Visualization can be a very powerful therapeutic technique in a variety of ways.
1. Visualization is best done when the body and mind are relaxed and awareness rests in the present moment.
In this state of present moment awareness, the conscious analytical mind naturally quiets and opens to our deeper inner experience. It is the bringing of the deeper unconscious sensations, thoughts, and emotions into our conscious awareness that is the first essential step to healing.
2. Visualization allows us to revisit situations or experiences in the past with depth and focus in order to better explore them and understand them.
We might want to explore a past experience in childhood, certain aspects of a relationship, of a challenging time in our life, or a strong emotion. Experiencing the past in this way, reveals new information and insights. And even more importantly, it can actually give us a new experience that shifts how the past affects us, while teaching us healthy ways of being in the present and the future.
3. We can also use visualization to explore and experience what is happening right now and to create new healthy, therapeutic experiences.
All healing happens in the present moment. Freida Fromm-Reichman, Freud’s daughter, is credited with saying, “What the client needs is an experience, not an explanation”. Experience is how we have learned about ourselves and life in the past. How we feel, think, and act today is a product of our past embodied experience. Therefore, how we feel, think, and act tomorrow will be dependent on our experience today.
Visualization can give us therapeutic experiences in the present that heal and transform problematic reactions to the past while serving as a foundation for a new healthy, whole, and balanced way of relating to our future life experience.
Guided/Creative Visualization allows us to accelerate healing through present moment experience that reveals and heals the past, present, and future.
