Visualization: 4 Mind Tricks to Change Your Life

Glen / 32 Comments / February 26th, 2009 / Subscribe via RSS

Have you ever read a book and the author gives you a simple exercise to do in order to grasp the concept they are talking about? It could be dropping a pen in order to understand ‘letting go’ or it could be ‘focused breathing’ to understand living in the moment. Often times these small exercises help things click in your mind.

To take that concept to a more advanced level, I thought I would look at some visualizations that show the power of our mind and how it affects our feelings, emotions and reactions. These ‘tricks’ really do have the potential to vastly improve areas of your life and also begin to grow your consciousness.

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‘Mind Tricks’

What I’m going to share isn’t supposed to be a crutch that you use regularly in daily life. The ideas shared here are to help you see how small and irrelevant your mind-made problems really are, and how fragile the mind can be. With these tricks, our negative emotions can completely disappear and a shift in awareness can come in after a matter of minutes.

That’s the main thing I want to share here: you are not your mind. The mind is a tool and these visualizations are using this tool to change your internal conflicts into internal peace and clarity. Often, we identify with problems we have created such as ‘I am stupid’, ‘I am fat’, ‘I am angry’ and so on.

“I’m shy” is a popular self-identification, but one that can be broken in a matter of minutes. When we identify with something we start to live by it, if you think of yourself as shy you start to avoid social situations and the never-ending cycle of being shy continues. Is a shy person still shy if in the tick of a clock they can go and stand on stage in front of 20,000 people and give a powerful speech?

These techniques should hopefully help you with living in the moment and I hope you enjoy trying them if nothing else.

4 Mind Tricks

The tricks that I’m going to share with you today are titled:

• Connected in a Web (Seeing ‘Oneness’ and Removing Doubts)
• Golden, Shimmering, Positive Light (Removing Negative Emotions)
• Colourful Balloon of Emotions (Removing Negative Emotions)
• Cinema Screen Reality (Taking Action on your Goals)

In brackets are the benefits that you are likely to experience when trying the technique. I advise that you pick a benefit you would most like to have and try that technique. That way, there’s more chance of these working because you are able to visualize the necessary components more effectively.

1) Connected in a Web

I’ve read a lot of books on spirituality and something that always comes up is the topic of ‘oneness’. How we are life, and how we are all connected to each other. I think if we could all see the world like this, it wouldn’t just be another illusion but create a massive amount of peace on the planet and end a lot of violence and suffering. On that positive note, I accidentally created my own visualization that has been working very well for me.

Firstly, this came about because myself, and I’m sure many of you included, often have problems with others that are on our mind. Whether it is caring what people think of you, worrying about how you treat others or still going over a past personal incident in our minds…it’s incessant. This one little trick has managed to bring instant peace to me and made negative thoughts regarding other people completely disappear.

Whenever you are in a public place, simply visualize everyone being connected to each other by some thin, neon green cord. As if we are all free moving but this cord is touching us at all times. Realise that we are all connected, we are all here together, none of us are different than the other and we’re all attached to this cord. Don’t just assume this won’t work, the next time you are away from your PC just try this little technique.

I’ve found it to instantly rid me of caring what others think, who would care when we are all one, we are all connected? Instead of thinking of people judging you, it’s more like they are judging a part of them so it holds much less value in your mind.

2) Golden, Shimmering Positive, Light

This visualization comes in two parts. First of all, sit down, close your eyes and completely relax. Now, focus on anything negative in your mind at this moment, something that has been bothering you or something you would like to change. Imagine that you can take all this negativity and create a ball in your hand with it. Clench one of your fists, seeing all the negative energy and emotions contained within.

Now, keeping the negative energy there, focus on positive moments in your life. Think about times when you did something brave, when people praised you, when you made yourself proud. Concentrate on this and get as many ideas and memories as you can; if you focus you will find there are lots. Now, turn all this positivity into a shimmering, golden liquid. Make it so bright that its colours are emitting around it, lighting up your environment.

Now, visualise yourself pouring all this positive, glowing, holy liquid into your hand and completely drowning the negative emotions that you contained within your grasp. The end result should be you awakening into a happier and more relaxed state.

3) Colourful Balloon of Emotions

Once again, sit back, relax and close your eyes. Focus on your breathing and notice yourself getting more and more relaxed as you sink into your chair. Bring into clarity some of the negative emotions you are holding inside yourself – anger at situations, things you hate about yourself, and things you would love to change.

For each negative emotion, give it a colour. If you are angry at what someone said or did to you then make it purple. If you wish you weighed less or were a different height, give that a colour as well, maybe blue. Assign colours to all the negative emotions inside you till there is a mass of colour and emotion; now visualise yourself putting all these colours into a transparent balloon. The balloon is full of air and all these colours are swirling around creating a magical effect. See this balloon as holding all the negativity inside of you, just moving around inside.

Next, take a pin and just *POP* the balloon. See all your negative emotions disappear. Open your eyes and you should be in a much calmer and happier state.

4) Cinema Screen Reality

This technique is used by a lot of hypnotherapists and a common method in NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming). I’ve already touched upon it in this post but it is very relevant here as well. For this to be effective, think of something in your life that you would like to achieve, something you want but are too afraid to do or something that you don’t think you have the ability to complete. See yourself on the screen of a movie theatre, completely zoom out of your own body so that you are sitting in the back row, watching a projection of yourself on the display.

Now you should have that vision in your mind of seeing yourself from a distance. See yourself on a movie screen as if you are acting something out. What you should see is that you are in control of this character; if you can visualize it then this ‘character’, this ‘you’ can do whatever you want it to. Once you’ve got this, re-imagine whatever it was you would like to improve at from earlier. Spend however long it takes to run your on-screen character (you) through the motions of whatever it is you want to do, in as much detail as possible. Take your time with this.

Seeing yourself do this should start to program into your mind that you can actually do it, it is possible. This technique should help give you the confidence and the drive to get out there and go for the things you want, they are possible.

Hopefully you’ve learned some helpful new techniques with this post and learned a little about how the mind is a tool, not something we are. Use this tool whenever necessary but don’t rely on it as a crutch to your success.

Do you have any visualizations you would like to share? Let me know and tell us how the ones above worked for you…