Working Without Pictures

Begin here

This is a course in meditation and awareness for people who don’t see pictures in their heads, and for anyone who would rather practise with what is actually there.

Most meditation instruction assumes a mind’s eye: a warm light at the crown, a walk along a beach, a candle flame held behind closed eyes. If you have aphantasia, those instructions aren’t hard. They aren’t available. Being told for years to look at something that was never there is its own small injury, and it’s why a lot of people quit meditation early and decided they were bad at it. They weren’t. They were handed the wrong instructions.

My own work is touch and sound: drum, bowls, harmonium, voice and hands-on sessions. This course is built from that. Every practice runs on channels aphantasia leaves intact: real sensation, spatial sense, real hearing, and for many people the inner voice and inner ear. Nothing on the spine asks you to make a picture, a smell or an imagined touch. Touch runs through every week.

How it works

• The practice comes first. Each week opens with its practice cards, steps showing. Tap Guide me and a card becomes a timed, guided practice with the bowl, and the browser can read it aloud to you until my recordings are in. The Today card above always hands you the right one.
• Ten minutes a day is the floor, not the target. Four minutes done beats ten skipped, every time. What makes this work is the daily return, not the duration.
• About five minutes of reading, once a week. Under the cards sit a short key and a teaching from me. Read them on the first day of the week. The longer reading is folded away.
• One line, every time: what changed? When you log a sit you can add a line, and it lands in your journal with the date. With aphantasia this matters more than usual. You can’t flip back through mental images of last Tuesday, so the journal is your memory of the course.
• The one rule. You’re never asked to imagine a sensation. You’re asked to move your attention to a real part of your real body, a real sound or a real place, and report what’s already there.

A Grade I course

This is the first grade on the practitioner path, Sādhaka, the one who practises. It’s a real foundation: everything later on the path assumes you can find a fact in the body, hold a place in space and follow a sound into silence. Here is how the seal is earned, with nothing hidden:

• A practice counts once you’ve logged it three times. Making practices (naming your sentence, writing your card) count after one.
• Count two practices in each of the eight weeks.
• On day 56, write down the sequence you’re keeping, and the closing journal.

Every sit you log, in any card, also counts toward the thirty that open Grade II, Initiate. There are no streaks and no leaderboards. Missing days costs you nothing. The sixty-three-day plan is a shape, not a clock.

Two tracks

What this is and isn’t. It’s practice and reflection, not therapy or medical treatment, and it isn’t a course in growing a mind’s eye. Read Care and limits before you begin, especially if you lost your imagery recently or have a history of trauma, panic or dissociation.

A note on pacing. Some people find out about aphantasia late, often by accident, and it lands harder than they expected. Discovering in adulthood that your inner life runs differently from most people’s is disorienting, and there’s often some grief in it. That’s a reasonable response. Go at whatever pace suits you.

Your answers and your logged sits are saved in this browser only, on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere or seen by anyone, including me. If you clear your browser data, they go too. Use “Copy all my answers”, or a backup from My journal, to keep them somewhere else.

Offered by Bhālu · The Soul and the Scale · toward the Sādhaka seal · With Robert Bruce’s tactile imaging, the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, Kashmiri Śaiva teaching on the inner voice, nyāsa, the hands-on healing traditions, and current aphantasia and touch research

The first night

Forty-five minutes, once. The reframe, your map, and the felt experience of practising with what’s actually there.

What’s actually here

Short, and it does most of the work. Read it before Week 1.

The finding

Aphantasia was named in 2015, in a short paper describing people who couldn’t voluntarily form visual images (Zeman et al., 2015). The best current estimate puts it at about 4% of people when dim or vague imagery is included, and under 1% for no imagery at all (Dance et al., 2022). It runs in families. Most people who have it find out by accident in adulthood, because there’s no way to compare the inside of your head with anyone else’s.

The finding isn’t you have no imagination, and it isn’t your mind is empty. It’s narrower than that, and the narrowness is the useful part.

What’s missing, and what isn’t

Researchers separate two things that both get called visualisation. Object imagery is the look of things: colour, brightness, surface, faces. That’s what’s absent. Spatial imagery is where things are: position, distance, size, layout. That’s typically intact. The first paper noticed it at once: its participants could count the windows in their own homes without having a single window in view. Asked to draw a room from memory, people with aphantasia leave out the objects and keep the layout accurate (Bainbridge et al., 2021).

