How I learned to access true imagination

And what it's got to do with heartbreak, toothpaste, and an epiphany on the beach

Hello.

(I’m trying something new! Above, you’ll find a voice recording of this newsletter — for those who don’t have the time or capacity to read it.)

I want to tell you about an argument I had recently, a hill I will die on, a lasting epiphany I had on a beach when my life was in meltdown, and how it all relates to toothpaste and your capacity to imagine.

Let’s start with the epiphany.

A few weeks after my ex-husband and I split up, I was still living in Los Angeles, dazed and broken. I would struggle to adequately express how much of a mess I was. I was single for the first time in nine years. I was a 36-year-old woman, contemplating all the possibilities and life courses that were likely closed to me now that I found myself single. I was beginning to navigate a life-changing health issue. I knew I would soon leave the US and, in doing so, walk away from the life I’d spent a decade building there. I had just finished a novel five years in the writing and was slowly realizing that it hadn’t worked; that it was a novel written by a miserable person, and hard to read. Oh, and we were in the middle of a global pandemic.

It was not a good time.

During those dark days, my wise, golden-souled friend Nicole told me to meet her on the beach, and to bring anything that seemed important—anything that called to me as I left the apartment. I brought a handful of things, including the wedding ring from my recently broken marriage.

Nicole and I sat on a Malibu beach as the sun slowly set, and she conjured a series of rituals to mark that hard moment in my life—to help me walk through it. (Truly, may everyone have a Nicole in their life.) I wrote a letter to California and buried it. We made offerings to Aphrodite. And she suggested I wash my wedding ring in the Pacific, and ask Aphrodite to take away my shame.

Aphrodite

And when I had washed my wedding ring, and prayed to Aphrodite, something remarkable happened. Something I have never been able to explain. Something that changed the course of my life, and forms the seed of the novel I’ve been working on ever since.

When I looked up after washing that ring, I saw the colour blue for the first time.

Let me explain.

Of course, I’d seen blue before. I’d been looking at the world through my eyes for 36 long years. But in that moment, I realized that my eyes had always been filtering the world through my brain. I had seen blue and I had thought “blue” and that was that.

In that moment, I tasted and heard and felt the colour blue. Pacific blue. The waves that had been breaking on the Malibu shore were now breaking not on the sand but inside me. Specifically, they were breaking somewhere near the back of my body, on some infinitely soft and receptive field that spread along my spine and around my heart. In a place in my body that had been fine all along—had been fine even through those most excruciating of weeks in my life. A place that wanted nothing more than this: to feel the waves break and taste the sunset.

I’ve never lived in my body in the same way since. Knowing that that soft, infinitely receptive field exists inside me, I now meet people and places and moments and difficulties and joys in an entirely different way. It is a physical shift; an energetic, bodily shift.

And it’s more than that, too. Because what I’ve come to realize is that that place in my back body isn’t just the seat of my own being—it’s a portal to infinite worlds beyond me.

The novel I had spent five years writing up to that point had been cranked out miserably in a literal cupboard. I’d lock myself in there for hours before dawn every day and churn out sentences. When I emerged, my brain would feel overheated, like an engine run for too long on too little oil (is that how engines work? Idk I’m a writer).

These days—since that moment on that Malibu beach—writing looks entirely different for me. It means first relaxing enough to slip into that place in my back body, where the whole world lands synaesthetically. And when I can hear the sky and taste the leaves on the trees and touch the ambient hope and love and surprise and fear and curiosity flickering through wherever I am in the world, the whole imaginal realm opens. From there, I can tap into the invisible, inexpressibly beautiful, coherent, deep dimension of meaning and being that I wrote about in last week’s letter (see below).

And when you’re connected to that place, your creative work makes itself. Your decisions make themselves. Because your creative work and the best, most light-filled course for your life already exist, out in the imaginal. (And of course, it doesn’t always work. There are still too many days when I can’t slip the iron grip of cognition. I guess the difference is that now, I know that there is something else, another way to write and live, even when I can’t access it, and that that other thing is where truth lives.)

Which brings me to the argument I had a few weeks ago. The kind of argument you probably only have if you live in a town with a crystal shop in it.

A friend was horrified that I use toothpaste that contains fluoride (look, I am a tiny delicate baby with poor little ouchy sensitive teeth! Don’t @ me!) “Don’t you know?!” they said. “Fluoride calcifies the pineal gland. That’s where your imagination lives!”

“Don’t tell me where my imagination lives!” I said. (And if my parents and ex-husband are reading this (hello!), they are likely now bracing against any conversation with me that involves the words “don’t tell me”. I’d say I’m as stubborn as a mule but that’s unfair to mules, and it’s absolutely true that most of my heel-digging is pointless and probably maladaptive. But having read this piece up to here, I think you’ll understand why this particular point is a hill I will die on.)

“My imagination doesn’t live in my pineal gland,” I said. “It lives in my back!”

For those who don’t live in towns with crystal shops in them: the pineal gland is a small neuroendocrine organ that sits between the two hemispheres of the brain. It’s responsible for secreting melatonin, which regulates your circadian rhythm, and in certain traditions and contemporary communities it is considered, variously, the third eye, the seat of imagination and intuition, and the gateway to the spiritual realm. Studies of the pineal gland are controversial, but there seems to be at least a correlative relationship between high exposure to fluoride and pineal calcification, and there has long been a suggestion that such calcification affects melatonin production and can affect sleep patterns, the age of puberty onset, and even, possibly, the likelihood of developing neurodegenerative diseases. And of course, if you hold that the pineal gland is your spiritual gateway and the seat of your imagination and intuition, the implications of it calcifying are even more horrifying.

The pineal gland

And OK, yes, I probably should find a fluoride-free toothpaste.

But first, it is critically important to me to tell you that I do not believe that anyone can tell you where in your body your imagination lives.

And to tell you that for me, the conviction that it must be somewhere in my head was part of the problem all along.

The overheated, engine-oil-less brain in me that had cranked out 70,000 miserable words in a cupboard—that brain believed that it was producing a work of imagination. I really was trying to see something and feel into it and write it faithfully. But as long as I was locating that effort in my brain, my cognition was always going to hijack it and turn it into something metallic and empty.

For me, true imagination has nothing to do with the brain. It starts with the senses. With occupying them as fully as possible, which means entering into synaesthesia, which I fiercely believe is a universal capacity. When you stop insisting on categorizing your sensory experiences into smells, sounds, tastes, and so on—when you simply allow the world to wash over you in its fullness—colours naturally take on flavours, emotions naturally have textures, and so on. I’ve been practising with the imaginal for a few years now, and I’ve never met anyone for whom this is not ultimately true.

So if you feel stuck in an engine-oil-less brain. A brain that’s wearing too-tight shoes.

If you feel disconnected from your creativity.

If you’re desperate to tap into a deeper, truer realm of reality.

If you want unforced access to intuition and the coherent order of deep meaning that unfolds beyond the self.

I would urge you to thank your brain for its service, then politely evacuate it.

Physically shift your functioning out of your brain.

Open your senses.

And try seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting the blue of the sky or the green of leaves for the first time. Try letting it wash fully inside you, without running it through your brain. Try finding where in your body it wants to land.

For me, it took the breakdown of my whole life to get there. And, for the record, it was absolutely worth it. This gift would be worth any personal cost.

But you don’t have to pay with your life as you knew it.

To feel this, to inhabit that place in your body where everything has been fine all along, and where you are connected to an infinitely rich, beautiful, coherent order of being and meaning:

That’s your birthright.

And that is a hill I will die on.

Love,

xx Ellie