visualization meditation

6 Visualization Meditation Exercises and Benefits

Are you curious about visualization meditation? It has many benefits such as improving your mood, sleep, and general life. Meditation can also help you achieve your goals through reflections and visualizations. Visualization meditation will help you reflect on experiences even before experiencing them in real life.

When you visualize, you focus on a person, goal or event and think of it while imagining it will be a reality. Besides, many studies show that meditation has numerous physiological benefits as it can help build the grey matter in your brain. This helps you when thinking and perceiving and will also help you process the information in the brain by improving your cognitive ability.

6 Visualization Exercises

Color Breathing

Color breathing is the most popular visualization technique, and it will help you deal with stress and improve your mood. To start this exercise, you need to think of the positive effects you desire. It can be an emotion or a personality you want to develop. Assign a color which you find calming to this feeling.

How to Do it

Choose the desired emotion and a corresponding color

Get ready for your everyday meditation by getting comfortable

Close your eyes and start breathing slowly while visualizing your chosen color

As you hold your breath, continue thinking about your chosen color and what it means

Now, think that this color is washing your entire body.

Now, drain out any unwanted emotions from your body and replace them with positive thoughts

Continue this exercise for the time you prefer; you will feel relaxed and have a good mood after each session.

This exercise can be included in general meditation, but you can also do it when you don’t intend to practice full meditation.

Compassion meditation

Compassion meditation is also called loving-kindness meditation. It is a self-care technique that will help you reduce stress, boost-well-being and increase kindness and empathy towards yourself and others.

It is helpful when you’re feeling animosity towards someone by allowing you to let go of the negative emotions and replace them with positive ones.

How to Do it

The Buddhist traditions have indicated the various forms of practicing this meditation, but they share the same core operations. Below is a simpler way to practice compassion meditation:

First, find some minutes and sit comfortably in a place. Close the eyes, relax the muscles and take some deep breaths

Take deep breaths for some over 20 seconds, inhale, and exhale slowly until you find the ideal rhythm.

Imagine the person you don’t like and the pain and challenges they might face in life. Though you might not know about these difficulties, it’s important to admit that they are facing them too.

Think of yourself giving them the right feelings such as peace, joy, calm, happiness and healing. Picture these feelings in your heart and even say some mantras to help you like the other person.

Think about your feelings to focus on their picture and breathe out the tension and replace it with feelings of love and compassion.

Continue with this exercise for about 3 minutes, and you will notice the negative energy being replaced with warmth, compassion and light-heartedness.

The Stimulating Breath

The Stimulating breath is also called the bellows breath, and it will help you boost your energy. It is usually included in yoga exercises to increase life force energy. And when done in visualization meditation, it will help you increase your alertness and energy. Besides, it is safe, and though you might feel dizzy at first, you will eventually relax and get your body accustomed to the increased energy.

During your first time, try 15 seconds or less and increase gradually until you reach a minute.

How to Do it

Sit up while ensuring your back is straight and the shoulders are relaxed.

Inhale and exhale rapidly via your nose while keeping your mouth closed. Keep the same time for breathing in and out but ensure they are quick and short. This type of exercise is quite noisy, and you should focus on completing over three cycles at a second.

After each breathing, your diaphragm will experience a quick movement, which is like bellows. It will leave you more alert and invigorated.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation

The progressive muscle relaxation technique is ideal when you want to ease tight or stiff muscles, which is common when experiencing stress and anxiety. As your muscles relax, you will relieve tension in your body while improving the mood and eliminating insomnia.

How to do it

First, lie on your back on a firm and comfortable surface. Put a carpet or mat on the floor when conducting this technique.

Close your eyes, and take some 10 seconds to relax and focus on your breathing

Tense and relax the muscles in good shape as it will help you find out when they are relaxed.

Now, deal with the different muscle groups in your body; though you can start anywhere, I recommend doing it from toes to the head or vice versa. It will feel more natural.

Now, tense the first muscles while inhaling slowly for about five seconds. But don’t do it tightly as it will cause pain.

Exhale while relaxing the muscles and visualize the tension and tightness while doing it; it will help you deal with tension in your body.

Rest for 20 seconds after tensing each muscle group, and move to the next.

When you do this exercise numerous times, it will help you deal with pain in your body and reduce muscle stiffness.

Stoic Meditation Exercises- Early Morning Reflection

Stoic meditation is part of philosophy focused on humility, restraint and compassion. It will help you feel happy while appreciating the things you have in life. Though it looks negative, it can help you not take your life for granted by seeing the things you have that are essential and some people don’t own.

