Creating Your Own Imagery
There are times where you find yourself lost in the absorption of a moment. You feel your eyes streaming with gratitude, your heart glowing as you try to comprehend an overwhelming pleasure of fulfillment. Your eyes gleam. Your ears are resonating a song so beautiful, yet so unrecognizably familiar. Before you have time to truly question what you are experiencing, the awareness drifts to the next part of your body until you're consumed, free with certainty of your presence in that very moment. You are exactly where you are meant to be. You're home.
By creating imagery such as the one written above, you are introducing a new way of healing to your body, mind, and heart. By challenging yourself with putting words to your most blissed out moment, you are pushing beyond your expectations of happiness and stimulating a new way of manifesting and creating the reality of your wildest dreams.
Writing and putting words to our emotions is not as intuitive as some may think it can be. Many people struggle trying to find the "right" words to describe the way they feel or the way the want to feel. Some people respond stronger to imagery through pictures, memories, textures, sounds, and colors. For example, as you rest in savasana, corpse pose, you may be triggered by the deep and purposeful healing sound of a wave playing over the speaker in the background. But for the person next to you, sound may do nothing but put them to sleep. Perhaps their hearts and minds are captured by their instructor's voice guiding their breath through the same rhythms of a wave. Direction may be their way of entering into a state of bliss. To expand on this concept, another person may find the sound of the waves to be healing, but not fully engaging. They may find the instructor's voice guiding a pranayama exercise soothing, but distracting. As they tune out sound, they may choose to engage the back of their minds with true imagery of a wave. Existing in sight of the mind through memory, experience, and visual sight, they may find their true inner healing by visualization of physical imagery.
How we find peace within is our greatest gifts brought to us by our inner selves. Creating imagery to guide us into this path of peace and healing is something we must cultivate through purpose, practice, passion, and engagement. It is a tool we can apply to our lives daily, ritually.
PUT IT TO PRACTICE...
Find a quiet spot where you can sit or lay down with a pencil and a notepad. Take a natural breath. Now, take a mindful breath.
Close your eyes and settle into your surroundings. Make any adjustments to your body that may help you relax, and engage in a little three-part body scan. Begin by becoming aware of your feet, your ankles, calves, knees, thighs, and hips. Inhale fully and pause to become aware of the temperatures, vibrations, weight, and alignment of the lower half of the body. Exhale fully, allowing those areas of the body to rest awakened. With your next inhale, draw awareness from the hips into your lower abdominals, ribcage, chest, shoulders, arms, and fingers. Pause, engage, reflect, and exhale. For the final part of the body scan, take a full inhale and feel the air stream into your nose, the back of the throat and down your neck. Pause the breath with strength and invigoration. With this new air, grow your awareness from the base of your neck through the jaw, checks, nose, ears, eyes, behind your head, and all the way through the crown of your head. This third part of the body is especially significant to our body scan, as this is where we hold the most activity both verbally, emotionally, and mentally.
Once you feel quiet in your mind, fluid in your breath, and settled in your body, ask yourself, 'What makes me happy? What makes me feel safe? What makes me feel love? What makes me feel alive?" With those questions resonating through your whole body, not just the mind, allow the answers to flow to your surface. Welcome words, sounds, textures, colors, memories, songs, actions, people, scents, temperatures, elements, and so on. As the answers to your questions stream into your being, smile from your heart and allow them to consume you with contentment and bliss. Sit or lay there for as long as you feel serves you. When you're ready to awaken your body, deepen the breath, wiggle the fingers and the toes, and slowly flutter the eyes open. Once you have reached awareness within the new presence and energy of your self, write it all down, draw a picture, or record your voice. Allow the answers of this exercise to practice permanence, so that they may offer imagery that you can turn to again and again to reground, refocus, revitalize, and repurpose.