The Sunday Soother

243: How can you manifest or be spiritual if you have aphantasia?

Catherine Andrews

Have you ever heard of the term aphantasia? Aphantasia is a relatively unstudied phenomenon that involves not being able to visualize images in your mind. Reportedly about 3% of the population have this condition, and I'm one of them.

I didn't realize til my late 30s that this was even a thing; I was shocked to find out that most people had the ability to go around doing what essentially sounded like hallucination to me. (I learned about it, as many people did at the time, from this article.) As I read more about how most people can easily visualize or play movies or images in their mind, I grew jealous, especially as I got more into spirituality and manifestation. A huge component of manifestation, meditation and other spiritual practices is often the ability to visualize your desires, or other images, in your mind's eye. I've also been told many times by random people that I'm psychic, but how can somebody be psychic if they can't see, you know, psychic images in their mind's eye?

Over time, I've figured out my own ways to tune into spiritual practices that work for me, even though I can't visualize. And that's what I'm sharing about today! Even if you don't have aphantasia, tune in, because these tactics can help everybody deepen their spiritual practices.

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The Sunday Soother podcast is a spin-off of The Sunday Soother, a weekly newsletter that creates conversations around compassionate personal development and helps readers access their spirituality, magic and mindfulness in practical, actionable ways.

You can find Catherine on her website catherinedandrews.com, or  @catherineandrews on Instagram.