16 min read

The Power of Visualization

By Lola Iyya 5 October 16 min read

consciousness, reality, vision-1719992.jpg

Take a few moments and ponder on the following for a few seconds if you would pls:- Were you one of those kids who always seemed to be getting scolded in class for not paying attention?

Did it always seem that no matter how hard you tried, you just couldn't help find yourself drifting off to another place, dreaming or even streaming and enjoying pictures in your mind about anything you pleased?

Did you know that up until about the age of five, children are masters of the most powerful ability that we as humans have? This ability is called Imagination. With it, we can become time-travellers, famous explorers, circumnavigators of the globe; mothers, fathers, artists, novelists, athletes: that is, until we're "taught" that if we want to succeed in life, we can't waste time on daydreaming!

Why is it that just when a child starts to discover who he or she is and what he or she most loves to do, the act of exploring their inner world on his or her own terms is discouraged and even punished until the adventures cease…"or else."

If the most powerful ability human beings possess is imagination, then why is it so quickly suppressed in favour of conformity to a system that may or more likely may not see their personal strengths as a very high priority?

Too often in life, we take the easy road. With only a vague idea about where we're going, we allow circumstances to drive us. Sometimes we can wind up going to some place we never intended to go to. We pass through various landscapes on this ride -- some perhaps a bit challenging or confusing and some remarkably beautiful. Sound familiar? It did to me!

So now, we’re touching upon the nature of happiness in life.

Most of the adults who enter the working world eventually wind up in jobs that don't fulfil them or bring out the best that they have inside of them.

Most of the time, job success is less about us and instead about the expectations of others for us to fit into a predefined role, whether or not it resonates with who we really are deep down. (the perfect 'cookie cutter' employee!) If success is defined as sustained gradual achievements toward a goal that's finally reached, then somehow most of us don't qualify as "successful." Only 5% of retired adults fit this definition of success. It's an unfortunate fact that the work the rest of us wind up doing is very different from what the children we used to be would have imagined themselves doing.

We don’t know how powerful we really are.

Humans experience life as a continuum that starts out from a perspective of powerlessness. Unable to shelter, bathe, dress or feed ourselves, we just try whatever works to get our needs met. As we begin to learn, grow, evolve and expand our reach into the world around us, we begin to discover our innate autonomy. Just try to argue with a two-year-old saying "no." Such spurts of independent thinking usually don't last very long. We may discover that our reach exceeds our grasp. Lots of institutional structures wait to reinforce a helpless mindset and teach conformity. To some degree this can be a good thing, and in most cases it also sets the stage for the child to shine within a set of rules and expectations from outside. Many of us lose parts of ourselves at that point and get stuck there, wondering years or decades later why we can't seem to get to where we want to be in our lives.

Although we all have somehow kept our own individual dreams in some special place within our souls, throughout life unknowingly some of us have also managed to swallow and replicate the limitations that we learned so early in our lives from others, so without even realizing that we were doing it, we have visualized ourselves not being all that we can be.

Visualization is about power, and power is tied to belief. If a belief becomes strong enough and endures long enough, it eventually becomes accepted as fact.
So it's very important to pay attention to what we say to ourselves and to understand that the words and images we circulate within may or may not always be our own.

The Famous “Door Study”

How does visualization work to improve your life? The famous "Door" study by Simon, Levins and their colleagues demonstrates something called "change blindness." In the experiment, they sent an actor out onto a street with a map and had him ask passers-by for directions to someplace on the map. Halfway through the conversation, two construction workers (hired for the experiment) carried a door between the first actor and the passer-by as they talked. As the door passed between them, behind it a new actor stepped in to replace the first actor, who passed him the map. Once the door had gone by, the conversation continued. Only half of the passers-by who were asked for directions even noticed that they weren't even talking to the same person anymore. Fascinating! This happened because the passers-by's focus was broken and they were distracted from seeing the big picture during the switch, and the information their brains selected on was out of sequence. Change blindness is a common phenomenon that occurs to all of us, depending upon whether or not we maintain our focus at any given moment.

How many times throughout your day do you find yourself being interrupted? Have you even been expected to multi-task in your job or at home? How often do you guess that change blindness could have occurred in one of those scenarios?

