Dr. Gerald Epstein is a physician, a pioneer in mental imagery, and an authority on the Western spiritual tradition and its application to healing and therapeutics. He is the author of the bestselling classic Healing Visualizations: Creating Health through Imagery and four other books. He founded and directs the American Institute for Mental Imagery, a postgraduate training program for health professionals and an educational center for the public. During more then 30 years of clinical experience, he has taught thousands of people how to transform their lives using imagery.

In the opening chapter of this salutary book, Epstein sets the context for what follows with an explanation of the Visionary Kabbalah tradition that is 4,000 years old. Epstein's teacher, Colette Aboulker-Muscat, who lived and worked in Israel, passed on to him two essentials of the Visionary Kabbalah of imagination: (1) creating healing for the challenges and difficulties of everyday life and (2) achieving transcendence and mystical union with Spirit. Through the regular practice of mental imagery we can, according to Epstein, "establish in ourselves the inner peace that comes from balance and order." The content in this paperback has been organized around the material and physical demands of an ordinary day. The intent is to show "how we can invest our lives at all points with health and happiness, balance and abundance."

Epstein begins with helpful pointers on the practice of mental imagery, which he calls "an all-purpose antibiotic of the inner beliefs that direct our passage in the world and shape our physical, social, mental, and moral response to the world." He emphasizes the importance of keeping imagery exercises short, abandoning goals (expectations of certain outcomes), and staying in the present moment rather than exiting to the past or to the future. Epstein shares more than 60 exercises (19 from his teacher Colette Aboulker-Muscat). Among them are exercises for bringing freshness to the day; dealing with anxiety and pain; handling money worries; coping with physical ailments; healing the past; falling asleep; and wrestling with self-doubt, indecisiveness, and disquieting feelings.

One of the best chapters is on "Combatting Inner Terrorists" which Epstein describes as "inner entities, mental children, or inner demons formed by our attitudes, feelings, beliefs." Here imagery can serve as a counter-terrorist force. We were also impressed with his commentary and imagery exercises on awakening to Spirit, finding spiritual freedom, and letting in the invisible universe. A helpful index includes practical material on "How to Create Your Own Imagery."