Try This Beginner Visualization

You may have heard of visualization as a tool to bring your manifestations to life. And while visualization — the simple act of imagining an idealized self, future, or situation — is a popular exercise on its own, adding visualizations to a regular meditation practice can have powerful effects on wellbeing. How? “The brain does not distinguish between what we imagine and real reality,” says meditation teacher Tatum Barnes. “And we can use this to our advantage for manifesting our best selves and [finding] deeper states of relaxation.”

A guided visualization meditation can be especially helpful for people who have a hard time clearing their minds or tend to fall asleep during more-passive meditations. Focusing on an imaginary journey keeps us focused and alert. When we practice visualization meditations, we guide the mind and breath toward a specific image for a desired result, such as a healthier mindset or happier feelings or other embodiment of a goal.

Try this course: Discover the Power of Visualization to learn this type of meditation.

How Visualization Supercharges Your Intentions 

Guided visualization meditations ask the practitioner to activate their imaginations and follow along with guided imagery to strengthen focus — particularly on specific goals. Sports coaches and psychologists use visualization meditations to improve their athletes’ focus and determination. In fact, elite athletes have been using visualization practices to improve their outcomes for decades: tennis champion Billie Jean King famously used it to gain edge in the 1960s. According to the New York Times, “the practice of mentally simulating competition has become increasingly sophisticated, essential and elaborate, spilling over into realms like imagining the content of news conferences or the view from the bus window on the way to the downhill.” Multiple studies have demonstrated that practicing visualizations improves motor skills and an athlete’s capacity to learn new skills. By adding visualizations to your meditations, you can strengthen your own ability to achieve your goals while unlocking creativity, reducing stress, and improving focus.  

Visualize This 

Visualization meditations are not just for athletic performance and goal-setting. You can use them to improve relationships, happiness, and reduce stress. Once you’re familiar with dropping into a visualization, you can lean on the practice in tough times: “Use visualization as a tool to calm your body in stressful situations, to release tension while experiencing something painful, or to overcome the mind and body’s natural response when something frightening might be happening,” says Barnes. Remember, just like your regular meditation practice, visualization isn’t a one-and-done exercise. It’s a muscle you strengthen over time, says Tyagi Shurjo, whose class, Manifest Your Dream Life, offers visualization tips and techniques. “The more you practice, the more powerful it becomes,” he says. You can strengthen your visualization muscles by looking at an object in your house and then trying to recreate it in detail in your mind, says Shurjo. This helps you build the mental muscle of creating and recreating realistic visuals. 

Connect to Your Successful Self through Visualization

Meditation teacher Yael Shy suffered debilitating anxiety before she found meditation. “Rather than visualizing things going right, I spent hours visualizing all the things that could go wrong,” she says. But she realized that when you visualize success instead of failure, you “unlock the joy and possibility of good things happening in your body so that you can experience them in the real world.” No one makes 100 percent of the shots they take, she says, but by visualizing success, we set ourselves up for positive experiences, regardless of outcome.

Try Yael’s 10-minute meditation class Visualize Success.