With all the information that constantly comes at us, we can quickly go into overload. Some of that information has to be suppressed in order to leave sufficient resources for the object of our attention to be properly processed by the brain. So the thalamus filters out some of the information that it deems less important in the bigger picture. Hence, some of the information drops out and we may miss things as they go on around us.

Visualization and Mindfulness

When you practice mindfulness, which is what visualization promotes, your attention is able to capture and hold the bigger picture and its details. Visualization itself is learned by imagining in great detail - in fact, in as much detail as you can bring in - and this trains your neurological system to process and hold information in greater amounts and for longer periods of time.

Visualization is actually a form of meditation. When you reduce or eliminate surrounding sensory input and hold a focus in your mind, you increase your capacity to expand that focus out into other areas of your life. This is partly because this kind of practice literally changes the frequency of your brainwaves to a more creative and focused state. It is also because once you start to focus on an idea, with repetition that idea becomes a "milepost" for your brain as it looks for things to focus on and gather more detailed information on.

The longer you practice visualizing an image, the more closely your life will begin to resonate with the quality of that image. The thalamus will already be conditioned to hold onto certain types of information while it filters out the rest as discussed above.

People who practice visualization notice that as they continue the practice, synchronicities begin to occur. One example is being in the right place at the right time, like finding yourself among the right people to help with something you need at that time. Sound familiar?

Good things start to happen as you focus your brainpower on your life as you would like it to be. It makes it easier to do what you need to do for that to happen. Visualizing that life works alongside of the other things you have to do in order to achieve that life. It prepares your neurological system to react appropriately to succeed.

When the right things come into your life, it becomes even more possible for your brain to select on the right information that aligns with the imagery you've been visualizing. We all need each other: at least, we do in most cases. In a few cases, there have been people who preferred to live as hermits. They had visions of their own that led them to follow their own paths to what most people would call an extreme.
Often we hear of writers or artists or other creatives who go and live in a cabin somewhere away from civilization. It can be hard to grow without taking risks, and for most of us that would be taking a risk.

The urge to create is in all of us because we are more than physical.

But while some of us dabble and beat about the bush about whether to or not, it can be a little embarrassing and even disconcerting to admit that we're a little fearful about the idea of proactively taking on change, and of cultivating our own options without the impetus from external directives: or even failing to achieve our chosen outcome. Creatives know the importance of being able to sort through the number of sensory* distractions because attention is a valuable commodity when you are trying to create.

They know the importance of being self-direct in order to create. But before they create, they need space in their minds to visualize and allow their visions to develop the momentum to carry themselves into the realm of everyday reality.

Since we're all creative to our own degree, we all do this in our own way. Not necessarily by exiling ourselves to the backwoods for a year, but by allowing ourselves to be pulled toward something that means something to us.

It all comes out of the visualizations you're creating without realising it.

The brain thinks in images; hence, we dream, we imagine, we doodle…as if some part of us knows that its freedom will empower us to find wholeness, wellness and happiness.
We all encode information. It's what the brain does when it sorts through sensory input gleaned throughout each day and night. Once encoded, the information can then be stored in long-term memory.

When you consistently cultivate an "attitude of gratitude," every day is your best life! Your vision captures the goodness in your environment and presents it to you, asking you to see it. The more you practice using this kind of fine-tuning, the more deeply you align with that goodness, whether it's because you're training your mind to ferret out opportunities that will bring happiness, or because you are increasingly orienting your habits around that vision, or even because you're creating a magnetic charge in your field that attracts those things to you: Yes, Yes, and Yes. All three and probably many more!!!

Well, then, what if you were to consciously visualize?

Learning to consciously visualize takes some practice, but it does get easier and work faster when you practice it consistently. Your ability to visualize makes all the difference in how much say you have in your own direction in life. The thoughts and images in your head have direction and charge. Imagine for a moment: when you look out and see beautiful grass and trees and know that you were going for a walk that day, wouldn't you look forward to that walk (hopefully without the tech!) with greater joy? Going a little further with that image, wouldn't that walk be more likely to create an ease, enthusiasm and atmosphere that stays with you and brings more calm and focus into the rest of the day -- making you more receptive and selective of things that let you stay in that mindset?

You're probably going to feel and even be more productive because you visualized something you wanted and did it.

Where attention goes, energy flows! Life is Energy!

