visualization, affirmation, intention

Creative visualisation & affirmation are wonderful techniques, allowing you to use the power of your mind to create positive change in your life.   They can help you to achieve your goals, become the person you want to be, and live the life you long for.   They can help you bring out your best in business meetings, sports events, exams, job interviews, your relationships, your health, and all other aspects of your life.

Before you can create any situation in your life, you need to first see it clearly, and you need to believe – even the tiniest bit – that it is possible.
Your current circumstances are a direct result of the mental images and thoughts you’ve held in the past, and your future circumstances will develop out of your present mental images, thoughts, beliefs and expectations.
What you ‘see’ really is what you get.
What you believe is what you create.

Intention, Affirmation and Visualisation

Intention is the driving force behind all our conscious change and forward movement.   We create and shape our lives according to our intention.   We intend to do this, or that, and then we do it.
Creative Visualisation is a directed imagination exercise where you see, in detail, the life circumstances that you would like to create for yourself.   It is not mere daydreaming.   It needs to be backed up by a sincere desire.
Visualisation serves to create a focus for your intent.   The more clearly you can see a situation, the more power you have to affect it.
Affirmation involves the verbal expression of intention.   Our words are very powerful.   They are an expression of our inner and outer states, as well as a force for creating these states.   Verbal expression of vague thoughts and ideas gives them definition, clarity and focus, thus giving our intention greater clarity and focus.

By regularly seeing and affirming the details that you want to create in your life, you’re taking charge instead of just drifting along in whatever direction life pushes you.
Visualisation & affirmation are processes of re-programming & reinforcement.   You mentally create the circumstances which you want to have in reality.   If you see, in accurate detail, what you desire, and you reinforce it regularly, it will begin to manifest itself in your life.
You can visualise and affirm anywhere, anytime, (while sitting comfortably at home, while on your lunch-break at work, while traveling on the train, etc) because it’s mind work.   Just close your eyes, whenever you have a moment, and remind yourself where it is you are going.

At first you may feel unnerved when circumstances begin to materialise almost exactly as you visualised them.   But that is only a sample of the breath-taking power we all possess deep within our unconscious minds.   When you witness, first hand, the incredible ability of your subconscious to shape images into reality, you’ll realise the potential for visualisation to create change in all aspects of your life.

Visualisation and affirmation have countless applications.
When recovering from illness, see and affirm yourself as a picture of perfect health.
If you want to improve your communication skills, see yourself speaking clearly and articulately.
If you want to spice up your relationship, see yourself in exciting and intimate settings with your partner.
As part of their training routines, many athletes and sports people use creative visualisation to see themselves performing at peak level and achieving their best.
It’s also very useful for reducing stress, if you simply visualise yourself in relaxing situations.   For example, picture yourself sitting beside a mountain stream on a perfect day, seeing butterflies leaping through the cool air and landing on flowers, hearing the gentle birdsongs from above, delighting in the solitude of this natural sanctuary, breathing in the cool fresh air, feeling free from the pressures and anxiety of life.

‘auto pilot’… the role of the subconscious, ‘old brain’

The subconscious mind does not judge.   It doesn’t differentiate between memories of the past, or visions of the future, or your present experience.   It doesn’t discern between reality and imagination.   It accepts all images, thoughts and sensory experiences as if they are real.   If the experience is being played across the brain, whether it is really happening in the present, or not, the subconscious mind accepts it at face value and initiates programs and physical responses according to the information it is ‘experiencing’.
Techniques such as affirmation & creative visualisation take advantage of this quality and use it to reprogram the directives by which the subconscious mind is operating.   In using them, you’re telling it “this is where we are going now”, and the brain responds to those directives by subtly influencing physical, mental or emotional decisions and functions in order to create the reality you have programmed it to create.

Physically, the subconscious mind corresponds to the hind brain, our ‘old brain’.   This is our ‘auto-pilot’, the area that responds with instincts, fear & other strong emotions, and is basically concerned with our ultimate survival.   It is the area that controls & co-ordinates all the body's daily functions and the maintenance of homeostasis.   It is constantly receiving information about what's going on in, and around, the body and then sending out instructions to various cells, tissues & organs – as well as to the forebrain (cerebrum), the conscious, intellectual, analytical part of our mind – to adjust functions and make particular choices in an effort to maintain a healthy overall balance, and the body's continuing survival.

This ‘auto pilot’ is continuously making automatic decisions for you, according to the parameters of the programs it is running.   Unless you are 100% grounded and conscious in the present moment, every moment, you are not consciously controlling your directions, whether they be bodily functions or life choices.   Most of the time, we make some conscious decisions and choices, but allow the rest of our life to be directed automatically by our subconscious brain.
You may be surprised to find that you have a lot of programs within your subconscious patterning whose directives contradict the life that you’re trying to create for yourself.   This means that, in those moments when you’re fully conscious, you will move in your chosen direction, but the moment you allow your ‘auto pilot’ to take over for a while, it starts to drag you back in the opposite direction, according to it’s programming.   You take ‘one step forward and two steps back’.   No wonder we feel so exhausted and frustrated sometimes, trying to make our lives better!

