brief windows described above — the soft minutes on waking, the drift before sleep, the quiet lulls that come through the day. You don't need the audio or this page for those; just a few breaths returning to the image you've been working with. Use these naturally occurring rest phases whenever you notice one arrive.
Keep going. Four weeks is enough to notice whether anything has shifted — in the vividness of the imagery, in how your body feels, in your sense of the practice itself. Some people notice a great deal by now; some notice little, and that is honest information too. Either way, you'll have a real basis for deciding whether to carry the practice forward.
A rhythm like this is a suggestion, not a rule. Miss a day and nothing is lost; simply return the next. Long stretches where the practice feels quiet, before it feels like anything, are normal — that's part of how this kind of practice works, not a sign you're doing it wrong.