Visualization is an easy, quick way to shift our attention and help us bring feelings, senses, ideas, and spirit closer together.

When you visualize a clean flowing river, a brilliant galaxy, a snowy mountain peak, or the face of a loved one, you are using your senses, your experience of the person or place, and your heart. The images soothe your brain, relax your body, and create deeper connection in the moment.

We can visualize in our cars, in the middle of the night, and in the middle of work to remind ourselves of what's really important.

Here's an example. Say you are worrying about a friend, but you know that worrying does no good. Instead, you purposely imagine that friend surrounded with light-the light of your heart, the light of the divine, the light of the moon-or whatever image comes easily. This shifts your energy from worry to open-heartedness. It sends revitalizing energy to the friend, like a prayer. It creates spacious possibilities for connection to occur. And your intent has a larger impact on the world.

Every time we shift our attention to light or love or beauty, we get better at it. We contribute to the positive-thought index in the world. We feel good and it rubs off on those around us.

When a baby cries, we move to soothe it, hold it, and connect our bodies and hearts. Being conscious of how we are soothing ourselves as adults is a challenge. Learning what works to bring us into a more conscious, harmonious state of being is a challenge. Cultural trance is powerful; numbing addictions are rampant. What we can do to shift these powerful patterns is to try one visualization at a time, just like that baby takes one step at a time.

What Is Visualization?

Visualization is a tool for allowing unfamiliar perceptions and images into our awareness. For example, the first time you visualize clean water (below), you might feel you are "making it up." Yet, with practice, the visualization can become more and more solid, familiar, and connecting. For many people, unexpected images and sensations-a belly full of starlight, or a felt sense of an animal or otherworldly being next to you-can arise during visualization. All you need to do is accept it, and enjoy it. The energy of the unknown is just energy.

Visualization means to see something in your mind's eye, experience it in your body, and sense it in your field. Invoking and using hearing, smell, taste, touch, and movement helps us create vivid images. Weaving imagination and experience into visualization helps concretize it. Seeing from the heart, as shamans do, helps build connection to what we are visualizing.

Visualizing is a way of training awareness, concentration, focus, and intent. Once we are able to feel, experience, sense, and see something in our mind's eye and in our hearts, we can return to it over and over. With practice, it becomes another way to step between the worlds and feed our joy body.

In most non-Western cultures, what is being visualized is not a symbol: it is alive, pulsating energy in the larger field, activating the visualizer's felt interconnection with all beings. This is true of mandalas, Buddhist thankas, Shipibo designs on pottery and clothing, Q'ero weavings, Navajo sand paintings, Andean despachos, Cro-Magnon cave paintings, and African, Guatemalan, and Balinese dance masks, for example. Learning from these cultures, we can help our visualizations come alive.

Dreaming a Hologram of Clean Water

A mental hologram I like visualizes clear, clean, and pure water running everywhere on the earth. Notice, as you experiment with this practice, how it affects your own consciousness and perception. Be aware, too, that many others around the world are dreaming in this way; your contribution weaves into the larger field of intent for clean, pure water everywhere.

Visualize the groundwater under your feet running clear, clean, and pure. See it filling nearby streams. See the streams running into rivers, also clear, clean, and pure. If you notice debris or toxins in the river, return to your vision of clear, clean, and pure.

Watch the water flow freely. Watch the clear, clean, and pure water spread to nearby lakes, bays, and oceans. See these bodies of water clear, clean, and pure. Keep going: ocean to ocean, continent to continent, until you see all the arteries of the earth's body sparkling clear, clean, and pure.

Visualizing Holograms of Possible Perfection

Visualization uses imagination, dreaming, and intent to create a mental picture, or hologram. Once created, a hologram can be understood to exist in a parallel reality. Parallel realities are not in competition or conflict with where we are, they simply exist alongside the reality we notice (or think we live in). In every situation, there are choices, and all of them actually play out, manifest in different dimensions.

As we dream, grow, feed, and energize a hologram, our vision begins to affect this "real" world.  

"Dreaming" is a tradition over 30,000 years old. The central belief of the Australian Aborigines is that everything in our world begins in the Dreamtime. Each living thing begins and is incubated in the Dreamtime. After it has become fully developed in the Dreamtime, it then concretizes and becomes a part of our three-dimensional reality. Alberto Villoldo expresses it this way:

"When you access any part of the dream, the great matrix of energy, you can change reality and alter the entire dream...dreaming the world into being through the very act of witnessing it. Scientists believe that we are only able to do this in the very small, subatomic world. Shamans understand that we also dream the larger world that we experience with our senses. Like the Aborigines, they know that all of creation arises from, and returns to, this dreamtime."

Visualizing Ourselves as Sanctuaries for the Divine

Susann Taylor Shier recently shared wonderful decrees that we can use to practice visualization:

From the beloved universe:

"You are a sanctuary for the Divine.  

Your life is a breathing pulsation of creation.  

Your happiness brings joy to all existence.  

Your peace provides a home for your world. 

As you abide as love your love emanates a prosperous universe within you here and now."

From you to all creation: 

"I am a sanctuary for the divine. 

My life is a breathing pulsation of creation. 

My happiness brings joy to all existence. 

I abide as love and that love emanates a prosperous universe within here and now."

May it be so! 

Meg Beeler/Earth Caretakers                                                                        Copyright @2014