A common example of this is the lottery trap.   You want the big win.   You deserve the big win.   So why is it that you buy ticket after ticket and never get the big win?   Why do other people, who already have more money than they need, get the big win?   Why do some people win it twice, while you can’t even get a small prize?
If you buy ticket after ticket and never win, you will probably find that you have a program (or several) running in your subconscious mind, which define the limits of what you believe you deserve to have, and that $ figure will be very low.   Because of this program, even if someone walked up to you and gave you a cheque for a million dollars, you would undoubtedly find some way to accidentally lose it or squander it or give it away.   Your pre-programmed belief system will not allow you to have it or build on it.
The way to get around this problem is to change the ‘auto pilot’ program so that it reflects your conscious desires today.   Then you have all that extra power and creative force working with you, and not against you.   When this happens, you’ll find your life unfolding in ways even better that you could have hoped for, with almost no effort!

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Unconscious Programming

Whether you are aware of it or not, you are constantly sending messages, to that simple part of your brain, which affect the automatic decisions it makes about your maintenance and your basic reactive patterns.
For example, someone who repeatedly makes a negative comment about themselves, (often as a joke), like "Every time I pick up a hammer, I end up with a bruised thumb!" is actually programming their 'old brain' to obey this command.   So, when they do try to use a hammer, they will hit their thumb far more times than the average person.
The same applies when we repeatedly hear a message from external sources that have a strong influence on us.   We will subconsciously program our mind & body to follow these instructions in order to gain acceptance.   The following examples are greatly simplified as there are many factors, running from the moment of birth (and before) to our current age, which influence the choices we make, but they will give you an idea...

If a child is having difficulty learning to read, and her parent often tells her that she is very good at reading, and responds with love and pleasure at even the smallest achievement in this area, the child will come to believe that she is good at it, and her reading ability will inevitably improve regardless of her IQ.   However, if the parent responds with abuse rather than praise & encouragement - "what's wrong with you?", "you are stupid", "you can't even put a sentence together" - the child will inevitably fail because she has constantly been given the message that her parent expects her to fail.   In order to gain acceptance by her parent, on whom she is fully dependent, she will subconsciously aim to meet that parent's expectations.

Imagine that a wife repeatedly tells her husband that he is useless and can't do anything right, and the husband only experiences acceptance, or a pleasant outcome, when he defers to her decisions about the way things should be done.   This man will inevitably start to experience doubts about his own abilities, his confidence will slowly whither away and he will effectively become 'useless' and stop trying to do things, or take any initiatives himself, regardless of whether other people occasionally comment that he is talented & wise.   They are not the one's in whom he invests his life, and his energy, and they are not the one's with whom he needs to have peace.

Then there are the cultural and ancestral beliefs and programs that we inherit as children, regardless of whether they are relevant to our lives or not.   We take them on in the process of shaping our identity and needing to be accepted by our ‘clan’ or ‘tribe’.   Usually, most of these have no relevance to our generation and adult life.   They are ‘hand-me-down’ beliefs that we allow to have a major influence on our lives.
For example, the idea that life is a struggle, or that lessons can only be learnt through difficulty, or that there isn’t enough money to go around, or that a woman’s place is in the kitchen and a man’s place is in the shed, or that children should be seen and not heard, and so on.
In these examples, we may want to blame parents, partners or ‘the system’ for not accepting and loving us just for who we are, or for not allowing us to evolve freely.   However, the responsibility actually lies with us.   We make the choice (for whatever reasons) to become what we think others want or expect us to be, and we program our subconscious mind to live out this choice.   In the same way, we can make positive choices and program ourselves to live out these new choices.
We can be strong, we can be smart, we can be beautiful, we can be courageous, we can succeed, we can be heroes…   We can be whatever we choose to be, and do whatever we choose to do, and have whatever we choose to have.   We have the ultimate choice over our experiences.   The power and control actually is in our hands, but we often give it up to others and then try to blame them for messing up our lives, or for holding us back from our dreams.
This is the key.   If we take power back, we also have to take full responsibility, and this can be quite a scary business because we then have no-one else to blame, for the choices we make, but ourselves.   However, it is also incredibly liberating because it allows us to be the beautiful, lovable creatures that we truly are and allows us to live out our dreams in whatever ways we choose.

At every moment, regardless of what we did 5 minutes ago or 5 years ago, we have the choice to make the next moment whatever we want it to be.

The notion that we are responsible for our beliefs and perceptions applies equally to making changes in the physical body, such as healing disease or creating a new body image or developing a physical skill.   With repeated visualization & affirmation we can re-program our 'auto pilot' to respond in the ways we want it to.   We can make physical changes in the body, such as increasing the flow of healthy blood to an area that is in the process of healing, to help speed up the healing process; or we can make changes in our lives by re-programming our limited beliefs about what we deserve or are capable of.

