Finally: I Understand How to Visualize!
Within manifestation, there are plenty of things that can influence future outcomes. Visualization in particular is a driving force of momentum when it comes to manifesting your desires! So let’s talk about how to visualize.
The first step in learning how to visualize is to identify what it even means to do it.
So here’s “what it means” to Visualize:
Well, “Visualization” is essentially daydreaming for the purpose of showing your subconscious mind what it is that you desire.
The subconscious mind is the part of us that contains our unconscious programming, and it’s also the part of us that works and communicates directly with the Universe on our behalf. If you can convince your subconscious mind that you are a successful person in your desired field, it will give you signals in your daily life that will lead you towards more successful outcomes.
The subconscious doesn’t understand language the way that we do with our conscious minds. Rather —we can communicate with the subconscious through vibration, alone. Luckily, imagination and daydreaming serve as mechanisms for us to do that!! Imagination is a vibration that we are holding out! Visualization can absolutely include language in forms of affirmations and imagined conversations! Just keep in mind that it’s the vibration that you perceive or project as you’re using language that actually adds power to your visualization practice —not the words you say.
The subconscious communicates back to us not through language, but through synchronicities, signs, and intuition.
It helps immensely to practice it right before or as you fall asleep or right when you wake up in the morning, as your brain is hanging out in alpha waves at those times, and those waves help to open up the gates of communication to your subconscious mind.
“The number one reason most people don’t get what they want is that they don’t know what they want.”
You could think of visualization as “a memory of the future”. The more vivid and detailed the image, the more effective the visualization is believed to be. We’ll discuss more tips to help make visualizations effective, too! Let’s get into it!
Alright, Give Us the Tips and Techniques!
Number 1:
Get in Touch with Your Senses!
“Man either goes forward to imagination or remains imprisoned in his senses. To go forward to imagination is to forgive. Forgiveness is the life of the imagination. The art of living is the art of forgiving.”
When you believe in the “reality” that you sense around you so absolutely, you can accidentally create very little room for any different or new reality to come about.
For example: If you have a goal, like to get a specific car or to start a business, but you are super focused on how to get the money to fund your projects or down payments, you’ll get so focused on “how to get X amount of money for this” that you won’t let it flow into your reality by any means except for those that make perfect sense to you. Which could be restricting a LOT of things from coming into your experience. When you focus on the means, you restrict the “how”, or the way that you get the things you desire, to only those means!
So, we really have to turn away from the “reality” that we experience with our senses, and train our senses to anticipate a new reality, but without needing to know exactly how the new reality will come about! Within the context of manifestation, visualization refers to the practice of imagining specific sensory experiences that might take place upon the fulfillment of your desired goal. So, it’s daydreaming about what it would feel like to have your desires fulfilled, but really involving the senses so that your body will feel safe upon meeting this experience in your physical reality!
How to Increase the Effectiveness of Your Senses:
Sensory experience is far from “one size fits all”. If 100 people gather to witness one event, it will result in 100 different perceptual experiences of the event. —That’s because everyone associates infinitely unique combinations of feelings, sensations, smells, sounds, flavors, memories, and emotions with every situation.
Tuning into your unique sensory experiences at any given moment is going to amplify the power of your visualization exponentially! Here are some examples of what that means:
About 40% of people tend to process the world with an emphasis on their physical body sensations, or Kinesthetic senses. Kinesthetic learners typically absorb information better through doing a task versus having it described or watching it be done. Hands-on learning styles benefit these people.
If you believe that you process the world primarily through your Kinesthetic awareness, your visualization will be more effective if you imagine physical sensations, like the warm, humid heat in the air around you carrying the scent of fried foods from a nearby restaurant, to help you visualize a vacation at a tropical beach resort. Or the feeling of the cushioned seats supporting your body in your new car, and your hands firmly resting on the wheel as you drive it cleanly around a familiar turn on your normal route, to help your visualization of a new car.
