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THE VISUALISATION REPORT
SEVEN EASY EXERCISES TO HELP YOU MASTER THE THIS KEY TOOL TO FULFILLMENT AND SUCCESS
Why visualise?
Visualization allows us to see more clearly the result we want. It sets a destination for the unconscious mind, which in turns motivates it to chart or create a path towards it. To the mind it makes no difference that the image is "real" or imagined: it will accept it as truth and deal with in accordingly. This can be in the form of finding inner resources that help bring forth your visualized outcome; beginning to see patterns and insights on how to achieve your goal; and bring "proof" from past experiences of beliefs, that you have what it takes to make this image true in the material world. If emotion is added to the mix, you get an extra support, as positive emotions will put you in a more creative mind-set, help you go beyond those moments of doubt and frustration, and inspire and motivate you to keep moving forwards. From a spiritual point of view, visualization transforms thought into energy and releases it into the Universal clockworks or programmes, thus placing the image into the process of creation and manifestation.
The Centring Practise
The first element of visualisation is peace and relaxation, since both promote creativity. So find a time and space when and where you will not be disturbed. Sit or lay in a comfortable position. One of the easiest way to relax and connect to inner peace is breathing and scanning. If you feel comfortable doing it, close your eyes and place your attention in your breathing. Please read several times the instructions or have someone reading them out loud for you.
Feel the air passing through your nostrils, the back of your throat, down to your chest.
Bring the air to your belly, into it "pops" out a bit.
Exhale gently, pressing lightly your abdomen muscles, so all the air can come out.
Breathe in this way for several minutes and then go back to your regular pattern of breathing.
Now, think about your toes. If it helps, press lightly the muscles in this part of the body.
Think about your legs, your knees, your thighs.
Become aware of your abdomen, buttocks, back, chest, shoulders.
Think about your arms, elbows, wrists, hands, fingers.
Put your attention now on the back of your neck, on the muscles around your jaw line, on your cheeks, around your eyes, on the back and on the top of your head.
Repeat the process, but now you are going to tell yourself that when you think about a specific part of the body, the whole of your being relaxes 10 times more.
If you are good at imagining, see a scanner, like the ones in the supermarkets that are used to scan the prices' code bar, going slowly from the tip of your toes to the top of your head.
Tell yourself that where the scan passes, your whole body relaxes 10 times more.
The Visualisation Exercises
Exercise One
In spite of the name, visualisation doesn't have to be a visual exercise. It can be as simple as "thinking" about what you are visualising, or using your mental voice to tell you what you are visualising. For the purpose of this explanation, I'll use words as “seeing” and “watch.” Let's then do our first visualisation exercise.
(Note: read the following instructions before carrying on the next task.)
Do your centring practise.
Think about your house. That's it, just think about your house.
Now think about your front door.
Think about your bedroom.
Think about your closet.
Think about your favourite shoes or the shoes you use the most. See the shoes. Good.
Now breathe in, get up, stretch, have some fresh water, and get an object, anything, a photo frame, a fruit, a book, something that feels comfortable to hold and handle.
Look it carefully. What shape is it? What colour? Are there any particular marks or design on it? What is made of? How does it feel? Is it smooth, rough, cool, warm? What's its smell? How heavy is it? If possible, taste it.
Put the object in a place when you cannot see it, and get some pencil and paper.
Breathe in deeply and close your eyes and think about the object. Can you see the colour, the shape? Can you see the pattern or design? Can you feel the taste, how it weight on your hand, its texture?
Now say out loud all the information in your mind.
Breathe in deeply, open your eyes, and write down all this information.
Take out the object and compare it with your notes. How close were they to the solid object?
Do the centring practice and the first visualisation exercise for a few days (I suggest three to nine), using different objects each time. If you like, you can start the visualisation as we did here, thinking about places and things from your everyday life: your car, the route you take to work, your kitchen, your street, your favourite pub or restaurant and so forth. Doing so will be a gentle reminder to your mind that you already have the capacity of visualising -you just have to master it.
