On Waking
Stiffness and slower movement are often strongest first thing, before your morning medication has settled in. A few unhurried minutes here, before you're up, is a gentle way to rehearse ease before the day begins.
Five practices. One method. It's built on research showing that imagining a movement switches on many of the same brain networks as actually doing it — which may help make that movement a little more available, alongside your medication and physiotherapy.
Guided imagery is a set of mental practices you do alongside your usual Parkinson's care. In each one, you imagine a movement or state in detail — from the inside, with the feeling of it actually happening — and, in most practices, follow the pathway involved in the body. Here's why that may help: when you imagine a movement clearly, your brain switches on many of the same networks it uses to actually make that movement. Rehearsing this way, again and again, may help keep an easier, fuller version of that movement a little more available to your body — not by reversing Parkinson's, but by keeping a pattern of ease warm and familiar.
The practices are free. They are not a treatment, and they don't replace medication, physiotherapy, or the guidance of your Parkinson's team. They sit alongside those — something you can do on your own, in the gaps between appointments, or on the days when movement itself is harder.
A spoken introduction to what's on this page — what the programme is, the research behind it, and how the practices work — for a listen instead of a read. Around twenty minutes. Useful for yourself, for a family member, or to share with a clinician.
This overview is AI-generated: two synthetic voices discussing the material on this page, not Jeremy's own voice and not his direct recordings used in the five practices below. It's offered as an accessible way in, not as a word-for-word reading of the site. If anything in it seems to go further than the written page, the written page is the accurate version.
A shorter, visual walk-through of what's on this page, for anyone who finds a video easier to follow than reading start to finish. Useful alongside the audio overview above, or on its own.
This overview is AI-generated, drawn from the material on this page, not Jeremy's own recordings used in the five practices below. It's offered as an accessible way in, not as a word-for-word reading of the site. If anything in it seems to go further than the written page, the written page is the accurate version.
Every practice follows the same four parts, in the same order. The order matters — each part sets up the one after it.
Every practice starts by settling you. You bring your attention to your body, slow your breathing, and let a soft warmth or light rest wherever it's easy. This calms the nervous system — worth doing deliberately in Parkinson's, where hurry and anxiety are common triggers for symptoms like freezing. Around three minutes.
A figure appears — or you simply sense one — moving easily, doing the movement you're working on. First you watch them, and notice how smooth and easy it looks. Then the figure steps into you, and you become them. What you were watching, you now feel from the inside. Watching a movement wakes up many of the same brain areas as doing it; stepping in lets you rehearse the feeling of it yourself. Around four to five minutes.
Now the practice moves inward, to a plain-language picture of what's happening in the body — different for each practice, since Parkinson's affects several different systems. It's not a diagram to memorise, just enough to make the rehearsal make sense. Around four minutes.
Every one of those pathways is a thread inside a much larger network. If it helps to see the whole thing first, Innerbody hosts a model of the nervous system you can rotate, zoom, and look around — worth exploring before you go anywhere near a single practice's pathway.
You come back to your breath and let the images settle, carrying a little of the practised ease with you. Nothing to prove and no test passed or failed — then you bring yourself gently back to the room. Around two to three minutes.
Each part sets up the next. Part I settles the nervous system and gets you ready to focus. Part II wakes the movement system by watching, before you step in and feel it from the inside. Part III aims that rehearsal at the specific pathway this practice is working with. Part IV lets it settle before you return to the room. The parts are designed to build on one another, so doing them in order is how the practice is intended to work — though, like the four-part structure itself, that sequencing hasn't been tested on its own in any trial.
The heart of each motor practice is Part II: a figure appears at a distance, is watched moving with ease, and then "steps into you," so that the feeling of easeful movement is borrowed from the inside. The figure is never a pre-Parkinson's self to chase back — there's no going back, and the practices never imply it. It's simply an embodiment of ease, offered to the body as it is now.
