Dr. Elizabeth-Anne Stewart, BCC, PCC
Imagery, Healing & Pain Management
Image Guidance
Image Guidance is an innovative approach to healing and discernment that I have developed, taught, and refined over more than three decades of work with clients, healthcare professionals, clergy, and spiritual directors.
What if the answers you seek are already within you?
Image Guidance is a unique process that uses imagery, reflection, and guided exploration to help individuals access their own inner wisdom. Often, when words fail us, images speak. A recurring dream, a spontaneous mental picture, a memory, or a symbol can reveal insights that lie beyond ordinary thinking.
Image Guidance is designed to help you explore challenges, gain clarity, and discover new possibilities for healing and growth. It can be particularly helpful when you feel stuck, overwhelmed, uncertain, or when you are confronted by circumstances that seem difficult to understand or change.
Clients have used Image Guidance to:
- Explore the emotional and spiritual roots of persistent challenges
- Prepare for medical procedures, difficult conversations, or major life transitions
- Reduce stress and manage physical discomfort
- Clarify important decisions and discern next steps
- Deepen relationships with God, self, and others
- Find meaning amid loss, illness, disability, or unexpected change
- Transform limiting beliefs and recurring patterns of behavior
- Access creativity, courage, and hope
No artistic ability, special talent, or previous experience is required. The images arise naturally from your own imagination and life experience. My role is not to interpret your images for you but to help you discover the wisdom they contain.
What Happens during an Image Guidance Session?
The process begins with a conversation about the issue you would like to explore. Together, we identify an image, symbol, memory, dream, or inner experience that reflects your concern. Through guided relaxation and focused attention, you are invited to enter into a dialogue with the image itself. As the experience unfolds, you may discover new perspectives, unexpected insights, emotional healing, or a deeper understanding of your situation.
Following the imagery experience, we spend time reflecting on what emerged and discussing how these insights apply to your everyday life. Every session is unique because every person's inner landscape is unique.
Experience
I have used Image Guidance with private clients seeking healing, discernment, personal growth, and spiritual transformation. I have also presented workshops and professional training programs for healthcare professionals, therapists, spiritual directors, educators, clergy, and community organizations throughout North America.
Organizations that have hosted presentations or training in Image Guidance include professional nursing associations, healthcare systems, universities, theological schools, retreat centers, spiritual formation programs, and national organizations dedicated to spirituality, mental imagery, and holistic healing.
Whether you are seeking clarity, healing, discernment, or a deeper understanding of yourself, Image Guidance offers a powerful pathway into the wisdom already waiting within you.
BOOKS ON IMAGERY & HEALING
I have published two books of mostly therapeutic case studies with Paulist Press: Image Guidance: a Tool for Spiritual Direction (1992) and Image Guidance and Healing (1994).
Mind-Shifting Imagery: Image Guidance for Life Coaches provides brief, safe, and effective guidelines for using imagery in coaching, spiritual direction, pastoral counseling, and other forms of inner guidance.
Endorsements
Dr. Ewert Cousins, Professor of Theology, Fordham University, (1992)
"The symbols which emerge in her work resonate with those found in the spiritual classics, and they harmonize with the classical philosophies and theologies of the spiritual traditions. Add to these perspectives her own remarkable creativity and wisdom, and it is clear why she has been able to awaken in others the resources that guided imagery offers to those on the spiritual quest."
Dr. Joan E. Bowers, Chair, Department of Nursing, DePaul University (1994)
"Stewart's case material in Image Guidance and Healing provides an excellent embodiment of the image guidance process and helps the reader to appreciate the very real gift she brings to this endeavor."
Dr. August J. Cwik, Jungian Analyst (1994)
"Elizabeth-Anne Stewart is an intuitive healer with an uncanny ability to help her clients express and transform their physical problems through imagery. Extending Jung's technique of the active imagination, a type of inner dialogue with spontaneous images, she illustrates how to evoke this healing fantasy in individuals with physiological conditions."