Given a demanding task that would normally be solved by picturing something, people with aphantasia do as well as everyone else, and they mostly don’t switch to words. They reach for spatial and sensorimotor strategies: position, movement, the feel of things (Keogh et al., 2021; Reeder et al., 2024). Left to choose, the system reaches for the body and the room. So you won’t be asked what something looks like. You’ll be asked where it is, what it weighs, how warm it is and what it sounds like.

Aphantasia often reaches past vision. For many people the inner ear, imagined touch or imagined smell are reduced too, and it varies enormously from person to person (Dawes et al., 2020). That’s why the course begins with a map of your own channels rather than an assumption.

The reading argument

This one needs no science. Many people with aphantasia are heavy readers, often of the books that are supposed to depend on picturing: fantasy, science fiction, long immersive novels. They follow the geography of an invented continent, track dozens of characters, feel the weight of a scene, and have never once had any of it in view. Whatever you’re doing when you read like that is a complete act of imagination performed without a single image. You’ve been doing it your whole life. Nobody named it, so you never counted it. That faculty is what this course trains. You aren’t starting from zero.

The dark isn’t a failure

When you close your eyes and are told to visualise, you may meet a dark field, and you may have spent years treating it as a screen you’re failing to put something on. It isn’t a screen. It’s the inside of your eyelids, and it isn’t even true black: closed eyes give everyone a faint grey with a shifting grain, made by the eye and visual system itself. There’s nothing to put on it and nothing to clear from it. The strain you may feel is the strain of reaching for a muscle that isn’t there, and what relieves it is being told, once, clearly, that there’s no muscle. Practices here that use the eyes use them open, on something real.

Where the method comes from

The core technique of Weeks 2 and 8 comes from Robert Bruce, who developed what he called tactile imaging in the 1990s. In his account a blind reader wrote to him through a Braille computer and asked for a technique that didn’t rely on visualisation. What he built used body awareness and touch in place of images, and he found it worked better for sighted people too, because it rests on sensations that are actually happening (Bruce, 1999, 2007). That’s a practitioner’s report, not a research finding. But it means you aren’t getting an adapted version of a visual system. You’re getting the one that was built without pictures.

The language of this course

No instruction on any card uses the words picture, imagine, visualise or see. The build checks every card for them. Hold the course to it.

What changed?

If you practise with other people or follow recorded meditations, you’ll eventually be asked what did you see? That question is where most of the exclusion happens. It forces you to invent something or say nothing. The question this course uses instead, every time, is what changed? In the body, the room, the sound, the temperature, the mood, how much time passed. Everyone can answer it, and it’s a better question for people with vivid imagery too, who often report pictures when what actually shifted was something else.

I hold every practice here to one idea. An experience doesn’t matter because it shows you something true. It matters because it changes your attention, your posture and the way you meet the world. No inner picture, however vivid, proves anything on its own. So nobody in this course is ahead because they see more, and nobody is behind because they see nothing.

The course in plain language

Attended sensation

What’s already happening in the body, found by putting attention there. Different from imagined sensation, and the only kind this course uses.

Spatial sense

Knowing where things are without having them in view. Typically intact in aphantasia.

The inner voice and inner ear

For many people, the channels where they make something from nothing all day long.

Awareness hands

Bruce’s term for attention drawn slowly across the skin, like a thumb.

The gap

The open, listening space right after a sound ends. Weeks 4 and 5 live there.

Clear, fill, move, close

The four-beat order of the hands-on traditions, in that order, always.

Notes on the record

• Aphantasia isn’t a disorder in any diagnostic manual. It’s a variation in how inner experience works, and most people with it live full, ordinary lives.
• Prevalence figures vary with how the question is asked. The 4% and under-1% figures come from a large general-population study (Dance et al., 2022).
• Courses that promise to grow a mind’s eye are common. The evidence that it can be reliably done is thin, and this course doesn’t try. If imagery ever shows up for you, good. The course doesn’t need it.
• Imagery that arrives on its own, such as afterimages and patterns in flicker, was long assumed to be intact. It’s more mixed than that (Krempel & Monzel, 2024; Königsmark et al., 2021). See Experiments with imagery.

