Visualisation

"Visualisation is daydreaming with a purpose" - Bo Bennett

Visualisation is a form of meditation that guides you to imagine yourself in a specific environment or situation, to allow a mental image of, for example, worries being cast away. Despite the name ‘visual’-isation, this does not need to be creating a visual picture in the mind, it can also be getting the visceral sense of the situation, imagining your feelings or hearing sounds of a particular place to achieve the same result. The aim is to provoke the imagination, which can be very helpful as a way to step out of an overthinking or anxious mind.

Below are some examples of commonly used visualisation techniques.

Imagine you are standing at the edge of a lake you like to visit. Along the banks are lots of little pebbles, and you notice they have words on. "Sadness", "worry", "fear", "guilt" and so on. One by one, you pick them up, feeling their rough and jagged edges and their heavy weight. You decide to throw each one into the lake, watching as they create a splash and ripples which extend to a wide circle, before the surface returns to being smooth and calm.

You can adapt this to include any words on the pebbles which feel pertinent to you and your current situation. The idea is that you are casting away thoughts or feelings that are weighing you down. It helps you to see that these things are separate from you, and that you can choose to leave them behind (throw them in the lake!).

Pebbles by a lake

Leaves on a stream

It's a nice autumn day and you are walking by a stream. You realise your path is blocked by a huge piles of leaves which have fallen from the trees above. You decide that to move forward and continue on your path, you'll need to clear the way. You take the leaves and bit by bit, throw them into the stream and watch them gradually float away. Now you have a clearer path and can walk through much more easily.

This visualisation is a metaphor. The leaves blocking your path represent thoughts, feelings or situations which are preventing you from doing something you want to or should do. By choosing to unblock the path and watching the leaves float aaway down the stream, you are detaching yourself from all those things holding you back and allowing them to float away, in order to clear the path ahead.

Clouds in the sky

Picture, or get a sense of, sitting on a bench in your favourite park. As you sit there, you find that your mind is remembering some sad events that happened recently, and then you start worrying about further bad things that could happen in the future. With these thoughts and emotions, you notice dark storm clouds start to roll over ahead. They cover the sun and the blue sky, and you can no longer feel the warmth of the sun on your skin. But before long, you notice they have already passed by. Smaller, white, fluffy clouds are moving over instead. Each time a new thought comes into your head, a new cloud appears, and you watch it pass across the sky. Sometimes they block the sun and make everything dark, but you know they will always pass and the sun and blue sky are always there above them, ready to come out again.

This visualisation also emphasises that your thoughts and feelings are not permanent, and are not part of you. They come and go, and sometimes will feel very overwhelming (covering the sun), but they will pass.

Notes about visualisations

Visualisations can be very flexible, because you are creating the image or feeling entirely in your own mind. While following guided visualisations is often useful when starting out and learning the technique, once you pick it up you can use these techniques yourself anytime, anywhere, and adapt them to suit you. For example, if you are listening along to a guided meditation which asks you to imagine you are standing next to a lake, you may choose to imagine you are there alone, or with a loved one, or strangers who are also walking in the area, it is up to you, it's your mind.

Guided visualisation meditations are often at least 5 minutes long, sometimes 20 or 30 minutes, or even longer in some class settings. However since many techniques create images or feelings of thoughts or worries passing you by, these small snippets can be used in daily life whenever you are feeling anxious or overwhelmed. For example, let's say you are trying to prepare an important report for work, but when you open up your laptop it feels incredibly overwhelming - "where do I start? how am I going to manage this? Maybe I should have started this earlier. Why did I leave it until now? I bet X would have done a better job with this. What was that website Y recommended? Did I boil the kettle for my tea? Is the washing machine done yet? Eugh I need to get on with this report. I'm so useless at this...." In this situation, taking 20 minutes to do a guided visualisation is probably not going to be suitable for you as you are supposed to be working. However, since you've learned some techniques to help you visualise your thoughts and worries as separate to you, you can quickly take a breath and imagine all those swirling thoughts are simply leaves blocking your path that you can throw into the flowing stream and watch float away. That could take all of 30 seconds!

Try some guided visualisations

Don't be put off by the name 'visualisation' if you are someone who cannot picture things visually in your mind. As mentioned above, these guided meditations are about getting a sense or feeling of you being in that particular situation or environment. For you this could be evoking sounds or feelings associated with throwing stones into a lake, for example.