Active Imagination Enables Imaginal Dialogues with Plants in Western Psychocultural Contexts

Abstract

There has been a recent proliferation of Western authors documenting imaginal dialogues with plants. Mainstream perspectives often dismiss such experiences as projections or anthropomorphisms, neglecting their deeper, transformative potential on human behavior in ecosystems, as well as the reality of vegetal agency. However, a post-Jungian understanding of active imagination offers a valuable, culturally rooted framework both for making sense of imaginal dialogues with plants and for engaging with them in a way that can return Western people to the vegetal depths of the more-than-human self. Examining an example of imaginal dialogues published by the American organic gardener and author Maria Rodale (2023), this theoretical article demonstrates how imaginal dialogues with plants inform understandings of the psyche and the self, and how they can contribute to individuation—an ongoing process reflecting the interconnectedness between human beings and the more-than-human world. This framework has direct implications for ecotherapeutic practice.

Keywords

Jungian—Active imagination—Plants—Individuation—Self—Imaginal

Introduction

Amidst the florescence of interest in plant medicines during the current psychedelic renaissance, there has been a quiet proliferation of Western authors publishing transcripts of verbal, visual, and sensory conversations with plants not typically considered psychoactive (e.g., Gagliano, 2018; Loorz, 2021; Rodale, 2023; Worton, 2019). Psychedelic yet not attributable to neurochemicals, these non-ordinary interactions can be described as imaginal dialogues that occur via the imagination between egoic consciousness and the unconscious, including vegetal aspects of the unconscious (Downey, 2024). Opposed to imaginary, i.e., unreal fantasy, imaginal refers to the intermediate and intermediating connective tissue between the sensorial and intellectual poles of being (Corbin, 1972, p. 5). It is the dimension where the sensuous world matters in the psyche and where the psyche becomes matter, often in ways that rationalistic measurements are unable to explain (Romanyshyn, 2013). In ecopsychological discourse, Hillman’s (2018a) re-visioning of anima mundi—the ensouled world—refers to the same thing, and it is into this dark forest that vegetal voices lead. Fortunately, humanity is equipped with an organ of perception to reveal these hidden realms: “imaginative consciousness” (Corbin, 1972, p. 2). This article offers active imagination as a theoretical framework for understanding, critiquing, and integrating imaginal dialogues with plants in eco-therapeutic practice.

Human–Plant dialogue in ecopsychology

Imaginal dialogues with plants live within a vast landscape of human–plant interactions (DelSesto, 2020), often forgotten due to Western culture’s plant awareness disparity, the anthropocentric inability to see plants on their own terms (Parsley, 2020). Yet biological and ecological research has established that plants are actively in ongoing, multimodal dialogue with their vegetal neighbors, as well as with non-plant visitors, including humans (Baluška and Mancuso, 2021; Simard, 2021; Struik, Yin, and Meinke, 2008; Trewavas, 2016). Ecopsychologists have approached these interactions in a variety of ways. To some, plants have been viewed technologically as non-agentic resources for horticultural therapy (Lin, Lin, & Li, 2014), as essential though abstracted features of forests (Keller, Chawla, Kayira, and Rhoades, 2024) and green spaces that benefit human mental health and inspire pro-environmental action (Barnes, 2022; Bettmann, Speelman, Blumenthal, Couch, and Schmalz, 2024), and as interchangeable terminals in humanity’s nature connection (Largo-Wight, Kusomoto, Binder, Wludyka, and Hooper, 2024). Such abstractions, however, risk obscuring the particularity of plants themselves, which is essential for a true connection (Hillman, 2018b). Other ecopsychological theorists have considered plants as ensouled persons possessing legal rights (Fields, 2020), as teachers communicating in their own ways about reality’s fundamental relatedness (Gagliano, 2013), and even as perceiving—potentially understanding—entities with whom humans might converse, by virtue of their shared sensuous participation in the world (Abram, 2010, p. 169–170).