Before you go on

My journal

Everything you write, rate, time and log in this course, gathered into one diary as you go. Nothing to copy over.

With aphantasia, a written record does more work than it would for most people. You can’t flip back through mental images of Week 2, so this page is your memory of the course. Each time you log a sit you can add one line about what changed, and it lands here with the date, beside your journal answers, check-ins, tracker times and maps. On the last day of each week the Today card offers your one-page week sheet. Save it as a PDF, print it, or send it to your notes.

My answers

To keep this on your iPhone like an app: tap the Share button in Safari, then Add to Home Screen. It works offline once installed.

Your Channel Map

Fifteen minutes, once, before Week 1. Then again on day 56.

Try each line honestly and rate what happens, from 0 (nothing at all) to 5 (as clear as the real thing). There’s no good score. The point is to know which channels are live for you, so that if a week runs slow, you know it’s the channel and not you. Leave the Day 63 column for the end.

Your body map

A second, faster map. After your first Week 2 walk, rate how clearly each region comes through when you rest attention there: 0 quiet, 1 faint, 2 clear, 3 vivid. Redo it on day 56. The quiet patches getting louder is one of the clearest markers of progress in the whole course.

Trackers

Two measurements most meditation can’t give you.

Do each one cold, without warming up, so the numbers compare fairly across weeks. Saving keeps your longest attempt of the day, and it goes into your journal.

If you like numbers, the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA-2) is a free, public-domain questionnaire on noticing, attention regulation, body listening and trusting. Take it before Week 1 and after Week 8 (Mehling et al., 2018).

Tactile yoga nidra

The practitioner’s track

An ordinary day

Practice that never leaves the cushion never reaches your life. These take under a minute and need no one to know you’re doing them.

Library

Experiments with imagery

Optional, and deliberately outside the eight weeks.

None of the course depends on anything here, and nothing here is a training programme. These are calibration experiments: short, one-off tests of whether certain kinds of visual experience are available to you at all. Run each once, write down what happened, and put the page down.

Some visual experience is perceptual rather than imagined, produced by the eye and visual system itself: afterimages, the grain in a dark room, the patterns a uniform field of light can produce. Because they’re perceptual, it was long assumed they’d be fully intact in aphantasia. The research is more mixed. Afterimages tend to come through less intensely in people with aphantasia (Krempel & Monzel, 2024). And in a study using a flickering red-and-black screen, almost half of the aphantasic participants reported nothing at all, while most of the rest reported simple patterns rather than the complex scenes people with imagery often describe (Königsmark et al., 2021). So don’t expect fireworks, and don’t treat a blank result as a verdict on you.

Under conditions like these the visual system makes its own geometry, spirals, lattices, dot-fields, honeycombs, before any story arrives about what it means. They’re forms, not symbols. Whatever does or doesn’t show up for you, report the form and leave the meaning alone.

• Candle afterimage. In a dim room, look near a candle flame, not at its brightest part, for about thirty seconds. Close your eyes. Report anything that persists, and for how long.
• The grain in the dark. Sit in a fully dark room with your eyes closed for ten minutes without trying to do anything. Then report the texture of what’s there. The point is discovering that the dark field is itself a perception and has always had content.
• Uniform field (ganzfeld). Tape half a ping-pong ball gently over each closed eye and sit facing a soft lamp for fifteen to twenty minutes, ideally with gentle static or white noise. Report whatever arrives, including nothing.
• Open-eye gazing. A candle at arm’s length, at eye height, in a dim room. Rest your gaze on it softly for two minutes, blinking as needed. Then close your eyes and note what remains. This one is a practice in its own right, because the object is real and external, and you may keep it.

Two cautions. Don’t press on your eyeballs. If you have any eye condition, migraine with aura, or a seizure history, skip this page entirely, especially anything involving flicker. The flicker study itself isn’t reproduced here for that reason.

The science of touch and attention

Why a course built on touch, space and sound isn’t a consolation prize. Each claim carries a tag for how strong the evidence is.

