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Shifting Your Energy Through Visualization - 2017-09-26 16:56:59.657047-04
“It’s not events that define us, it’s how we handle those events.”
How can we manage our responses to the crises and extreme weather events we are experiencing? How do we stay calm in the face of nuclear threat, ethnic cleansing, and refugees with nowhere to go?
We are all challenged to stay in balance. A mixture of overwhelm, fear, avoidance, rage, and compassion beset each of us every day. We are all challenged to keep visualizing a more beautiful world.
My mantra/personal reminder is:
“Where your attention goes, your energy flows.”
For example, if you become anxious, your whole energy body can seize up and become immobilized.
If you try to avoid all the bad news (is that even possible?) you build an energetic wall, cutting yourself off from everyone and everything.
If you manage to self-soothe and stay present, it’s a lot of work and your compassionate heart kicks in; you stay connected even in your grief.
Shifting Your Energy with Visualization
Visualization is an easy, quick way to shift your energy. By flowing your energy towards something positive, you can help bring your feelings, senses, ideas, and spirit closer together.
When you visualize a clean flowing river, a brilliant galaxy, a snowy mountain peak, or the face of a loved one, you are using your senses, your experience of the person or place, and your heart. The images soothe your brain, relax your body, and create deeper connection in the moment.
You can visualize in your car, in the middle of the night, and in the middle of work to remind yourself of what’s really important.
Here’s an example. Say you are worrying about a friend, but you know that worrying does no good. Instead, you purposely imagine that friend surrounded with light—the light of your heart, the light of the divine, the light of the moon—or whatever image comes easily. This shifts your energy from worry to open-heartedness. It sends revitalizing energy to the friend, like a prayer. It creates spacious possibilities for connection to occur. And your intent has a larger impact on the world.
Every time you shift your attention to light or love or beauty:
- You get better at it.
- You contribute to the positive-thought index in the world.
- You feel good and it rubs off on those around you.
When a baby cries, you move to soothe it, hold it, and connect your bodies and hearts. Being conscious of how you soothe yourself as an adult is a challenge. Learning what works to bring you into a more conscious, harmonious state of being is a challenge. Cultural trance is powerful; numbing addictions are rampant.
What you can do to shift these powerful patterns is to try one visualization at a time, just like that baby takes one step at a time.
What Is Visualization and How Can You Practice?
Visualization means to see something in your mind’s eye, experience it in your body, and sense it in your field.
Invoking and using hearing, smell, taste, touch, and movement helps you create vivid images. Weaving both imagination and experience into visualization helps concretize it. Seeing from the heart, as shamans do, helps build connection to what you are visualizing.
For example, when I visualize the high mountain peaks of the Andes, I remember sleeping on their slopes, trudging up their passes, feeling the clear freezing air, and seeing the vast beauty of the stars. I concretize my visualization by consciously bringing those physical, sensory experiences into my awareness.
Visualization is also a tool for allowing unfamiliar perceptions and images into your awareness.
For example, the first time you visualize clean water (see below), you might feel you are “making it up.” Yet, with practice, the visualization can become more and more solid, familiar, and connecting.
For many people, unexpected images and sensations—a belly full of starlight, or a felt sense of an animal or otherworldly being next to you—can arise during visualization. All you need to do is accept it, and enjoy it. The energy of the unknown is just energy.
Visualizing is a way of training your awareness, concentration, focus, and intent. I share many ways to use these tools in great depth in Weave the Heart of the Universe into Your Life: Aligning with Cosmic Energy.
Once you are able to feel, experience, sense, and see something in your mind’s eye and in your heart, you can return to it over and over. With practice, it becomes another way to step between the worlds and feed your joy body. It becomes a way to calm your nervous system reconnect with what is truly important. It becomes a way to create a more beautiful world.
In most non-Western, animist cultures, what is being visualized is not a symbol: it is alive, pulsating energy in the larger field, activating the visualizer’s felt interconnection with all beings.
This is true of mandalas, Buddhist thankas, Shipibo designs on pottery and clothing, Q’ero weavings, Navajo sand paintings, Andean despachos, Cro-Magnon cave paintings, and African, Guatemalan, and Balinese dance masks, for example. Learning from these cultures, we can help our visualizations come alive.
Dreaming a Hologram of Clean Water
A mental hologram I use visualizes clear, clean, and pure water running everywhere on the earth. Notice, as you experiment with this practice, how it affects your own consciousness and perception. Be aware, too, that many others around the world are dreaming in this way; your contribution weaves into the larger field of intent for clean, pure water everywhere.
Try this:
Visualize the groundwater under your feet running clear, clean, and pure. See it filling nearby streams. See the streams running into rivers, also clear, clean, and pure. If you notice debris or toxins in the river, don’t focus on them. Keep returning to your vision of clear, clean, and pure.
Watch the water flow freely. Watch the clear, clean, and pure water spread to nearby lakes, bays, and oceans. See these bodies of water clear, clean, and pure. Keep going: ocean to ocean, continent to continent, until you see all the arteries of the earth’s body sparkling clear, clean, and pure. Imagine what an amazing world that would be to live in!
Visualizing Holograms of Possible Perfection
Visualization uses imagination, dreaming, and intent to create a mental picture, or hologram. Once created, a hologram can be understood to exist in a parallel reality. Parallel realities are not in competition or conflict with where we are, they simply exist alongside the reality we notice (or think we live in). In every situation, there are choices, and all of them actually play out, manifest in different dimensions.
As we dream, grow, feed, and energize a hologram, our vision begins to affect this “real” world.
“Dreaming” is a tradition over 30,000 years old. The central belief of the Australian Aborigines is that everything in our world begins in the Dreamtime. Each living thing begins and is incubated in the Dreamtime. After it has become fully developed in the Dreamtime, it then concretizes and becomes a part of our three-dimensional reality. Alberto Villoldo expresses it this way:
"When you access any part of the dream, the great matrix of energy, you can change reality and alter the entire dream...
dreaming the world into being through the very act of witnessing it. Scientists believe that we are only able to do this in the very small, subatomic world. Shamans understand that we also dream the larger world that we experience with our senses. Like the Aborigines, they know that all of creation arises from, and returns to, this dreamtime."
Visualizing Yourself as a Sanctuary for the Divine
Here are some wonderful decrees from Susann Taylor Shier that you can use to practice visualization. Speak these words out loud to all of creation:
“I am a sanctuary for the divine.
My life is a breathing pulsation of creation.
My happiness brings joy to all existence.
I abide as love and that love emanates a prosperous universe within here and now.”
I would love to hear your experiences with visualization! Email me or add your experiences below.
Parts of this blog exerpted from Weave the Heart of the Universe into Your Life: Aligning with Cosmic Energy, Findhorn Press, 2017.
Meg Beeler—Author, Shamanic Guide, and Spiritual Mentor—helps you discover your essence and joyful connection with the universe through mentoring, training, healing, and community ceremony. A lifelong explorer of shamanic, animist, and meditative consciousness, Meg is the creator of Energy AlchemyTM and founder of Earth Caretakers. Her latest book is
Weave the Heart of the Universe into Your Life: Aligning with Cosmic Energy (Findhorn Press 2017). She lives on Sonoma Mountain in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.megbeeler.com