Problems of vegetal voice

The question of conversing with plants and the notion of vegetal voice is an emerging, multidisciplinary exploration (Gagliano, Ryan, and Vieira, 2017). Kohn’s (2013) anthropological work demonstrated that plants are semiotic selves in expectant, transspecies dialogue with an ecology of selves that includes humans. Yet yearning to hear plants speak, humans can obstruct their voice through inadvertent anthropomorphizing, ventriloquizing, or projecting (Marder, 2017; Ryan, 2017). Plant theorist Marder (2017) instead proposed that hearing vegetal voices means participating in an untranslatable encounter with being. For him, the language of plants is “an articulation without saying” (p. 119), a definition meant to highlight both “the ideal and the material strata of language, uniting the Cartesian res cogitans and res extensa” (Marder, 2017, p. 120). These united strata resonate with the intellectual and sensorial poles mediated by the imaginal realm (Corbin, 1972), signaling a kinship between imagination and the language of plants. Indeed, the imagination is not only a “mediating stratum” but also “the echo of vegetal freedom in human beings”, i.e., the inherited vegetal ability to respond, play, and co-create with the environment (Marder, 2013, p. 145).

Foregrounding the untranslatable in vegetal voice, though, can hyper-separate human and vegetal (Hall, 2011, 2019). Ecofeminist plant theorist Hall (2019), for example, has argued that plants participate in human culture as differentiated kin, and humans are inclined to speak about those relationships “in human terms (what other terms do we have?)” (p. xxvii). Since plant voices can be perceived through their multivocal expressions in the environment, this includes their effect on human imagination, myths, and religion (Hall, 2011, 2019).

Poet and plant theorist Ryan (2017) has sought to refine the human terms available to express vegetal voices. Whereas the vegetal voice is nonverbal and non-aural, it is immanent, multisensory, multivocal, and collective, heard through how plants affect, which is them announcing themselves. Although ventriloquizing uncritically can recapitulate human-centrism, its thoughtful use can bear fruit, such as when poetry lends plants words that reflect vegetal spatiality, sensuality, and relatedness (Ryan, 2017). These critiques complexify the literature on imaginal dialoguing with plants, where listening to plants is sometimes corporeal (Buhner, 2004, 2014), sometimes verbal (Worton, 2019), and sometimes both (Cowan, 2014; Gagliano, 2018; Rodale, 2023), and where teachings are frequently conveyed from ventriloquized plants (Plotkin, 2003; Weed, 1989).

There are fertile cracks between the uncritical ventriloquizing of plant voice and the equally human-centric and particularly Western impulse to dismiss imaginal dialogues with plants as anthropomorphic projections or fantasies. These cracks are relevant to ecopsychology, especially given the potential for imaginal dialogues with plants to transform human behaviors in ecosystems (Downey, 2024). Specifically, imaginal dialogues with plants can address the practical task of Fisher’s (2013) radical ecopsychology, i.e., cultivating recollective practices aimed at “recalling how our human psyches are embedded in and nurtured by the larger psyche of nature and at relearning the essentially human art of revering, giving back to, and maintaining reciprocal relations with an animate natural world” (p. 13). Making sense of human–plant dialogues, then, carries both personal and ecological implications.

Need for culturally grounded approaches

Imaginal encounters with plants need to be grounded in culturally resonant language and practices. There is little space in mainstream Western psychology to situate imaginal dialogues with nonhumans, in contrast to many Indigenous cosmologies where they already make sense (e.g., Callicott, 2014; Daly, 2021; Kimmerer, 2013). Western researchers have often misappropriated Indigenous lifeways to legitimize human-nonhuman relationships (Charles and Cajete, 2020). However, there are sense-making roots at the mainstream’s edge, begging to be explored. Animistic herbalist traditions acknowledge and teach forms of imaginal human–plant dialogue (Buhner, 2004; Popham, 2019; Weed, 1989; Wood, 1997), and some depth and ecopsychological scholars have offered broad theoretical access points to imaginal phenomena with nonhuman others (Abram, 2010; Chalquist, 2020; Perluss, 2012; Rowland, 2019; Watkins, 2015). Personal accounts have framed imaginal dialogues with plants as spiritual or mystical (Cowan, 2014; Loorz, 2021), shamanic (Ingerman and Roberts, 2015; Rodale, 2023), channeled (Worton, 2019), or as a deep mode of embodied listening (Gagliano, 2018). These varied, evocative framings hint at the potentially numinous quality of human–plant dialogues, as well as the gorge between these mysteries and the language available to describe them.