If you know that you associate and imagine the world with more Visual emphasis on your experiences, you can commit more of your energy to using actual imagery, like pictures and videos, and imagining visual content before bed.
If you know that you tend more towards an Auditory emphasis on how you experience the world, you might find that guided meditations, affirmations, or just using playing music could enhance your dedicated visualization time!
Number 2:
“Losers visualize the penalties of failure. Winners visualize the rewards of success. ”
The Visualizer’s best friend: Vision Boards
Let’s get one of the most common techniques out of the way: most everybody has seen a vision board, and many of us have already made one at some point during our lives. It’s basically just a big collage with images of things that would make you feel the way that you’re looking to feel!
How to Increase the Effectiveness of Your Board:
If vision boards are a technique that you already tend towards, check your local art supply store (or the art supply section of your favorite store) for cork boards and pushpins, and pick up your favorite size for your vision board! That way, you can switch out the images much easier —without needing to re-make an entire board every time your images manifest into your reality!
It’s useful to change the images out as they manifest because wanting something that you have can communicate to your subconscious that you are actually lacking that thing (and it will manifest that lack dutifully into your reality)! In order to continue having the thing, try taking the images off your board and looking with appreciation towards the things that you’ve manifested into your life! Then replace the images when you find new ones that you like.
Place your vision board at about a 20 degree angle above your eye-height. For some reason, this angle of the eyes puts the brain into an alpha wave state. As mentioned above, alpha brain waves help you communicate more directly with the subconscious at will! So take advantage of that! Put the vision board in a place you’ll look at every day. Repetition is invaluable in reality creation.
Number 3:
Assume the Feeling of Your Wish Fulfilled!
“Everything that everyone wants is because they believe that they will feel better in the having of it.”
Emotion combined with visualization is an infinitely powerful energy force in terms of influencing future circumstances. If you want to put magnetic energy and attractive forces into the visualization, you can do so by adding emotions to your imagined experiences!!
Emotion Wheel, to help identify emotions | Source: The Junto Institute
Neville Goddard, a new thought author and expert manifestation teacher, wrote and said over and over again throughout his teachings that if you only assume the feeling of your wish fulfilled, you can bring the fulfillment into being.
Many manifestation teachers will validate this concept using other words. Abraham Hicks teaches that “How you feel in any moment of time is the indicator of your point of attraction.” Joe Dispenza has said the time it takes your assumption to become fact – your desire to be fulfilled – is directly proportionate with the naturalness of your feeling of already being what you want to be – of already having what you desire!
The key is to identify the emotions that you would feel were you to actually have the things that you’re visualizing! Write them down! You can use resources like the emotion wheel provided here to help label the positive emotions that you want to practice in your visualizations! Then, do everything you can to feel these feelings as often as possible in order to teach your subconscious what its goal feels like.
Number 4:
Repetition, repetition, repetition (say it again)!
“A belief is just a thought you keep thinking.”
Repetition is relevant to visualization because it literally changes your mindset and beliefs! Just as physical practice strengthens the body, the repeated mental rehearsal of an event strengthens the neural pathways associated with the desired outcome. In fact, some studies suggest that the brain doesn't distinguish well between a vivid mental experience and an actual physical experience! So, practicing something in your mind can be almost as valuable as practicing it in real life.
As psychologists say, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” The more often you think a thought, the more significantly it is wired into your brain. When you’re practicing a new thought or habit, you’ll want to practice it as often as possible.
How to Increase the Effectiveness of Repetition:
That’s simple! Apply it to everything! Repeatedly practice your new feelings to yourself about your visualizations every time you see contrary evidence in your reality. Specifically, practice the feelings of your wish fulfilled when you see evidence contrary to your desires and goals in your reality.
Number 5:
Seal the deal! WRITE IT DOWN
“People get to where they want to go because they know where they want to go. Most people don’t know where they want to go... The most important question you can ever ask yourself is ‘What do I really want?’...The reason most people have such chaotic lives is because they’re living in chaos in their head, and as soon as you get clear, it clears up.”
