In the early 20th century an Australian woman from the bush, Elizabeth Kenny, known as Sister Kenny, formulated a physical therapy treatment that enabled thousands of people around the world to make full recovery from the polio virus. Her method included visualization. She taught her patients to visualize lifting the weights and resisting pressures as they actually did this with their debilitated limbs.
Sports performance studies show that merely visualizing an exercise regimen can achieve half the results of actual physical performance of the exercise. This is now well established sports performance theory.
A few years ago I attended a workshop where we were taught how to manifest our desires. This workshop was not concerned with things spiritual or metaphysical. The speaker was an ex-professional football player with no obvious interest in spirituality. Instead, his was an entirely left brain process. He got us to formulate a declaration and told us to repeat that declaration every day for a year. He assured us we would see the results we sought within the year.
I formulated a mantra based on the ideal weight I would like to be. I got the outfit that I wanted to fit back into and hung it on my closet door to remind me to repeat my mantra each day. Within a year I wore that outfit to a friend’s wedding. It was an effortless and uncomplicated process. In addition to the mantra and my visualization practice, all I remember that changed in my daily life was that I lost the desire for certain foods.
If we can accept that we create our experience with our thoughts, then visualization is a practice that assists us to restrict our thoughts to those we wish to manifest. This is important because there are an infinite number of possibilities in any situation and the path to mastery involves being able to consciously and actively manifest the conditions of our life.
The range of possibilities can be seen to be like a swathe of cloth. There are only a certain number of possibilities with just a piece of cloth. However, once we have a pattern, once we have a picture of what we want to create, we are able to cut that cloth according to the pattern. Once we have the pattern, and there are limitless patters we can choose from, we then have the ready materials to construct our desire. Without it we just have an amorphous and nebulous bundle of potentials that we have very little hope of harnessing because we lack focus. The pattern creates attention and then, the other crucial element of manifestation, intention, is possible.
Once we begin the visualization process it is important not to keep looking back at the current state of affairs. These only reflect all the thoughts, beliefs and intentions we have had up to this point. To create a new set of circumstances by changing our thoughts and beliefs necessitates the understanding that the current circumstances are irrelevant to the process. Continual examination, perhaps to assess whether change is occurring, keeps us locked into the very circumstances we wish to change. Our whole attention has to be on what we wish to manifest.