Active imagination provides a common language, native to Western culture, through which therapists and patients can engage imaginal dialogues with plants. Moreover, a recently published encounter with mugwort demonstrates that active imagination with plants is a potentially individuating practice. Acknowledging that marginalized herbalists, animists, and Indigenous practitioners already have long histories of dialoguing with plants, the intention is to enter the mystery and contribute to a conversation rather than present a definitive construct.

Case Study: Mugwort’s Invitation to Imaginal Dialogue

Common mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) is a perennial herbaceous plant native to the temperate ecosystems of the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia (Ekiert et al., 2020). For centuries, mugwort has enthralled herbalists and folk medicine practitioners in traditional Hindu, Chinese, and European cultures, due to its intense aroma and spicy taste (Ekiert et al., 2020), as well as the multitude of benefits it offers humans, including digestive (Barney and DiTommaso, 2003), antibacterial (Malik, de Mesquita, Silva, de Mesquita, de Sá Rocha et al., 2019), and anti-inflammatory ones (Ben Nasr, Aazza, Mnif, and Miguel, 2020). Mugwort plants vigorously spread and, once established, return year after year to the point that Westerners have labeled mugwort a weed (Barney and DiTommaso, 2003), reflecting an indoctrinated cultural barrier to imaginal dialogue (Fisher, 2013).

Mugwort’s resistance to such human-centrism allured Maria Rodale (2023), an American organic gardener, author of books on the subject, and former executive at the global gardening-focused publishing enterprise bearing her family name. When a tenacious community of mugwort continued spreading itself through her garden despite her increasingly aggressive attacks, the author, who thought of herself as a nature lover, was surprised to feel frustrated, even furious, at their return. In the immediate wake of these emotions, she paused to reflect. As she peered more closely, the graceful intricacies of mugwort’s lobed leaves entranced her. For a fleeting, numinous moment, it seemed as if the plant was reaching out to her, “with a direct line to my soul” (Rodale, 2023, p. 27).

To answer this call, she used “shamanic journeying… a method of activating a different part of the mind to visit other realms” (Rodale, 2023, p. 10). Her approach involved ceremonial steps: setting an intention to understand the plant, sanctifying herself and her space with incantations, and rhythmic drumming. Then, in her imagination, she entered a portal to encounter and engage with whatever figures and sensations arose, before returning from the imaginal journey through the same portal and closing the ceremonial space.

The non-ordinary states she encountered conveyed messages, visual images, and a sense of beauty and clarity (Rodale, 2023). For example, after a period of waiting in darkness, she heard mugwort say, “You are always trying to kill me. Have you ever thought about asking me nicely?” (Rodale, 2023, p. 30). She realized she had not. Mugwort then named some of their healing qualities, claiming to be good for the heart, and told her that when so-called pests bother her, they are trying to communicate. The author accepted this and wordlessly walked among the imaginal mugwort plants before they imparted a final lesson that “all your anger at weeds is not good for your heart. Stop worrying so much about them” (Rodale, 2023, p. 30). This message resonated with her personally, as she was undergoing tests for a heart condition at the time.

Emerging from the journey, Rodale’s (2023) curiosity about mugwort blossomed. She amplified her imaginal experiences through research, asking friends and herbalists, and noticing mugwort’s presence in culture. Despite a life and career already rooted in plants, her encounter with mugwort still managed to transform the way she saw them, the way she interacted with them, and the way she understood herself in reciprocal relation to them. After meeting mugwort, “I approached the mugwort in my garden completely differently. I asked nicely. I pulled gently… I let a lot of it grow wherever it wanted to. I softened my heart. I thanked it” (Rodale, 2023, p. 34). Her attitudes and behaviors toward so-called pest species were changed, and she set out to inspire change in others (Rodale, 2023).

Understanding Imaginal Dialogues with Plants as Active Imagination

Despite its cultural misappropriation, Rodale’s (2023) lived experience warrants consideration and highlights the importance of recovering alternative language native to Western traditions. To that end, a critical hermeneutic analysis of her account has illuminated similarities between the author’s shamanic journeys and the Jungian practice of active imagination (Downey, 2024). In depth psychology, the imagination is an organ of perception that allows consciousness to sense the unconscious, via images (Jung, 1971). Active imagination is an intentional practice of using this sense organ to engage with aspects of the psyche that lie beyond normal awareness (Jung, 1969b).