Well established Good evidence Early or small studies Taught by tradition Practitioner’s account

Aphantasia: the current research

• Well established Object imagery is absent; spatial ability is spared. Replicated across questionnaires and drawing tasks (Zeman, 2024; Bainbridge et al., 2021).
• Good evidence Performance holds; strategy changes. On visual working-memory tasks, people with aphantasia match others in accuracy and capacity while using non-visual strategies, mostly spatial and sensorimotor (Keogh et al., 2021; Reeder et al., 2024).
• Good evidence It’s often more than vision. Imagery can be reduced across several senses, and autobiographical memory is often thinner: people tend to know the facts of an event rather than re-live it (Dawes et al., 2020). That’s why the journal matters so much here.
• Good evidence Involuntary imagery is usually affected too. A 2024 review found no good evidence that spontaneous imagery is generally preserved, and afterimages were reported as weaker (Krempel & Monzel, 2024).
• Early or small studies Felt movement may be partly available, especially after moving. In a survey of 194 people with no visual imagery, kinaesthetic imagery was reported as clearly stronger than visual movement imagery, and performing the movement first seemed to help (Wright et al., 2026). A small brain-stimulation study found the motor system didn’t engage the usual way during imagined movement (Dupont et al., 2024). Don’t count on imagined movement, but “move first, then attend” is worth using.
• Early or small studies Meditation research for aphantasia barely exists yet. One pilot found a trend in favour of sound-based over imagery-based mindfulness (Cognitive Neuroscience Society poster, 2025). Encouraging, not proven.

Touch

• Well established The skin has a nerve built for slow, gentle touch. C-tactile afferents in hairy skin fire most strongly at about 1 to 10 cm a second, the speed people rate as most pleasant (Löken et al., 2009).
• Good evidence That’s the speed of the awareness-hands pass. Five seconds from wrist to knuckles is roughly 2 cm a second. Attention alone doesn’t fire those nerves, but a real fingertip at that pace does, and the attention pass then follows the same tempo.
• Well established The hands and lips own huge territory in the brain’s body map (Penfield & Boldrey, 1937).

Interoception

• Good evidence Sensing the body from inside underpins emotion and the sense of being in a body. Body-scan practices appear to train it (Farb et al., 2015).
• Good evidence Accuracy and confidence are different things (Garfinkel et al., 2015). That’s why the course measures behaviour (seconds you can follow a sound or hold a point) as well as how it feels.
• Good evidence Body trust can be measured with the free MAIA-2 questionnaire (Mehling et al., 2018).

Sound and vibration

• Good evidence Humming is physical. It raised nasal nitric oxide about fifteen-fold compared with quiet breathing out (Weitzberg & Lundberg, 2002).
• Taught by tradition The fading edge of a sound is one of the oldest meditation objects, from the Vijñāna Bhairava to Tibetan, Zen and Sufi practice.

Safety

• Good evidence Not every meditation experience is calm, and many difficulties depend on context and support (Lindahl et al., 2017).
• Good evidence Inward attention can overwhelm a nervous system that has learned to be on guard. Trauma-sensitive practice offers choice, external anchors, eyes open, movement and permission to stop (Treleaven, 2018). This course builds those in.

Where research and tradition agree, you’ll find both. Where research hasn’t looked yet (energy centres, the subtle body, the effects of nyāsa), the teaching stays on the practitioner’s track, offered as the tradition offers it, and labelled. Nothing on the spine depends on a belief.

Practice studio

Every practice card in the course, with my instruments and a timer.

Each card opens as a guided practice: the words move on by themselves at a spoken pace, with the bowl where it should sound and a drone, my harmonium, a pure tone or silence underneath (choose under Under the practice, and make the text larger with Aa). The screen stays awake while it runs. Turn on Read it aloud if you'd like your device’s voice to speak each step so you can close your eyes. Log a sit when you finish.

Instruments

The sound bed is off by default in this course, because the room’s own sound is the material. Use these when you want them, especially for nidra.

With Nick

All the talks, readings and reflections in the course, in one place.

Holding a room

Running this course for a group, a class or one person, and making any meditation you lead work for people without pictures.