Exercise Two
For the second visualisation exercise, you are going to need a picture of yourself during a holiday. It can include family, friends, pets or a special location -anything that triggers the memories of the day. Do your relaxation, centring practise. Please remember to read all the instructions before carrying out the tasks. If you think it can help, record them before the visualisation. Leave a few pauses in between questions.
Look at the picture carefully and see how many things can you remember about the day or moment it was taken.
Close your eyes and bring forth that moment to your mind. Where are you? Who is with you? What are you doing? What can you hear? What's the weather like? How are you feeling? What can you see that is not in the picture? Can you do a close up of a person or object that is either far way or blurred in the picture?
Breathe in deeply and open your eyes.
As with the previous practise, write down the information that came to mind and then compare it to the picture. As before, do your relaxation practise and this exercise for a few days, using different pictures each time.
Exercise Three
So, now we are ready for our third visualisation exercise. I am sure that by now your constant practise is helping to make the whole process a bit easier. For this exercise, you will need a short passage from a book that is very descriptive. It would be good if it included people talking or acting. Read the passage a few times. As always, read fully or record the instructions before visualising.
Do your relaxation routine.
Close your eyes.
Imagine you are seeing the passage come to life, as if in a film. What's the environment and the people like? What are they saying? What's going on? How does the image and/or actions make you feel?
When you are ready, breath in deeply, open your eyes, and write your ideas. See how they compare to the passage. Do this a few times with different books.
Exercise Four
Very good! Now we are ready to have some real fun. Again, choose a descriptive passage from a book. Read fully or record the instructions.
Do your relaxation routine.
Breathe in deeply, close your eyes and see yourself inside the passage, as if you had entered the pages of the book and were now part of this fictional world. What do you see? What can you hear? See your feet. Are you standing on a pavement, some grass, a muddy road? Look above? Are you indoors or outdoors? What's the temperature like? What can you smell? Who do you see? What are they saying or doing?
Go to them and introduce yourself as a visitor and see how they react to you.
Now walk about, away from what you already know from your reading of the passage and see what's out there.
When you are ready, breathe in deeply, wiggle your toes and fingers and open your eyes.
Write down both the ideas that came that you can compare to the passage, as well as any insight which you may have gotten from your exploration. Repeat the practice for three days before moving to the next visualisation exercise.
Exercise Five
In our fifth exercise we are going to start tapping into the powers of visualisation. As always, read fully or record the instructions first. Go to space where you can move and run freely; your back yard, a park, the beach. Have handy something you can use as markers. You have two choices for this exercise: you can jump or you can throw, in which case you also need an object you can safely throw.
Place a marker at the "start" area, from which you will throw or jump.
If jumping, walk a few feet back, so you have space to run.
Now, go! Mark where you or the object landed.
Take a few minutes to do your centring practise.
When you are ready, visualise yourself carrying out the throw or jump. See how your muscles move, hear the beat of your heart, feel the sensation of being up on the air or letting the object go with all your energy.
See yourself landing further than the original marker.
Feel the rush, the satisfaction, say "Yeah!" smile, and focus on the good feelings that achieving this bring up in you.
Breathe in deeply and now do the jump or throw.
How did it go? Chances are that you or your object landed a bit further than the last time. Now, do the opposite; if you were throwing, jump, if you were jumping, throw. But now you are going to visualise first and decide where you are going to land. Do be realistic, but do not sell yourself short, when it comes to deciding on the goal. Make it a real yet achievable challenge. After the visualisation, place the marker where you decided the land will be and do the action. How close did you come to your goal? How did it go? Repeat this exercise for three days, creating variations on the theme: how far can you stretch, how fast can you do something, etc.
