The Receptive Imagination engages your story-making capacities, which invite the creative and intuitive insights that can illuminate a way out of a bind. The Receptive Imagination reveals exactly what constraints are operative and what is needed to overcome them. You use the Receptive Imagination when you are unhappy with your situation but cannot conceive how it could be otherwise — that is, when you have no vision to strive for.

All three aspects of Applied Meditation continually weave together and are not distinctly separate activities. The Active Imagination and the Receptive Imagination are interdependent; the Witness observes their interplay. To try to work solely with one is like trying to breathe without exhaling.