When active imagination is practiced, “[ego consciousness] is confronted with a psychic product that owes its existence mainly to an unconscious process and is therefore in some degree opposed to the ego and its tendencies” (Jung, 1969b, p. 87). From the perspective of ego consciousness, these products and processes seem to come from somewhere or something else. The tension held between the ego’s position and the unknown other has the potential to birth a new, third consciousness that integrates both (Jung, 1969b). In more ecological terms, there are multiple, differentiated centers of consciousness within the psyche, which are always already in dialogue with each other, and active imagination becomes a way of tuning into those conversations (Salman, 2010).

The process of active imagination consists of the following moves:

Entering a trancelike state to concentrate on an affect or image

Allowing the affect or image to take shape

Interacting with what arises

Coming to terms with what emerges. (Chodorow, 1997)

Trancelike concentration on an affect or image

The first move in active imagination is to concentrate on an emotion, image, dream, fantasy, inner voice, symptom, or even a photo or object “until it comes alive” in the imagination (Chodorow, 1997, p. 7). This requires a trancelike or waking-dream state, which can be intentionally created through rituals that aid in entering a nonjudgmental, nondirective stance (Chodorow, 1997). Rodale’s (2023) practice of setting an intention and creating sacred space concentrated her awareness on how mugwort’s resistance affected her. Further, this expectant, open state allowed her to remain waiting in the fruitful darkness of her imagination without trying to escape or leave the experience prematurely.

Active imagination’s early monikers, such as “trancing”, “visioning”, and “technique of the descent”, reflect the initial move in the process (Chodorow, 1997, p. 3). They also hint at the wide range of entry points and non-ordinary states that practitioners can experience. For example, Jung’s entry points were often portals like narrow gorges, forest swamps, the sea, craters, and steep descents (Jung and Shamdasani, 2009). These strikingly resemble Rodale’s (2023) imaginal portals: “a hole in a tree, a cave, a body of water, or some natural crack in the earth” (p. 29).

Allowing the unknown to take shape

The second move is to facilitate the charged processes, now animated, taking shape and finding expression (Chodorow, 1997). This may be through spontaneous, creative expression, including words, writing, dance, or any art that deepens the experience and keeps it unfolding (Salman, 2010, p. 121). Here, ego consciousness remains open to the flow of psychic material, without trying to influence it (Jung,1969b, p. 85). This means accepting any images that show up, without assessing, directing, or avoiding them. As an example, Rodale (2023) waited in darkness before mugwort began speaking to her with words, tones, and images she was not consciously directing.

Interacting with what arises

Moving from passive observer to engaged participant and reciprocal co-creator is the critical, active step of the process. While allowing the non-directed psychic processes to continue emerging, the imaginer works in a directed way to enter the flow. Using the means by which the unknown has been given shape, the imaginer seeks to elaborate, dialogue with, or make meaning of what emerges (Salman, 2010, p. 120). In the case study, Rodale (2023) responded in both words and a wordless imaginal walk through the garden.

The active imaginer influences the encounter, whether consciously or not. Because Rodale (2023) started with how mugwort affected her, her imaginary dialogue unsurprisingly included references to her personal context. After all, the psychic processes animated in active imagination are holographic, interpretive experiences, indicating that what is actively imagined with is “the Unknown as it immediately affects us” (Jung, 1969b, p. 68). Importantly, Rodale (2023) did not claim to be channeling plants, i.e., passively receiving objective information without influencing the transmission. Even when other authors have claimed to be channeling plants (e.g., Worton, 2019), closer examination reveals the unconscious interpretive, dialogical activity at play (Downey, 2024). The holographic dynamic can be thought of as a collaboration that proceeds when both sides of the dialogue disappear, co-creating a third space (Australian Psychedelic Society, 2019, 2:34).

Coming to terms with what emerges

Once the differentiated psychic positions are interacting in active imagination, one must come to terms with what is encountered (Jung, 1969b). This means making some sense of the experience, wrestling with the alternative perspectives presented, and critically considering how to integrate conclusions into daily life. This step does not necessarily indicate a release of tension, since it can also foment inner conflict or demand transformations and sacrifices from the imaginer (Jung, 1969b). Because coming to terms is seen as an ethical obligation, the experience is often recorded through writing, art, or movement, allowing for reflection and continued engagement (Jung, 1969b).

