by Anne Stone

Created on: March 15, 2009

Visualisation gives you the power to overcome the stresses of life that you feel you have no control over. Once mastered you can use it to enhance your life and health. The beauty of visualisation is that it is relatively easy to master, I taught it to my young son when he has problems sleeping.

There are many ways to achieve visualisation, some as simple as just closing your eyes and seeing in your mind what you want to achieve. I prefer to first maintain a state of deeper consciousness so that my mind truly accepts my visualisations. To do this is fairly simple and I will take you through it step-by-step.

First find somewhere quiet where you are unlikely to be disturbed. I find my favourite places are in the bath or in bed, but it doesn't really matter so long as you are comfortable. Then close your eyes and count slowly to ten while concentrating on your breathing. i.e. breathe in, count 1, breathe out, count 2.
Now imagine yourself at the top of a flight of stairs. Slowly imagine yourself walking down the stairs and count them backwards as you do from 10 to 1. When you get to one you should be at the bottom of the stairs.
You should now be at a deeper state of consciousness, you may only be aware of feeling more relaxed. If you do not feel relaxed then imagine another flight of stairs and go down again, counting from 10 to 1 again. At the bottom concentrate on your breathing, try to make it slow and relaxed.

Now it's time for the visualisations. I like to put mine into categories, for example, stress, pain, worry, wishing etc. Anything that you want to sort out in your life really. For each category I have a room. I imagine a door to each room and enter to begin my visualisation.

Here are a few examples;
If I have a pain then I will go to my medicine room. This door will say medicine room and my name. I will enter and sit at a table in a comfortable chair. On the table will be jars and bottles. I will choose which I want to take. If I take a jar I will empty out a tablet and swallow it. Then I will relax in the chair for a while before going out of the room again.

If I'm feeling stressed then I have a room with a huge comfy chair that I can relax in while I concentrate on my breathing, or think about colours. The colours in this room are all comforting to me and help me to relax.

Sometimes, I like to go outside. I have a door that leads into a lovely garden, I follow the garden path and at the end there is a lovely spa pool where I can relax and think of a solution to my current problem.

After my visualisation session I will concentrate on my breathing again for a while, or I might go back up the stairs counting from 1 to 10 if I need to be alert again.

My visualisations help me to sleep better, ease away aches and pains, come up with solutions to problems and help me to feel less stressed and more relaxed. I've also used them to help me achieve something in particular, like pass my driving test by easing my nerves and even lose weight. I also practised visualisation for pain relief during labour.

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