Ask people what images come to their mind when they hear the word “happiness”. The answers you will receive will differ substantially. Words remains empty, until ‘imaginations’ fill them with life.
When we were kids we all had very vivid imaginations, we experienced the most fantastic stories, some of them being quite ‘irrational’, and when we told our parents about it, they reacted by saying that ‘these things don’t exist’ The imagination, the image we had experienced was taken away from us by intellectual grown-ups, whose logical mind dismissed our images and stories as nonsense.
Little by little, this has made us ‘sober’. The little child filled with imagination turned into a rational grown-up.
Following is a simple exercise which helps us to develop our ability to see images:
** Place a flower you especially enjoy looking at on the table. Look at it carefully. Then close your eyes.
** Now you will see the flower with your inner eye. Maybe only for a second, maybe two, this is not important. The moment the flower disappears from your inner eye, open your eyes for a short moment, then immediately close them again, letting in the image of the flower again and then imagining the image again.
** Repeat this step again and again, for about five minutes
** Next take another motif, like an apple, a vase, or anything else. Look at your motif, this time only shortly, close you eyes, imagine and visualize your motif, see it with your inner eyes.
Practice this daily for about a week (or as long as it takes until you feel fully confident with it), and you will notice a difference in your imaginative abilities as well as in your perception of things. Then continue to do this exercise once a week.
Visualizing means creating images, and it is extremely important because our subconscious receives more information from one image than from a thousand words. If you have a certain goal in mind, it is important to create clear images of this goal. These images must be different from any images of your present situation, otherwise your subconscious will see them as being part of your present life and not as something new that you wish to achieve.
Following is an exercise you can do to train your mind to focus on a specific goal you want to attain without having the images of your present situation interfere.
You will need to be confident in the previous exercise to do this one:
** While washing the dishes or cleaning the house, imagine that you are lying on the beach.
** While standing with your eyes open, lifting your right leg and your left arm, imagine that, with closed eyes you are lifting your left leg and your right arm
** While dancing a walse, imagine you are dancing a tango.
You can use your imagination to create more examples to this exercise, which you should also do daily in the beginning, until you feel confident with it.
You Are A Genius
Let us take a closer look at our way of thinking:
There is the one hemisphere of our brain that thinks in terms of words and logical relationships (the left hemisphere). Now we do not want to belittle the importance of logic, but the problem for most of us is that we rely too much or even solely on our logic and on input from the right hemisphere of our brain. Our logic mind believes it is always right.
Our right brain, on the other hand is not as half as judgmental as the left brain, and has a very different approach. It thinks in images and is our visual memory storage. Here you have a place of vast and beautiful possibilities, because the visual memory knows no boundaries.
Our visual memory is also the source of our of creativity, and this is true also for people who live mostly in a world of abstraction and logic. Research has shown that even mathematicians do not think in numbers and words, but in images and movements, which are translated into formulas and numbers and a later stage.
We should therefore rely on our images and visual impressions, while at the same time granting our logical mind its due space.
In order to awaken the genius within you, it is important to synchronize the left and the right hemispheres of your brain.
The following exercise will help you to do this:
** Sit down quietly and close your eyes
** Listen to a tape you have previously recorded. In the recording, slowly mention various words and situations, and while listening to the tape, imagine these words separately in either the left or the right hemisphere of your brain.
For example: on the left a flower, on the right a tree, on the left a baby, on the right an old lady. It is important to visualize the images simultaneously, not one after the other.
** Listen to the tape again and switch the imagines, for example if you associated the flower with the left hemisphere before, image it on the right side this time.
Each of us has his or her preferred brain hemisphere that is used most of time, simply out of habit. In our Western world, this is mostly the left brain hemisphere. Therefore it is all the more important to develop and train the right brain, and to open up to creativity.
Let us now continue with our visualization exercises.
If you feel confident in your ability to see images, it is time for the next step:
** Bring up in your mind a wish or dream you have which has not yet come true in your life
** Imagine yourself explaining your wish to someone who does not know anything about in IMAGES ONLY (similar to a silent movie)
** You are now your own director and actor, shooting this film. Try not to make it too long – two to four descriptive images or scenes are sufficient.
** It is helpful to write down the ‘stage directions’, so to speak, and read them often.
** Replay your film in your mind as often as possible.
The results will not fail to show.
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