Exemplifying this final move, Rodale (2023) emerged from her imaginal encounter with questions and doubts: “Was it really that simple? Just stop worrying? Easier said than done” (Rodale, 2023, p. 30). As she transcribed her experiences and explored them further through writing, researching mugwort’s benefits, and re-entering her garden with mugwort’s invitation in mind, she found herself relating differently to vegetal life. The tension between her doubt and mugwort’s position created a space in which a third perspective arose. “I softened my heart,” she wrote, revealing an active, ongoing dialogue (Rodale, 2023, p. 34).

Post-Jungian Active Imagination with Plants is a Recollective Practice

There are clear similarities between Rodale’s (2023) journeys and active imagination, but merely describing the latter does not yet situate it as a recollective or individuating practice. Some of active imagination’s theoretical roots, particularly the psyche, the self, individuation, and participation mystique, will further illuminate its recollective potential.

The psyche and nature are one

What does it mean that Rodale (2023) journeyed with mugwort? She was not physically interacting with mugwort plants during her imaginal experience. She was indoors, under a blanket, and listening to a shamanic drumming track over Zoom. Was it then all in her head? Perhaps, but the Jungian concept of the psyche offers an alternative understanding.

The psyche is said to encompass the totality of all psychological processes (Jung, 1971), to the extent that it is indistinguishable from “nature” (Jung, 1975, p. 540) and “the world” (Jung, 1969a, p. 173). This meant that all psychological experiences are always also expressions of the physical world, and vice versa: whatever can be said to be encountered in the world has a psychological presence. The interpenetrating continuity between the psyche and the rest of nature is what Hillman (2018a) referred to as anima mundi, the ensouled world. According to him, a thing’s “availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality” and its “imaginative claim on attention” reveal that humans are nodes of perspective within the psyche, but not the sole possessors or generators of it (Hillman, 2018a, p. 33). The imagination, then, is a level of perception outside of Cartesian space and linear time, open to the psyche’s other nodes of perception.

Rodale (2023) illustrated this. Despite being physically distant from plants, her experience was one of intimacy, closeness, and connection. It could be said that she was with mugwort in a third space, that “other realm” (p. 10), where her emotions evidenced the nonlocal presence of the vegetal being with whom they originally arose. The emotions and associations with which she interacted were not just her own; they reflected how mugwort had moved her. Thus, the psychic textures of active imagination can tell a person about their fundamental relatedness in the world, about the legion not-I who creates the I. This reflects a post-Jungian position that “[a]ctive imagination, by taking one deeply into oneself, also brings us in contact with what is more than ourselves” (Salman, 2010, p. 130).

The self reflects fundamental relatedness

Active imagination with plants can loosen root-bound conceptions of the self. The self (Colman, 2008; Jung,1966a; Zinkin, 2008) or Self (Hillman, 2018b) is an archetypal image of one’s fundamental relatedness in the world, including the more-than-human roots and fruits of their being. According to Jung (1966a): “the self, as an inclusive term that embraces our whole living organism, not only contains the deposit and totality of all past life, but is also a point of departure, the fertile soil from which all future life will spring” (p. 192).

Hillman’s (2018b) ecological archetypal psychology emphasized the communal aspects of Self, which he characterized as the field of interiorized relationships (p. 58), the depths of which are “alien, inhuman, and impersonal” (Hillman, 1975, p. 51), and perhaps also vegetal.

Rodale (2023) tuned into a dialogue that is always already happening in the self, out of which human senses of self-arise. From a post-Jungian constructivist stance, “the self comes into existence only through interaction with others” (Zinkin, 2008, p. 394). Such a self is the emergent, ontologically relational process of psychosomatic unity, of being in the world, woven from the physical, cultural, and symbolic aspects of reality (Colman, 2008, p. 360). Insofar as plants shape and participate in reality, they shape and participate in the self.

One’s sense of self, then, is the awareness one has about the emergent, relational unity of being that one is. “The self thus conceived is all of me, body and mind, perception and action, whereas the sense of self refers to any and all knowledge that I may have about the self that I am” (Colman, 2008, p. 356). Therefore, although plants participate in the self, they may not factor into many Western people’s senses of self.

In Rodale’s (2023) case, we can imagine the self as the ecological web in which she gardened: a landscape woven from plants, geology, weather, and animals, including humans, whose present mugwort inhabitants, through their resistance to her anthropocentric project and their invitation to dialogue, called forth a deeper sense of the web. Her sense of self as a nature lover was met, challenged, and changed by the other, vegetal aspects of the self. Such active imagination with plants can stretch Western conceptions of the self beyond individualistic connotations to something that contains and is not contained by the individual.