The one exception is Calm Beneath the Storm, the non-motor practice. Calm isn't an action to rehearse, and asking you to "become" a serene figure could carry an unwanted message that where you are now is wrong. So that practice sets the figure aside and simply arrives at a settled place directly — a restorative exception, made on purpose.
Pick the practice that fits where you are right now. You can do more than one, but it's usually best to get comfortable with a single practice for a week or two before adding another. They're separate — you don't have to do them in order.
Rehearsing the smooth approach and the way through a doorway, for the step that catches.
For the pause before movement and the shrinking of it — rehearsing an easy, full-sized start.
A gentle, seated rehearsal of calm, unhurried steadiness — a quiet companion to physiotherapy.
For writing that shrinks and fingers that fumble — rehearsing a hand that stays full and fluid.
A settling practice for the hard hours — meeting the storm differently, not making it disappear.
There's no required schedule. Once a day is a reasonable place to start, fitting the practice wherever it fits in your day. But the full fifteen-minute session isn't the only time it can help — three moments in the day tend to work especially well for rehearsing ease, and even a few slow breaths returning to a practice's main image, without doing the whole session, keeps the pattern close at hand.
If you've been practising Walking Freely, come back to the line on the floor and the step over it, for two or three breaths. If you've been practising Finding Flow, come back to the feeling of a movement starting the moment you intend it. If you've been practising Steady Ground, come back to the easy sway and settle of standing. If you've been practising The Steady Hand, come back to the full, open feeling of the hand at rest. If you've been practising Calm Beneath the Storm, come back to the settled place you found there. These small moments add up.
Pick one practice. Play the audio if that helps — or read the script to yourself, or have someone read it to you. Get into a comfortable, supported position — seated or lying down both work well; this is mental rehearsal, not movement, so there's no wrong position to start from. Most people close their eyes; softly gazing at a point in the distance also works.
The first session may feel unfamiliar, and that's completely normal — it often takes a few tries before guided imagery starts to feel more natural. If the imagery feels faint, effortful, or simply doesn't arrive at first, that's a known feature of the territory, not a failure on your part — most studies of motor imagery only recruit people who can already form vivid mental pictures, and you haven't been screened that way.
If you're working with a physiotherapist, occupational therapist, or your wider Parkinson's team, it's worth telling them you're doing this. Many will know about motor imagery and can help you pair it with the exercises and strategies they've already given you.
There's no need to plan this out in advance — but if you'd like a sense of what a steady month with one practice tends to look like, here's a rough shape.
Pick one practice — whichever domain matters most to you right now — and do the full session daily, at roughly the same time if that's practical. Use the audio once it's recorded, or read the script slowly to yourself in the meantime. Don't worry yet about how vivid the imagery feels, or whether you're doing it "right" — the first week is simply about building the habit and getting familiar with the shape of the practice.
Keep to the same practice, same time. By now the imagery should be coming more easily; you may find you no longer need the audio to follow it. If you'd like to work on more than one symptom, this is a reasonable point to add a second practice on some days — but let each one keep its own daily repetition rather than rotating through all five at once. Depth comes from returning to the same image, not from variety.
The longer practice stays daily. But now the imagery is in your memory, and you can begin using the brief windows described above — on waking, before sleep, and the quiet lulls that come through the day. You don't need the audio or this page for those; just a few breaths returning to the image you've been working with. Use these naturally occurring rest phases whenever you notice one arrive.
Keep going. Four weeks is enough to notice whether anything has shifted — in the vividness of the imagery, in how your body feels, in your sense of the practice itself. Some people notice a great deal by now; some notice little, and that is honest information too. Either way, you'll have a real basis for deciding whether to carry the practice forward.
A rhythm like this is a suggestion, not a rule. Miss a day and nothing is lost; simply return the next. Long stretches where the practice feels quiet, before it feels like anything, are normal — that's part of how this kind of practice works, not a sign you're doing it wrong.
A short note now and then is worth more than it sounds — it gives you a record of change you'd otherwise forget. There's a free printable reflection journal, structured to compare where you started against where you end up a few months on.
Download the Reflection Journal (PDF) ↓