Why to Write:
Of course, you can do this next exercise in your imagination! But remember: writing things down seems to have an amplifying effect on the magnetism of the content, and it makes it easier to practice and repeat in your imagination later. If you are physically unable to write: try recording yourself an audio message, or asking a friend or robot to transcribe it for you.
This one’s a sort of “scripting” exercise. For those who haven’t heard of it: “Scripting” in the context of manifestation is essentially like writing a story or scenario as if the things you want to manifest have already happened or are currently happening.
Here’s what to do: You’re going to find a notebook or paper where you can write extensively about the things you desire.
Make a list of things, qualities, and situations that you would like to have for yourself in the future. Write as many specific things as you can come up with. You can’t plan a trip if you don’t know where you’re going! Get specific about the things that you want so your subconscious will know what you want from it!
Now, using your list… Write yourself a letter from the future, with the following parameters:
From whichever point of view seems like the most fun to you:
Write from your future self!
Write from the point of view of someone close to you!
Write as a neutral observer describing/listing the things you’ve accomplished and different things about you!
Write about the desires, intentions, and goals that you have now as if you have already reached them. Tell your reader about all of the ways that you’re enjoying having reached your goals —tell about how much you like the things you have now!
However!! This exercise is most effective when you do not talk about exactly how you got the things or reached your goals!!
How to Increase the Effectiveness of Your Letter:
Your subconscious does not perceive differences in time, so it’s very important that you talk about your goals as if you already have reached them or are currently doing so. Telling yourself that something will happen in the future” will register to your subconscious as “that thing is in ‘the future’, an imaginary place that is not now.” So talking about things as if they are in the future keeps those things perpetually out of your reality.
Really, write down your goals, wishes, desires in the present tense, as if you already have them!! For example, you could say things like, “I drive my [new car] to work everyday” or “I’ve loved how it feels to sleep in my new apartment.”
Stay Specific! Your subconscious is like a travel agent: you have to affirm where you want to go in order for anyone to even be able to help you get there (including your subconscious)!
Number 6:
Mind Movies
Visualization is often seen as creating a movie in your mind. The more vivid and detailed the image, the more effective the visualization is believed to be. A fun technique to make your visualization as vivid as possible is to create an actual, digital Mind Movie. Joe Dispenza (neuroscientist, author, lecturer, teacher) developed a version of this visualization technique that he teaches in workshops and wrote about in his book Becoming Supernatural. You can look into his resources if you want to hear about some of the neuroscience behind this technique.
A mind movie is essentially a dynamic visualization technique where you create a short film with clips and images of your desired reality or outcomes, pairing it with a specific piece of music that you don’t hear elsewhere. This will help you associate the music with the images, and after watching it enough times, you might be able to just listen to the song to inspire the happy feelings that you get when you watch the mind-movie.
Okay, so here’s the homework:
Use a website like Canva or adobe express to create your own mind movie! You’ll want to make an account if you don’t have one. Start a movie project. You can upload video clips from your computer if you have some saved, but these platforms also provide many clips that you can pull from! You can edit the clips to be any length. Optionally: You could make each clip 1 second long, so the subconscious doesn’t have time to resist anything about the image before moving onto the next one.
Thanks for Reading!
You will probably find that after you start these visualization exercises, your decisions —however meaningless they seem at first— might start to lead you to coincidental stepping stones on the path to your goals.
You might have more energy in your free time to spend on the things that you love. You might find synchronicities popping up in your life, like thinking about a specific friend who you haven’t seen in a while before running into them in public. You’ll most likely see opportunities pop up that “you wouldn’t have had” if not for seeming coincidences helping them line up.
Leave comments below about your own experiences, with questions about the techniques from this article, or with questions or comments about topics you’d like to see on this blog in the future!