Individuation leads deeper into the world

Active imagination, by attuning awareness to the other aspects of the more-than-human self and letting them speak, exemplifies the essence of individuation as opposed to individualism (Chodorow, 1997, p. 17). Individuation is the ongoing development of “a more complete sense of self” (Zinkin, 2008, p. 403), i.e., of a sense of self more closely resembling the self that one is (Colman, 2008). Individuation is also a movement toward wholeness, which means recognizing and more consciously participating in a world that is “alive and full of many voices” (Perluss, 2012, p. 185).

Thus, individuation unfolds through relationships, when a sense of self expands through contact with other aspects of the self. It has long been recognized that particular relationships are the catalysts for individuation, especially with a psychoanalyst (Jung, 1966b) or marriage partner (Jung, 1954), yet scholars have also acknowledged that other interpersonal relationships can attune one to the intrapsychic patterns in their life (Samuels, Shorter, and Plaut, 1986, p. 79). In gardening, for example, the processes of death, decay, and rebirth can stimulate individuation (West, 2010). Moreover, accounts of imaginal dialogues with plants suggest that plants can partner and participate in human individuation (Downey, 2024).

The individuating value of active imagination is in the differentiating function of coming to terms with the other. Differentiation is the healthy separation—not hyperseparation—between ego and other that makes an authentic relationship possible, whereas a failure of differentiation, due to insecurity, leads to splitting as a way to defend oneself (Fisher, 2013). Differentiation leads to a generous sense of self that recognizes the soulful, fundamental relatedness shared by all (Fisher, 2013). Part of this differentiation requires entraining to vegetal subjectivity, which is nonlocal and collective (Marder, 2013)—evidenced by the particular, species, ecological, and archetypal levels on which plants appear in the imagination (Downey, 2024)—and which confounds totalizing conceptions of plants or self, thereby bio-illuminating humanity’s own “inhuman” depths (Hillman, 1975, p. 51).

Rodale’s (2023) initially undifferentiated, i.e., un-individuated, misperception of mugwort as a weed, an undesirable plant in conflict with human goals, reflected the psyche/nature split that recollective practices aim to address (Fisher, 2013). However, when mugwort claimed her awareness, she recognized them as another on their own terms, apart from her needs, desires, or values. This drew her toward differentiation—and arguably toward individuation. She came to know herself by appreciating mugwort as a particular assemblage of relationships, differentiated but soulfully participating in the psyche alongside her. The numinous clarity, love, and even divinity that suffused Rodale’s (2023) imaginal dialogues further hinted at individuating processes, specifically, the sense of transcendent coherence (Young-Eisendrath, 1997) or wholeness and centering (Colman, 2008) said to accompany those fleeting moments when one’s sense of self more clearly reflects the totality of their psychosomatic being in the world.

Participation mystique is vital for non-dissociated communities

Finally, active imagination with plants conjures participation mystique, a concept appropriated from early twentieth-century anthropology to describe an unconscious identity between subject and object (Jung, et al., 1971). Some examples from Jung were so-called “primitive” humans’ identifications with trees, snakes, and rivers (Jung, 1964, p. 95). Imaginal dialogues with plants could be another example. Despite Jung (1964) lamenting that “[n]o voices now speak to man [sic] from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear” (p. 95), classical Jungian theory has typically denigrated participation mystique and sought to escape it, even labeling “primitive” those animistic or Indigenous lifeways judged as too intimate with the more-than-human world (Dalal, 1988; Deloria, 2022). Recent scholarship, though, has challenged these ethnocentric assumptions about participation mystique (Winborn, 2014). Instead of a polarity of either conscious or unconscious, a fluid understanding of participation mystique—indeed, of the psyche—provides a more critical view: one can either be more or less aware that we are always already in conversation with the unconscious, and thus actively or passively always in participation mystique.

