Visualisation, Affirmations, and Meditation
Visualisation, Affirmations, and Meditation – By Derek Mair
Our Self Concept, how we think, feel, see and evaluate ourselves is made up of three distinct elements:
Our Ideal-Self: The person we would truly like to be if we only believed we could be that person… This is fundamentally our true self, so simply act as if.
Our Self-Image: How we see ourselves in a multitude of situations and events
Our Self-Esteem: How much you like yourself; how we feel about ourselves.
Learning to be self-aware is key to identifying and raising your self-concept, which is intrinsically linked to confidence. One of the best ways to do this is to become aware of your emotional guidance system... ‘How you feel’. This can be a powerful portal to become aware of what you are thinking and therefore to your self-talk; what you are saying to yourself about yourself at that particular moment. When you become aware of your self-talk you can then start to ask yourself better questions. Perhaps you could ask yourself, “what would my ideal-self do or be doing right now, or how would my idea-self handle this situation”?
By definition therefore you need to get clarity of your ideal-self by learning tools that will tap into this person and use those same tools to raise your Self-Image and Self-Esteem:
Visualisation
Imaging a road system that could create new roads to join onto exiting roads almost instantaneously, that could quickly transform B roads into motorways. The mind is such a system, it is a living map of roads that allows vehicles of energy to travel along them.
Just as on a map we associate with the right roads to get us to our desired destination, so does our mind, except it can interconnect with any other road or build newer better roads to handle the right volume of traffic, and get us there faster. Just as we associate the Highway Code road signs with our interpretation of what they mean to us, so our mind associates pictures, or smells, or sounds, or feelings to what we are consciously thinking about.
In fact over the past 20 years Neuroscience has demonstrated that humans see pictures on the screen of the mind when thoughts are being processed. For example if a person is looking for their car in the car park… Is it the word CAR that pops up on the screen of the persons mind or a visual image? Subconsciously the person is accessing a memory from their mind that was instilled while they was first learning what a “car” is. Then an image of their current car popped up. The person didn’t always know it was called a car, and they only know it is a car now because of the association with the picture in their memory.
This provides us with a glimpse, pardon the pun, as to why visualisation is so important to help you achieve any goal. Visualise an outcome you want over and over, and you will build ‘cells of recognition’ in your memory bank, just like you did with a car or other learned objects when you were younger. This serves us in the following two ways.
First: you become consciously and acutely aware of everything that can help you achieve the visualised outcome that you desire; such as the road signs you pass (i.e. opportunities) the traffic jams you can by-pass (i.e. limiting beliefs, fears or other obstacles). You quickly scan over anything that is not in tune with that image. When you continuously focus on an image in your mind, your whole body is involved, because the energy in every cell of your body resonates with the energy in your minds road system.
Second: you impress an idea into the subconscious part of you, it eventually becomes ‘fixed’ and you automatically attract and move towards that which you desire. The reason athletes practice visualisation is because they want to condition their mind in such a way that the body automatically behaves the way they want it to without effort. It is the only way to become ‘unconsciously competent’. The same is true for highly successful people. If they visualise the success they want over and over again, eventually their bodies will automatically do whatever it must to make the image a physical reality. In other words the outside world becomes a mirror image of the internal subconscious world.
The key to visualisation: some people struggle with visualisation until you ask them if they have ever imagined something. Visualisation is simply using your imagination by engaging all five senses, or as many as you can, which means you are free to add sound, smells, tastes, touches to the project image in your mind’s eye. It may better be described as ‘emotionalisation’ …When you imagine things you must feel the ‘feeling’ of the wish, event or scenario fulfilled; this is the key.
Affirmations
Developing a positive mind-set is one of the most powerful life strategies there is. By using powerful positive thinking techniques, visualisations and positive affirmations, it is possible to achieve, with affirmative actions, whatever you want. Professionals and business people can use these techniques to develop personal power or gain a competitive edge. At a personal level it will transform your life, your health and renew the joy and passion for life. Imagine waking up each morning, bursting with excitement, energy and joy for the new day. Affirmations are so powerful that they create a chemical change inside our minds and when coupled with visualisation can truly begin to manifest your desires… and your Ideal-Self.
The fact is you already know this, for example remember (picture, hear, feel) a time when you had been driving for some distance feeling a bit drained because of the amount of traffic or road works and one of your favourite song came on the radio. How did that song change your state?
The key to affirmations: by doing affirmations you put yourself into a better ‘feeling’ place. In effect it puts you into a higher frequency vibration of positive energy from where you can manifest better expectations and your desires.
Meditation
Mediation connects us to source energy. It has a rebalancing effect on our system by increasing serotonin levels that produce a general sense of well-being. At source we are all ultimately conditioned by our belief system, our empowering or disempowering beliefs influence one of our two main decision making filters within our minds, the other being our core values, which are intrinsically linked to the concept of our ideal self. Meditation creates a platform for Visualisation and Affirmations to better CONSCIUOSLY help us re-affirm our empowering beliefs, and can help us to ask better questions of our disempowering beliefs when associated to re-educating ourselves ‘on us’ through reading books or attending personal development seminars, etc.
The Key to Meditation: the most important thing to understand about Meditation, when done properly is that it suspends our beliefs (all of them, empowering and disempowering) and allows us to tap directly into our source (SUBCONSCIOUS) to plant the seeds of better beliefs, which we can then cultivate and grow through Visualisations and Affirmations.
In context to our road system analogy, Meditation is like a Sat-Nav system for your mind. It is a method of cutting out all the other routes so that you focus only the route that will get you to where you want to go, and lay the foundations to build new energy motorways. It clears away all blockages to new roads (such as all the crap you have been accumulating in your mind, e.g. worry and stress, etc.).
In Combination
When you combine all three techniques; mediation supported by visualising (with feeling) and affirmations, they compound (multiply) the powerful effect each has individually on our internal Endocrine system. They increase the levels of neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin. In our analogy you can liken our Endocrine system to the logistics of transporting essential human needs to shops through our road systems. Internally it is the logistics of delivering boi-chemicals to our body’s cells:
Serotonin – This hormone positively affects emotions and thoughts. It is a neurotransmitter that has a calming effect on the brain and body functions, producing a general sense of well-being. The ‘happy hormone
Dopamine – This neurotransmitter helps regulate mood, attention, learning and sleep and is vital in the body’s control of movement. It is also believed to release endorphins, chemicals that allow us to feel pleasure. The ‘feel good hormone.
Oxytocin – This has been dubbed the “hugging hormone,” as it produces feelings of calm and contentment. The initial feeling of well-being from a massage is produced by the release of oxytocin from the posterior pituitary. Oxytocin imparts a feeling of being ‘unstressed’, loved and loving.
Meditation also decreases the levels of less desirable chemicals like cortisol creating a platform for real change to begin in the mind, which can be cultivated through visualisation and affirmations.
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When you couple mediation with holistic massage it causes an increase in these neurotransmitters. In a study on massage therapy by the Touch Research Institute at the University Of Miami School Of Medicine, serotonin levels in the test subjects increased by 28 percent, dopamine by 31 percent.