It all started with an idea. That idea made you receptive to the beauty of the outdoors and motivated you to create an event/experience around it. It's that simple. Do that enough times in your day, week or life, and you will have experienced the results of empowerment through visualization. It can have far-reaching effects. Where attention goes, energy flows. Life is energy.

Visualization is attention being focused upon a scenario or atmosphere. The essence of the thing you are after, in the case above, the physical manifestation is health on many levels…probably also inspiration that will propel you forward to the next thing on your plate, with greater energy and focus.Focusing on the now can mean two things:

1) neglecting to pay great enough attention to the possibilities for growth and enhanced self-knowledge, and being in the eternal now - in the moment where the power is through which to affect change in your life.
2) Focusing on where you are now can help you get a fix on where things are at now in your life, but don't stay fixed on where you are now.

If you are looking for change, you're absolutely correct to hone in on where you now find yourself. We all have to start from somewhere. Any time you make changes, there needs to be an anchor, a point of origin, an acknowledgment of where you are. The idea is to ground yourself and move from that point. The paradox in this anchoring is that you do it in order to let go. It's important to remember that there are lots of shiny objects to the side of your path.

Don't underestimate the part that anchoring yourself in the "now" plays in priming your trajectory. We learn by associating. A lot of the ability to see is dependent upon having the associations (mileposts) that keep you on your path and headed toward your intended destination.

Even going back to ancient Greece and perhaps even before, there was an awareness of something called an ideal template.

What makes you happy? If you didn't have to consider time, or the earning power of something you love to do, maybe of something you love but never have time for because you have to earn a living, what would it be?

If time is an issue, why then are you trading all of your time to make someone else rich, while you keep on trading the next day, the next week, month, year, maybe even before you know it, your whole working lifespan has gone with you trying to earn enough income to buy the time you could be enjoying now? To be able to put aside some to make your retirement a little more comfortable?

Visualization can help you to live your best life now! It really is a balancing act. Working hard now may let you save more earnings, but only up to a certain point. All those savings can reach a point of diminishing returns if they leave you with diminished vitality when your life could be at its richest. Visualisation can significantly shorten the time it takes to do this.

So, Maybe you think it's not for You!

A lot of people think it's too late for them to change course. They've saved and worked hard to earn a retirement. Unlike their parents, however, they are in a different economy where security is no longer guaranteed.

The pension, annuity, and gold watch have become the exception for all but the high-ranking. Now, with more and more things going online, it's a completely different set of factors that are coming into play.

With a few basic computer and software skills, anyone can now earn money online without having to leave home. For people approaching retirement, it offers an opportunity to rethink their own retirement scenarios. For those who already have some retirement funds saved, the new online work environment could provide long-term passive income to supplement what they already have. And for those who come to retirement with less than what they need, it can provide the sustenance they didn't think they were going to have going forward.

You think you can't deliver the goods? You don't know enough about this or that…or maybe there are too many others who already know and practice this or that…or maybe somebody has told you that you don't have what it takes.

Happiness isn't a goal. It's the cumulative result of the things we tell ourselves every day and even every moment. Even if you think that nobody listens to you or takes you seriously, you seriously listen to yourself. The brain doesn't know the difference! (Chuckle!)

Finally, Visualise Whatever makes you feel ALIVE and ON-PURPOSE

Sit comfortably in a quiet place with your spine straight and close your eyes. Come up into it through your senses. Try to feel as if you were actually in your vision now. See the sights, smell the smells, hear the sounds, feel the sensations, taste the flavours. Perhaps you're stretched out in the warm sand on the beach on a sunny day, surrounded by the sounds of gulls and rhythms of the waves, and the smells of the ocean, the taste of the fresh salty air and the silken touch of a slight breeze.

It only holds power for you if it's genuinely yours because it calls to you or for someone else, maybe it entails the smell of fresh-cut wood in a workshop where crafting things while the wood teaches you about possibilities, patience and care in service of creating something useful or beautiful that starts out as an idea and ends up beautifying someone's living or dining room or creating extra room in their living space by giving them a place to hang their coats. The possibilities are as endless and unique as we are. That uniqueness is what speaks to you through visualization.

Visualization touches upon eternal truths that can be accessed by finding those things that speak to you about lasting values. Things like love, happiness, beauty, sharing, whatever makes you feel alive and on-purpose.