Creating Conscious Affirmations and Visualisations

Affirmations are always said in the present tense, as if they are already real now, and supported with ‘positive expectation’.
This is an attitude that accepts the affirmation as real, as already true, and even extends to feeling the positive feelings you associate with that reality.
Even when you’re visualising, try to maintain this positive expectation.   The desired outcome is just around the corner!   It’s only a matter of time!   How great does it feel to be in this new situation you’re creating?   Let those feelings stay with you, as they are the strong magnets which will attract this circumstance into your life.

Experiencing a feeling of gratitude and appreciation for this new circumstance, even before you’ve achieved it, also adds to the power of the attraction.
Usually we wait until we get something before we say thanks.   But the power lies in saying thanks first, because you know you’ve got it, even though it hasn’t yet physically manifested in your life.   This attitude sees the physical manifestation as a ‘done deal’ and removes all doubts of whether it is, or isn’t, possible.
Your beliefs totally define your life.   If you believe something is impossible, it will be impossible for you, but not for someone else who doesn’t share your beliefs.   So, you must first believe your desire is possible, even just a bit, and then the becoming is inevitable.

Avoid using negative terms and images.   You need to remove the negative imagery completely from the programming.
For example, you would say "I now have the courage to express my opinions" rather than saying "I am not afraid to express my opinions".

The more vivid and realistic and detailed your visualisation is, the more effective it will be.   Smells, sounds, and physical sensations can be included, to add to the sense of realism.   The positive feelings associated with the desired circumstance must be included.   You need to feel the reality of it.
How good does it feel standing up for yourself?   How good does it feel receiving that cheque for $100,000?   How good does it feel working in your perfect job?   How good does it feel travelling around the world?   How good does it feel having a partner who respects and accepts you unconditionally?

Feel the feelings associated with the picture, or the words.   These feelings are the magnets for attracting that situation into your life.

How great do you feel?

The more relaxed and receptive you are when you visualise, the more effective it will be.   Visualisation is just another form of medicine.   If you do it regularly, and reliably, you will get results.   Ten minutes 2 x day, would be an effective ‘dose’.   Then, whenever you think of it, see it again and affirm it again, as every little moment helps.

Make the visualisation practical and achievable.   Don’t bother seeing yourself leaping tall buildings in a single bound or catching bullets in your hand, like superman!   Ultimately, every conceivable circumstance is achievable but, due to our society’s programming and beliefs, there will undoubtedly be a very strong part of you that denies this possible reality.   It may take a lifetime (or two or three!), at 5 hours a day of visualisation, before you can shift this program enough to bring yourself into a ‘superman’ state.
Instead of putting a lot of time, effort and energy into trying to create a situation which you strongly believe is not possible, be realistic about what you are trying to achieve.   But, at the same time, don’t limit yourself to what you already know you can do now.   In relation to the area you wish to change, think of the best possible place you can imagine yourself being, and then push it a bit further into the zone of “I’m not quite sure if I can do that (or have that, or be that)”.   Create your goal, and your visualisation from this place.   Once you achieve that, then your next visualisation will take you even further, easily, into areas you couldn’t previously have imagined.
You cannot easily move from A to D, but you can very easily move from A to B to C to D.   You will still get to D, but you take one real step at a time.

Healing the Body

People commonly believe that we are victims to illness and have no power over what happens to our bodies. We get invaded by microbes, our tissues break down, fat layers build up, our hearts fail, our eyesight goes, our brain cells die, our blood pressure rises and falls, etc., and all this while we stand around helplessly wondering what’s happening ‘in there’.
You have an immense degree of control over your body and it’s functions. After all, body functions are co-ordinated by the mind, and you control the mind. So who’s in charge here?

Numerous studies into the ‘placebo effect’ have shown how the mind can affect major changes in the body, simply according to what it is programmed to believe.
In the next issue, I’ll be discussing this phenomenon, and how you can take more control over your health using visualisation, affirmation, and re-programming the ‘auto pilot’.

Have a Go

Your visualizations can be single images or epic movies.
It doesn't matter how you get your new intentions across to your ‘auto pilot’, as long as you do it repeatedly.   Longer, detailed visualizations, simply help you to bring in more details and make it even more real, as well as increasing the amount of time you spend focusing your intention.
The more time you spend holding the intention in your mind, and the more often you repeat the intention, the more successful you will be.

Remember that until your re-programming starts to affect more permanent pattern changes, it will naturally return back to its old habits when you're not consciously telling it what to do.   So the more time you spend on re-programming the old habits, the better.

Have a go at it.   This is the cheapest medicine you have, and it puts you back in control of your life.

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Copyright © Aquarian Blessings, Melbourne, Australia

The information given on this website is a guide only and is not intended to replace medical advice offered by your own doctor or complementary health practitioner. Aquarian Blessings accepts no responsibility for any choices or actions you may take based on your interpretation of the information provided on this site.

Unconscious Programming

Healing the Body

Have a Go

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