The practice of visualisation goes hand in hand with the Law of Attraction. Visualisation is the practice of creating pictures in your mind seeing yourself in the situations that you desire. This can be anything from for example being in a successful primary relationship, being slimmer or having a different job or home. And most importantly it can and should be seeing yourself as a happy person. Visualisation is a very powerful practice and is now widely used, for the very good reason that it works, for instance by professional sports people.
It works because when you are visualising how you want life to be then you have taken the first step to thinking and behaving in the very way that will attract the life that you want. Put another way you treat yourself as if you already are what you would like to become. But you have to be sincere and honest about it because that is how attraction works. If you are underneath still at the mercy of negative energy and negative emotion then that is the type of life you will attract and for example visualising being happily married in a new home is not going to work. The law of attraction cannot be fooled or tricked! The good news is that deciding what you want to happen, with a positive and genuine heart, is enough to begin making it happen. Now that both your conscious and subconscious minds know what you desire, they can unite and arrange it for you to achieve your objectives.
Let me illustrate visualisation with the example of losing weight remembering that it works in exactly the same for everything. You need to visualise yourself having lost the weight that you want to lose. You need to see yourself as that person who has already lost the weight and the reason for this is that you are generating the thoughts and feelings of having it now. This is a very important principle of the Law Of Attraction. You attract the thing you want by assuming the thoughts and feelings already to allow the thing you want to come to you. Put another way, once you think like that you act like that. If on the other hand you still have issues of self confidence and self esteem and do not love yourself because of your current weight then clearly all you will do is attract the same and you will continue to over eat for comfort.
This is such an important concept and it applies to everything so let me run through it again still using this example of losing weight. You have to feel good about yourself and love yourself and that includes your body and physical appearance. If you feel bad about your body, or even more extreme you actually hate your body, then you will continue attracting more ‘feeling bad’ about your body. This will manifest itself in lack of willpower to gain control of your diet due to negative feelings such as, ‘it is all hopeless, I am not worth it, I will always be overweight, eating to combat depression, eating is the only pleasure I get’, and so on. You have to feel that you are already beautiful, you have to already love yourself and your body, and feel good about all your other qualities such as your personality and character, your eyes and smile, and then you will attract the good things you want regarding your weight. Funnily enough long before I understood these things many years ago back in the 1980s I bought an audio cassette tape aimed at weight reduction by hypnosis. But the hypnotist was saying exactly the same things that you cannot lose weight if you do not love yourself, and he used a lovely expression that ‘you’ve got to love the weight off!’
I would like to make a quick point about wealth. Contrary to what some self enlightenment books on this subject say, and in particular, The Secret, I don’t believe you can attract great wealth into your life. This is because firstly and self evidently, there is not enough money for everyone to be a millionaire. But more importantly because wishing for great wealth and affluence is grasping and therefore negative emotion and so you will merely attract more of feeling that you do not have enough and jealousy that others have more. Instead you should visualise being content with your wealth, however modest it is. Visualise feeling that you have everything you need, that you have enough, or even that your cup is overflowing and you have an abundance of what you really need and what matters in life. What happens then is very interesting. Because you are no longer seen as, and no longer behave as, a jealous and envious person who feels ungrateful, you become the opposite- a positive person whom other people like and want to help and look after. You then find that more and more people are generous towards you, and help you, and your luck changes with respect to money. It sounds unbelievable but try it and you will find that it is true.
You need to understand the role of goals as this is something about which there is widespread misunderstanding. Setting goals to drive direction, effort and timeframe has a place but they have their limitations as it is not the ultimate achievement of a goal that will make you happy. I read many self help books where goal setting is seen as the be-all and end-all of self improvement. They even dangerously assert that happiness is the successful achievement of goals. But this is absolutely not true and I will explain why.
People often achieve a goal but they then find that they do not feel any different and are still not happy and they cannot understand why. For example they had believed that once they had lost those 30 pounds or got that promotion that from then onwards they would be happy. Instead they feel exactly the same as before they started and they cannot believe it.
But being spiritual is about understanding that there is no ‘end of the rainbow’ where happiness is to be found. Spiritual behaviour is about realising that life is a miraculous, wondrous, and magical privilege and that you were always already at the end of the rainbow but you just could not see it. There is only the present moment and so the role of goals is the positive attitude, positive energy and emotion that working towards a goal generates moment by moment. The outcome or result of a goal is not about the achievement of the goal but the cumulative effect of the positive thinking along the way, moment by moment. Returning to the example of losing weight this could translate into the feeling that your weight is no longer out of control, and that instead you are now in control of it and your feelings about it. In fact it probably does not matter if you achieve most goals; what endures and shapes you is the cumulative positive emotion and positive energy that is engendered by feeling that you are now in control of your thoughts and behaviours.
So in summary having goals is fine but you need the wisdom to really understand that it is the change in your thoughts- cultivating loving yourself , self esteem, being in control of your thoughts- that is engendered by pursuing a goal- which is the source of happiness. Happiness is not a place that you arrive when you have achieved a goal, it is what you experience on the way.