For instance, imagine if you didn’t have a wonderful home, your parents or if you lost your job. How would this feel? You need to practice gratitude because it enables you to realize that you’re blessed.

There are about four stoic exercises, but we will focus on one called the early morning reflection. If you don’t know about the other exercises, you can find more information on Wikipedia. They are popular among millions of people, and they don’t need any special equipment other than a functioning brain.

Besides, most of them have been in place for thousands of years, and the reason they’re popular is their effectiveness.

How to do it

The early morning reflection technique doesn’t need rocket science to deduce as it only requires you to reflect each early morning. But it’s not that simple either as you will focus on what you will do but your reactions to your actions and the actions of others.

First, you need to show gratitude that you have woken up and many other people did not. Also, while some are lying sick in the hospital beds in great pain, you are fine, and you need to show gratitude.

Secondly, you need to plan how to avoid bad vices while embracing the positive ones. Choose a mentor i.e. philosopher who you admire for his personal strength and emotional values, and you want to implement it in your life. Also, find ways of dealing with any challenging situations you may come across.

Thirdly, note that you can only control your actions and thoughts. Anything else is beyond your control.

Goal’s visualization

Well, I need to tell you a secret about your brain; it cannot differentiate between actions and imaginations. This is why you need visualization, and if you need to think of yourself achieving your everyday goals, your brain will believe you have achieved them. This will boost your self-confidence and make it easier to achieve your goals.

Besides, it will create pathways in your brain through the neuroplasticity process. For instance, if you are thinking of being promoted at work, you will be excited and thrilled about it. The mind will generate an image, and it will relate optimism to that image. Therefore, any positive feelings will be generated when you think of this image, and you won’t feel insecure about improving.

It is just similar to guided imagery, and instead of creating imaginations, you will have the visual imagery of you achieving the goal.

How to do it

First, think of your goals in your thoughts. It can be learning new skills, winning a competition or developing an admirable personality.

Now, visualize yourself achieving the goal. Focus on your friends, acquaintances, your location and present feelings. I would recommend you add as much detailing to make it seem realistic.

If you experience any doubts such as “This won’t work” or “It’s beyond my ability”, then mention the positive mantra such as “I can always achieve my goals when I keep trying” to motivate you.

Now, focus on breathing normally while visualizing the sceneries of your success.

Benefits of Meditation

It’s Good for your Well-being

Visualization meditation affects us spiritually, mentally, physically and emotionally. They can change your life by enabling you to establish a deeper connection with your intuition, higher self and to develop a powerful connection to the universe. Overall, it will help you to improve your overall well-being.

Scientists also agree that meditation plays an integral role in our lives, and it improves our mental state, which increases our healing. It improves focus, mental health and also reduces cognitive decline. Or, we can just say that meditation has many science-backed and spiritual benefits, which makes it ideal for anyone who wants to enhance their mindfulness.

Digital Fasting Boosts Memory

When you spend some time away from your smartphones and other devices, you will improve your concentration and increase your attention span. Many people prefer visualization apps, but this can be counterproductive. Instead, you should leave your devices behind to help you enjoy more benefits. It is called Digital Fasting, and you should try one to two sessions each day.

Visit a park or any other quiet place and sit, close your eyes and start visualizing. When you spend time visualizing while knowing nothing will disturb you, you will improve your imagery skills and expand the attention span.

Besides, as you walk to the meditation area each day and come back, you will be doing great exercises while promoting diffuse thinking. Alex Pang, an author, said that you would do more things done by working less, and he notes that most productive inventors and authors visualized while walking as it helped them develop many great ideas.

Encourages Deep Relaxation

Provided you don’t pressure yourself while undertaking these activities, the benefits of visualization will be visible on their own. Visualization is very helpful as it will help you to relax and expect some particular outcomes. It is ideal, and you can use different sensory tools in your body to help you relax. For instance, you can try a warm blanket that will help you to ease the muscles in your thighs, calves, lower back and feet.

And when you use visualization to relax, you will meditate and enjoy meditative visualization simultaneously. Also, if you are experiencing other issues such as insomnia, anxiety and stress, visualization can help you reflect on the positive aspects of your life. This will help you to develop a more positive attitude towards life.

Bottom Line

Visualization meditation is an important practice that has been there for centuries and has incredible benefits to your overall health. If you don’t have the motivation to achieve your set goals or consider your future too bleak, you need to practice visual meditation each day, and it could give you the solution to your problems.

If you are curious about visualization meditation and its benefits, I would like to assure you that it will improve your sleep, overall life and other goals. These exercises combine meditation and visualization and enable you to achieve some goals even before you experience them in real life. They are very calming and are essential when you want positive vibes in life.

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