Dr. Judith-Rae Ross, Department of History, DePaul University (1994)
"What did image guidance do for me? It took my fears, gave them shape, and made it possible to face them. Image Guidance gave me a way to communicate and learn from the diabetes. It gave me the means to discover my true feelings about the disease and to work through all the anger and hurt. Finally, it showed me that my attitude was making it difficult to come to terms with the disease. Through Image Guidance, I found a way to live with the diabetes without setting myself against myself."
Elizabeth Ann Houlihan, Student, DePaul University, (1994)
"Liz was able to guide me into what I can only describe as the depths of my soul --going beyond the dust that had lingered there so long and drawing into the light all the beauty, courage and love that had always been there and which I sorely missed. Through the process, I not only learned to trust in myself again, but I learned to trust in another."
Dr. Patrick Williams, BCC, MCC, Founder, ILCT (2018)
"Mind-Shifting Imagery: Image Guidance for Life Coaches offers a wealth of information, research citations, transcripts from sessions, and clear distinctions on the variety of ways that imagery can be used in coaching without shifting into the world of psychotherapy or psychiatry. It presents descriptions of imagery from the world of art and literature, and then the world of imagery in our own minds. Imagery guidance often leads to breakthroughs and this book includes such use in personal guidance, relationship challenges and healing from trauma or grief or loss; it also includes ways for incorporating imagery in the corporate work place."
More Endorsements
Dr. Betty Morton, Professional Certified Coach (PCC), (2018)
"As a coach, I often ask clients questions like, 'What does that look like?' or 'Can you imagine what life will be like when you reach this goal?' Using such visualization, I try to help clients get clarity on their current circumstances and their goals. I did not know that, in a way, I was doing image guidance. Nor have I had others so adeptly guide me through this process. I love how Liz followed my energy and challenged me to go deeper."
Dr. Carole J. Parker, Psychotherapist (2018)
"Dr. Stewart's guided imagery book is a treasure for Life Coaches and anyone wishing to change their outcomes in life. Just as it has been said, 'change your thinking change your life' - change your images and you can change your life as well. I deeply appreciate Dr Stewart's wide range of examples from business to pain management to relationships and more, She wisely cautions to use this with knowledge and experience, I would recommend this book to therapists as well. Dr Stewart would make a great consultant to those stuck in their therapeutic work. Thank you for putting it all together for those of us working in the field of behavioral health,"
Sister Dolores Lytle, CSA (2018)
"This book arrived at the best possible time in my own personal life. Many weeks of rehab after an accident had left me a bit disorientated. As I read Mind-Shifting Imagery, I realized it is a tool to tend my own spirit. My unfamiliar sensitivity to otherwise manageable events became opportunities for conversation with these very reactions. What insights they are revealing to me!
As Dr. Stewart teaches Image Guidance for Life Coaches she stresses the importance of being able to use the tool in one's own life before using it with others. Practicing Image Guidance in one's own life will make one's relationship with others much more effective."
Jeffery Seitzer, Adjunct Faculty, Roosevelt University (2018)
"Images flash through our minds all the time. Some positive, many not so much. Images shape our reactions to events, how we feel about ourselves, and limit our sense of our own potential. Elizabeth-Anne Stewart's Mind-Shifting Imagery offers a step-by-step guide for life coaches and therapists who wish to use imagery to help people liberate themselves, understand themselves better, and find more positive direction in their lives. Moreover, though the book was meant for use in a professional context, with a life coach or therapist as a guide, I found many of the guidelines very helpful for a nonprofessional, such as myself, in becoming aware of and sometimes altering or replacing images that shaped my outlook and led to unproductive reactions or habits. I am very grateful for her guidance. This is a timely book I would recommend to anyone who feels stuck in place in their lives."
Deacon Al S., Archdiocese of Chicago (2018)
"This is a very informative and educational book for life coaches. Dr. Stewart explains this valuable coaching tool clearly, and her examples reinforce the key points. Every life coach should have this book to enhance their effectiveness with their clients.
For spiritual directors, it also is an adjunct work to her prior books on Image Guidance lending additional knowledge to this important tool. "