Exercise Six
Our sixth exercise is a bit frown upon by some people, who believe you should visualise only the outcome and not the process towards a goal. Yet I feel it's very helpful to clarify ideas and useful once you have divided the goal into stages. The best illust
ration I have seen of this exercise is in the film Hero. In the story, two assassins are about to get into a fight. But before moving the first muscle, they see the fight in their mind, seeing all the possible obstacles and the ways to overcome them, until they feel sure that they know which set of moves, both from themselves and from their rivals, will bring them closer to the desire outcome. In the movie, this mental fights lasts for minutes, but the actual combat is fought and won within seconds.
Let's say you are doing a presentation to convince a client to buy your product or service. By now the presentation is prepared; you have gathered information about the client; you know the people from your company who are going to be present, and how they can help or hamper your presentation; and you are aware of the strengths and weaknesses of your product, your company and yourself.
Do your centring practise.
Visualise the presentation. What problems may come up and how would you resolve them? What else do you need to take into account that you had not thought before? What possible attitudes may you encounter and how do you react to them? What ace can you have under your sleeve to pull out in case the client is not receptive?
Run the different scenarios and see yourself overcoming all obstacles and succeeding in all of the "alternate" realities in your mind.
You can do this as a one session, which short breaks in between visualisations or doing the different visualisations on different days. Be sure to write down all the insights you have received and see how to incorporate them to you overall plan. Once you are finished, do a last visualisation, this time focused on the positive outcome.
See yourself toasting with friends, celebrating with colleagues, being congratulated by your boss, having you had shaken by a smiling client.
Try to make the image as real as possible. See, hear, smell, touch. Feel the elation, the joy, the relief, the satisfaction. See if you can sense where in your body those these feeling rest or arise.
If this was a movie, what would be the tag line that describes it? Write it down and re-read it a few minutes before presenting,
Before the presentation, bring forth fast images of the last visualisation and the feeling that it evoked.
Exercise Seven
You may have come across visual boards before: images that represent your goals and dreams. Usually they are cut out from magazine and some facilitators recommend that you paste a picture of your face over the model’s head, to give you a sense that is you who’s enjoying the life depicted in the picture. I do believe visual boards are very powerful and it’s very fun to them, but personally I think that putting your face on another person’s body looks and feels fake. So for this exercise, I’m going to ask you to do a an “open” visual board, with landscapes, be them natural or manmade that evoke and represent your goals, such as an office, a garden, a café, a beach, etc. Be sure you are clear on what you one and the way the different images connect with each other.
Let’s say you are going to make a career-oriented visual board. Include pictures not only of a beautiful office, an imposing meeting room and the latest technologies, but also pictures that show your work-life balance: those ten minutes for fast meditation or relaxation; that coffee shared with co-workers; dinner with the family. The collage doesn’t have to be over complicated, but do make it pleasant to the eyes. Going back to the career oriented visual board, you could use three big pictures that represent your main goals and two or three smaller ones that represent that flow of life work balance. Include powerful words or sentences across the images and If possible, create your visual board on A3, A4 sheet of paper, so once you are finished, you can copy it and even reduce it in size and carry a small version with you all the times (do laminate it.) This way, you can have a version at home and another at the office. Once you have your collage:
Do your centring practise
Look at the visual board and choose a picture. Close your eyes.
See yourself inside the picture. What does it feel like to be in that environment? What do you see, what do you hear, with whom do you interact? Look at yourself. How do you carry yourself in this environment, how do you talk, how do you act, how do you dress, what do you do?
If you remember clearly your visual board, “walk” now to the next picture and repeat the above visualisation. If you don’t, open your eyes, choose a picture and repeat the process above.
Breathe in deeply and now visualise a “day” in this new circumstances, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go back to bed. Again, evoke the feelings that living in this way would likely come to you; visualise the way you would like to deal with people and circumstances; see the sights, hear the sounds, smell the aromas, and touch the textures.
If you remember them, say out loud the empowering words and phrases. If not, open your eyes and say them as you see at visualisation board.