You’re welcome to teach from this course, with attribution. Around one person in twenty-five has weak or absent imagery, so in any group of twenty-five or more there’s likely to be someone for whom your visualisation scripts have never worked, and who has probably never said so.

Ground rules for a circle

• Every practice is an invitation. Anyone can open their eyes, stop, move or sit out at any time, and no reason is needed.
• The sharing question is always what changed?, never what did you see? Passing is a full answer.
• We speak about our own experience, not anyone else’s, and what’s said in the circle stays there.
• Nobody is touched without asking, every time.

Translating any guided meditation

Opening words

Tonight nothing is going to be asked of you that you have to make. No pictures, nothing to hold in front of you. Everything we’ll use is already happening: the weight of your body, the temperature of the air, the sounds in this room. If you’ve ever been told to see something in meditation and nothing came, you’re in the right place. If you have vivid imagery, you’re in the right place too. You might find this is the first time you notice what actually changes.

Closing words

Hands on the lower belly. Feet on the floor. Three breaths. And together, out loud: done. When you’re ready, one word or one sentence each: what changed? Passing is a full answer.

A 90-minute circle: the first night

An eight-session series

One session per week, 75 to 90 minutes, following the weeks in order: arrival and the three-minute reset (10 minutes); a round on last week’s journal (15); teaching for the new week (10); the main card, led live (15); the touch card done together (10); writing and the integration prompts (10); round and close (10). Session 1 is the first night. In session 7, everyone writes their card. Session 8 ends with each person reading their day-one line and their day-56 line aloud, if they want to.

Partner touch: a consent protocol

Several cards offer partner versions. In a group, run them only in pairs who’ve both chosen to, never assigned.

• Ask plainly and wait for a spoken yes: “May I rest my hands on your shoulders for about a minute, over your clothes?”
• Name the area and the duration. Keep to neutral areas: hands, forearms, shoulders, upper back, feet.
• Agree a stop word, and honour “stop”, “wait” or silence equally. Ask again before any change of position.
• Hands-off versions, an inch above the body, are always offered as equal alternatives.
• Afterwards, the receiver speaks first: what changed?

Sound in a session

Real bowls and bells are far better than recordings for Week 5. Strike softly and let each tone end completely. If you place bowls on bodies, ask first at every placement, and don’t do it with a pacemaker or other implanted device, on recent wounds or inflamed skin, or on the belly in pregnancy.

Immersions

The course compresses well into a weekend or a week: two practice periods a day (morning body and space, afternoon sound and voice), one teaching, tactile nidra in the late afternoon, field listening outdoors, and the journal kept in a shared quiet hour. Week 7’s card is written on the last morning, and Week 8 is taught on the last afternoon so people leave with something for the body.

Before you bring this to other people

Five questions I ask before I pass any practice on, whether it’s to one friend or a full room:

1. Can they bear this?
2. At what tempo?
3. With what support?
4. Who stays responsible afterwards?
5. What can’t be undone?

A practice is safe to pass on when it can be survived. What you pass on is never the image, or the intensity that came with it. It’s the discipline of how you relate to whatever appears. Go slower than you think you need to: once something has been received, it can’t be un-known.

Look after the facilitator

Keep a short referral list (therapists, a crisis line, a doctor) and a peer or mentor you can debrief with. If you notice yourself trying to rescue people, or needing the circle to go well for your own sake, take it to that person. It’s a common pattern in people who hold space, and it’s workable.

Sharing this with someone

Maybe someone close to you has just found out they have aphantasia, and you want to help.

• Don’t offer it as a fix. Nothing here is meant to give anyone a mind’s eye. Offer it as something good to do together, built on what they already have.
• Never ask “what did you see?” Ask “what changed?” and mean it. If the answer is “nothing”, that’s an answer.
• Do the first night together. Read the three short pieces aloud, take turns on the Channel Map, and lead the first-night card from the reader, or let it run so you can both sit. You’ll learn as much about your own mind as theirs.
• Let them set the pace. Some people find the discovery a relief; others grieve for a while. Both are reasonable.
• Point them to others. Reading dozens of people describe the same experience does something no course can. The Aphantasia Network (aphantasia.com) has forums, research summaries and first-person accounts.