Instances abound of passive participation mystique with plants. For example, after an unexpected imaginal encounter with a birch tree while lost on a hike in Britain, one enterprising author, Worton (2019), began a year-long project of channeling trees and transcribing the stories she perceived. Believing she was listening to unfiltered vegetal perspectives, she failed to see her own influence on the exchanges and uncritically ventriloquized the verbal messages she perceived as the literal voices of trees (Downey, 2024). In such a passive stance, the imaginer cannot see the experience as a reciprocal encounter, which hinders coming to terms, that critical move in active imagination. This is not only potentially ineffective and human-centric but also dangerous, since the unconscious is as diverse as an old-growth forest, populated by energies that range from benevolent and helpful to insidious and destructive (Johnson and Ruhl, 2007). However, even in such passive cases, plants can reveal themselves as active dialogical participants, capable of influencing change, whether or not humans appreciate what is happening, even compelling people to come to terms with them (Downey, 2024). For example, despite Worton’s (2019) passive stance, she found herself responding to, seeking out, and sitting with those trees whose growth form, vitality, and sensual qualities claimed her awareness.

Conversely, there are also active forms of participation mystique. Scholars influenced by Indigenous psychologies (Bernstein, 2005; Bryon, 2014; Deloria, 2022) and depth psychology (Bryon, 2014; Perluss, 2012; Winborn, 2014) have sought to reinterpret the concept and demonstrate its critical place in non-dissociated communities. In these views, participation mystique can be an adaptive and vitalizing openness to the more-than-human psyche from which human consciousness emerges.

Rodale’s (2023) case demonstrated both poles of participation mystique and how they can flow into each other. Her initially passive experience in the garden, where mugwort’s leaves momentarily claimed her awareness, eventually led to an active practice of shamanic journeying. Her openness to imaginal experiences, of something happening to her, served as the starting point for a more active journey with mugwort. The passive/active dynamic demonstrates dual agency at work in the ecopsychological dimension of individuation. Mugwort allured Rodale, and she actively responded. Thus, her case shows that plants can invite humans into a space (1) where the splitting between subject and object, inner and outer, human and vegetal is challenged and (2) where the sense of self is deformed and differentiated in lasting ways.

Conclusion

Active imagination, based on a post-Jungian understanding of the psyche and the self, is a framework for understanding imaginal dialogues with plants. The practice both challenges the Western notion of Nature as an undifferentiated other and invites ever more differentiated-yet-continuous understandings of the self, its mugwort, oak, and ivy aspects, but perhaps its riverine, igneous, and canine ones, too. Active imagination’s Western roots make it a culturally resonant orientation in contrast to ones misappropriated from cultures where imaginal dialogues with plants already make sense. This gives Western practitioners recollective opportunities to work through, rather than avoid, their cultural legacies of alienation from the vegetal world (Fisher, 2013).

This framework has immediate implications for depth-oriented eco-therapists tending soul wounds by reconnecting people with their imaginal organ. Future theoretical work could continue exploring how active imagination entrains the individualistic ego to vegetal multiplicity, how it might facilitate humans coming to terms with life-giving mortality, and how to hold the ecological shadow it unearths, namely, humanity’s fundamentally death-dealing relationship to the vegetal beings we eat, wear, and use. Practically, ecotherapists must also consider how Westerners can collectively and therapeutically interpret—or not—an individual’s active imagination experience with plants. For example, how individuals’ dialogues might inform collective understandings of differentiated vegetal voices.

There are cautions to take, though. Active imagination with plants can make ethical claims that deeply change the practitioner, with major and sometimes painful implications for their spiritual, emotional, personal, and professional life (Downey, 2024). The practice requires releasing some control and tends to disclose the plights of ecological communities, which ego consciousness can find alarming. It is thus best suited for those who can come to terms with what they encounter, ideally alongside a therapist trained in active imagination.

Although this practice has clear eco-therapeutic applications, this article is not an argument for plants-as-technologies. Rather, it gives language to a bottom-up process, an initiatory exchange seeking understanding. Listening for vegetal aspects of the self is a way to acknowledge both the debt we owe plants and their ongoing potential as friends, teachers, and adversaries on the path of ecological individuation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

This article benefited from the insightful feedback and contributions of Lori Pye, Marybeth Carter, Andra Daunhauer, Michael Sipiora, and Jerry Ruhl, as well as the anonymous reviewers. Their expertise and guidance were invaluable in the development of this article.

Author Disclosure Statement

The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Funding Information

This research was self-funded by the author.

Author’s Contributions

M.G.D.: Conceptualization, methodology, investigation, data curation, writing—original draft, and writing—review and editing.

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