Do this visualisation for about three days and then do a shorter version (visualising the “day”) each morning or evening until you feel you have reached your goal if possible. If not, do it once or twice a week.
Carry your small board with you and see it several times during the day. If possible, say or think the empowering phrases. You could put it in a small picture frame on your desk or inside a drawer or in your wallet, like a credit card. It doesn’t matter if the image is not so clear, as you know the content from the bigger board. The small board if just a trigger to remind yourself your goals.
Another more conspicuous and creative way to make a visual board is to use symbols instead of actual images. I am a great fan of Tarot card and personally believe that part of their attraction is that de depict almost every possible human experiences, so I usually do my boards using beautiful cards. If you are into old wisdom, you could also use Runes, I Chin, Totem Animal and Ogham symbols. Or you just can create your own symbology (hearts, suns, money sings, simple house sketches) to create your visual board, a bit like you would do in a Mind Map (which could also be used as board). As long as you are clear on what each symbol or group of images mean, you can create a visual board any way you want. And if you are very abstract, you could even do a sigil, where you unite different letters or simple symbols into one. Let’s say you draw the female and male symbols inside a heart to symbolize harmony between different or opposing factors or a money sign inside the peace sing, to symbolise inner and outer prosperity.
Final Ideas
I think that by now you may have noticed some more elements of visualization. Besides a peaceful frame of mind, a good visualisation will involve as many senses as possible, hence the questions of "what do you hear; how does it smell; what's the texture." It should be as realistic and detailed as you can manage. And it should evoke emotions, preferable strong ones: happiness, joy, excitement, rush, a sense of triumph. It's also good to have a "trigger" that will bring the essence of the visualisation fast to mind, like the tag line in our last exercise, or more often than not, an affirmation. As I mentioned earlier, the general consensus is that you usually visualise the outcome and not the process of a goal. This, however, can be split into several visualisations for the different stages of a goal.
It is good practise to keep the main goal more or less open-ended (that's why you focus on the feelings of the end-result), and to really put our work and attention on the different stages. That is, place most of the effort in the process and have the main goal as guidance. The reason for this is that you don't have control over all the variables of a situation and the final outcome may not be exact to what you visualise. However, if you see the stages as "the things I can do" you can really focus your creativity and power, and find that sense of purpose and meaning we all are looking for.
Let's say that your general goal is to be rich. You see yourself as a rich person, enjoy a luxurious life and feeling at the top of the world. Now you divide that goal into different stages: to get rich I first do this and that. You then create visualisations that support this first stage, like we did in exercise six. In the material world, you take the actions necessaries to achieve this stage. And once achieved, you go to stage two. As the process unfolds, it may turn out that you reach your goal not by selling cars, but by buying-to-rent properties, to give an example. Because you have focused more in the process than in the outcome, most likely you won't be terribly disappointed that don't owe 20 dealerships, because, you still get the essence of what you wanted: the rich, luxury life.
For all the reasons stated above, is important that your visualisations put you in the driver seat: if in them people react favourably towards you, let it be for a skill and quality that you have or can develop. Visualisations can only change you and your view of the world. Then again, once the change is achieved, the way people deal with you will also change, most likely to what you want. The breaking of goals into stages is also important because it allows you to create more realistic visualisations -which in turn means than the nagging critic we all have inside will have less ammunitions to attack our good spirits and positivity.
Visualisation in one of the many spiritual tools you can use to become an active co-creator in your life. Use in conjunction with others, such as clearing, affirmations, coaching, goal setting and so forth, you can align yourself to both your inner and outer strengths, skills and gifts to live a full, purpose-driven, successful and fulfilling existence. To learn more, please check Journeying Soul's website and see how our services can bring inspiration, clarification and celebration to your life. If you would like this report in PDF form, please contact me at
http://almainterspirit.sgv2.com/contact and I'll be happy to send it to you.
Love and light,
Karem
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