Care and limits

Practice and reflection, not therapy or medical care. It doesn’t diagnose or treat anything.

• If you lost your imagery recently, rather than always having had little or none, talk to a doctor. Aphantasia can be acquired, for example after brain injury or with some psychological conditions, and a recent change deserves a proper look.
• Close attention to the body isn’t calming for everyone. With a history of trauma, panic or health anxiety, start with the eyes-open options and the outward practices (sound, the room, real objects), keep sessions short, and stop whenever you want. Moving, opening your eyes or touching something with texture are all full practices.
• If practice leaves you feeling unreal, detached or flooded, stop, use the Pause panel, and put your attention outward: feet on the floor, five things in the room, a cold drink. If it keeps happening, talk to a professional who knows about meditation-related difficulties.
• Pain and symptoms: new, severe or changing symptoms go to a doctor. Week 8 is self-care, not treatment.
• Grief is allowed. Discovering aphantasia in adulthood can bring up loss: for memories that feel thin, for years of failing at instructions that were never for you. Talking it through with someone you trust, or a counsellor, is a sensible thing to do.

If you need someone now

• US: call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
• US: SAMHSA National Helpline, 1-800-662-4357, free and open 24/7.
• Elsewhere: findahelpline.com. In an emergency, call your local emergency number.

Companion shelf

Books, films, music and practices that sit beside this course.

Read

• Helen Keller, The World I Live In (1908). A deafblind writer on the hand, touch and vibration as a whole world. Public domain and free online.
• Alan Kendle, Aphantasia: Experiences, Perceptions, and Insights (2017). First-person accounts gathered from people with aphantasia, with a foreword by Adam Zeman.
• Oliver Sacks, The Mind’s Eye (2010). Case histories of people whose seeing and inner seeing changed, and what they did instead.
• John M. Hull, Touching the Rock (1990). A theologian’s diary of going blind and of visual memory fading, and of a world rebuilt through sound and touch.
• Robert Bruce, Energy Work (2007). The source of Weeks 2 and 8. Take the technique chapters; leave the cosmology if it isn’t yours.
• Eugene Gendlin, Focusing (1978). The felt sense, in six steps.
• Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (2005). Listening as a lifelong practice, for Weeks 4 and 5.
• Swami Lakshman Joo, Vijñāna Bhairava: The Practice of Centring Awareness. The practical commentary.
• Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Yoga Nidra (1976). The structure behind tactile nidra.
• David Treleaven, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness (2018). For anyone who teaches this.

Watch

• Notes on Blindness (2016), the film made from John Hull’s audio diaries.
• Touch the Sound (2004), Thomas Riedelsheimer’s film with the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who is profoundly deaf and hears through her whole body.

Listen

• Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis, Deep Listening (1989), recorded in an underground cistern with a long reverberation. Week 5 on record.
• Éliane Radigue’s long-tone electronic works. Sound that changes so slowly you have to follow it the way you follow a fading bowl.

Practise with others

• The Aphantasia Network (aphantasia.com): community, research summaries, first-person accounts.
• Focusing partnerships through focusing.org.
• Jon Kabat-Zinn’s body scan (Full Catastrophe Living, 1990), often recommended in aphantasia communities because it asks for no imagery.

