Visualization and Experiences

Courtesy of Pixabay In Awakening the Sacred Body, the author shares some additional meditations you can do with the Tsa Lung. Some of those exercises include visualization of specific colors that can be associated with the movement of the breath. In my own work, I've tried to move away from visualization, but I thought with these exercises I might see how matching the visualization to other experiences I was already having would work. Initially when I did the visualizations I found myself spending more time on them, than on actually being present with the experience (Which is one reason I've moved away from visualization). However, I figured there had to be a way to crack this problem in such a way that visualizations could be included without distracting from the experience, and if anything helping a person go deeper into the experience.

What I decided to do was match the visualizations up with specific actions I was already doing. The way the exercises had been presented was that you did the visualizations separately, but that doesn't work for me. However, matching the visualization up to an experience I was having allowed me to stack the visualization and make it part of the experience, to the point that it could happen without me having to spend time thinking about it, as opposed to really being with it. Once I start doing the experiential work, the visualization of the color kicks in and becomes part of the experience.

I've never come across books or other resources where visualization is stacked on to an experience (though I suppose NLP would be where to look). There may be some resources or approaches that do it that way, but typically what I've noticed is an either/or approach to experiential meditation and visualization. You either do one or the other, but not the two together, and yet I also have never seen any warnings against it. I think the reason it's not typically done is because the practitioner is focusing on the experience or visualization and not trying to blend senses together in a manner that might be a distraction. Sound and visualization can go hand in hand because you can make the sound part of the visualization, but kinisthetic experiences are very tactile oriented and in some sense directed more inward as a result. Yet I also don't think its impossible to make our vision and kinisthetic experiences work together. It's just a matter of figuring out how they work together and in my case that means associating the visualization with the experience, so that when the experience occurs, the visualization automatically starts and supports the experience by becoming part of it.

My new podcast

I'm now hosting a podcast show on the Pagan Musings Podcast channel. You can listen to the first episode, where I interview Bill Duvendack about his book Vocal Magick here.