Sources

Aphantasia research

• Bainbridge WA, Pounder Z, Eardley AF, Baker CI (2021). Quantifying aphantasia through drawing: those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory. Cortex 135:159–172. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2020.11.014
• Dance CJ, Ipser A, Simner J (2022). The prevalence of aphantasia (imagery weakness) in the general population. Conscious Cogn 97:103243. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2021.103243
• Dawes AJ, Keogh R, Andrillon T, Pearson J (2020). A cognitive profile of multi-sensory imagery, memory and dreaming in aphantasia. Sci Rep 10:10022.
• Dupont W, Papaxanthis C, Madden-Lombardi C, Lebon F (2024). Explicit and implicit motor simulations are impaired in individuals with aphantasia. Brain Commun fcae072. doi:10.1093/braincomms/fcae072
• Keogh R, Pearson J (2018). The blind mind: no sensory visual imagery in aphantasia. Cortex 105:53–60.
• Keogh R, Wicken M, Pearson J (2021). Visual working memory in aphantasia: retained accuracy and capacity with a different strategy. Cortex 143:237–253. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2021.07.012
• Königsmark VT, Bergmann J, Reeder RR (2021). The Ganzflicker experience: high probability of seeing vivid and complex pseudo-hallucinations with imagery but not aphantasia. Cortex 141:522–534. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2021.05.007
• Krempel R, Monzel M (2024). Aphantasia and involuntary imagery. Conscious Cogn 120:103679. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2024.103679
• Reeder RR, Pounder Z, Figueroa A, Jüllig A, Azañón E (2024). Non-visual spatial strategies are effective for maintaining precise information in visual working memory. Cognition 251:105907. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105907
• Wright DJ, Scott MW, et al. (2026). Motor imagery abilities in individuals who experience aphantasia. Neuropsychologia. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2026.109530
• Zeman A (2024). Aphantasia and hyperphantasia: exploring imagery vividness extremes. Trends Cogn Sci 28:467–480.
• Zeman A, Dewar M, Della Sala S (2015). Lives without imagery: congenital aphantasia. Cortex 73:378–380.
• Mindfulness without imagery: mindfulness interventions for individuals with aphantasia (2025). Poster, Cognitive Neuroscience Society annual meeting. Pilot data.

Touch, interoception, sound and safety

• Farb N, et al. (2015). Interoception, contemplative practice, and health. Front Psychol 6:763. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00763
• Garfinkel SN, Seth AK, Barrett AB, Suzuki K, Critchley HD (2015). Knowing your own heart: distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness. Biol Psychol 104:65–74.
• Lindahl JR, Fisher NE, Cooper DJ, Rosen RK, Britton WB (2017). The varieties of contemplative experience. PLoS ONE 12:e0176239. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0176239
• Löken LS, Wessberg J, Morrison I, McGlone F, Olausson H (2009). Coding of pleasant touch by unmyelinated afferents in humans. Nat Neurosci 12:547–548. doi:10.1038/nn.2312
• Mehling WE, Acree M, Stewart A, Silas J, Jones A (2018). The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness, Version 2 (MAIA-2). PLoS ONE 13:e0208034. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0208034
• Penfield W, Boldrey E (1937). Somatic motor and sensory representation in the cerebral cortex of man as studied by electrical stimulation. Brain 60:389–443.
• Treleaven DA (2018). Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing. New York: W. W. Norton.
• Weitzberg E, Lundberg JON (2002). Humming greatly increases nasal nitric oxide. Am J Respir Crit Care Med 166:144–145. doi:10.1164/rccm.200202-138BC

Practice, tradition and the keys

• Bruce R (1999). Astral Dynamics: A New Approach to Out-of-Body Experience. Charlottesville: Hampton Roads. The origin of tactile imaging and the blind correspondent.
• Bruce R (2007). Energy Work: The Secret of Healing and Spiritual Development. Charlottesville: Hampton Roads.
• Gendlin ET (1978). Focusing. New York: Everest House.
• James W (1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt. Chapters on attention and habit; public domain.
• Kabat-Zinn J (1990). Full Catastrophe Living. New York: Delacorte.
• Keller H (1908). The World I Live In. New York: The Century Co. Public domain.
• Lakshman Joo, Swami (2002). Vijñāna Bhairava: The Practice of Centring Awareness. Varanasi: Indica Books.
• Satyananda Saraswati, Swami (1976). Yoga Nidra. Munger: Bihar School of Yoga.
• Singh J, trans. (1979). Vijñānabhairava or Divine Consciousness. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Verse numbers in the keys follow this edition; the renderings are mine.
• Wallis CD (2013). Tantra Illuminated. Mattamayūra Press.
• Yates FA (1966). The Art of Memory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Young S. See Hear Feel: An Introduction. Unified Mindfulness. shinzen.org.

Research citations were checked against publisher and database records in October 2026. Traditional practices are paraphrased in original wording; the Sanskrit formulas in the nyāsa card are traditional and in the public domain. The quotations from James (1890) and Keller (1908) are public domain. The lineage material comes from living traditions with their own cosmologies and ethics, which this course doesn’t attempt to transmit.