IMAGINATION
In our imagination we can travel anywhere at the speed of light. It can include all five of our senses; visualizing, hearing, tasting, smelling, sensation, while stirring up emotions and feelings. When used successfully it can be an incredibly useful tool for our lives. Imagination can soothe us during difficult times, aide us in solving our problems, inspire us to create new things, and illuminates new paths to follow and act towards. It can distract us from our troubles and worries and relieve us of our daily stresses.
We use our imagination when planning a party, a trip, writing a story, making a special meal, designing our homes or when working at our careers. It plays an important role in how we achieve things. It acts as a tool of hope that can lead us to our highest potential and fulfill our desires and passion. Creative visualization can be an important ingredient in producing positivity and happiness into our lives.
I remember when I was young, I could get lost in imaginary play all day long with my friends. If I wasn’t playing house with my stuffed animals and dolls, I might be next door at my neighbours flying around their back yard pretending to be a fairy princess. Sometimes we spent all day playing house and I might be cast as the wicked stepmother or the evil sorceress and it wouldn’t take long before I found myself defending the reason for my now horrible persona. All these great roll playing moments helped me begin to learn about the complexities of the human condition. Standing in another person’s fictitious shoes taught me a lot about having empathy and compassion for different kinds of people we encounter in this world.
As children, we all had boundless imaginations, but as time goes by, and we grow into more mature adults, our heads become more grounded in reality and we lose the joy of living in those fantasy worlds we loved so much when we were young. All my children loved the fun of being creative and I think I can still name all their imaginary friends. Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
Wherever your imagination might take you, it’s an opportunity to step out of the present to create what might be. Texting, Facebook, video games, and other devices that seize our attention, slowly begin to dull one of our most powerful tools. We soon become swallowed up by our phones, computers, and desks and forget how to play and be inventive. Imagination is a muscle and when you don’t use it you can begin to lose it.
WAYS TO RECAPTURE YOUR IMAGINATION
Walk in nature
Give yourself the gift of time in nature. It could be anything from a leisurely walk along the beach to a hike through the mountains. Get out there and experience everything our wonderful world has to offer. The benefits of getting away from the technocratic world and heightening your creativity and intuitive awareness are limitless.
For as long as I can remember I have loved taking long walks in the forest, particularly where my family cottage resides. One of my favourite things to do, even more so now as an adult, is to search for mythical creatures or interesting faces that seem to form out of the moss-covered underbrush or on the many varieties of tree trunks that populate this private paradise. I have spent countless hours looking for these otherworldly imprints imagining they are part of a secret fairy realm that continues to drive my artistic inspirations. These treasured walks continue to give me epiphanies, wisdom, and guidance when I’m searching for solutions in my life.
Read more fairy tales
Dr. Jean Houston, scholar, philosopher, educator, and a recognized pioneer of the “Human Potential Movement,” met Albert Einstein when she was 8 years old, when she attended a school in New York. The teacher took her class over to Einstein’s house one day, as this was part of her school’s curriculum - to encourage their students to speak with inspirational adults. One of her fellow classmates asked Einstein “how can we become as smart as you” and his answer was “read more fairy tales’. He was serious! He wanted to encourage these children to nurture and grow their imaginations. He said “imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited but imagination encircles the world.” Einstein fundamentally understood that most successful people were almost always highly creative. Dr. Houston, deeply inspired by his words, went on in her life to inspire and teach people how to realize their full potential. One of her core teaching concepts are, “the imaginal realm is where we find our most potent ideas – the ones that can change your life or change the world.” Creativity is the key to success in every field, helping us to solve problems and analyse situations to find better solutions.
Find time to play
Summertime is the perfect time to go out and have fun. Go to the beach and build a sandcastle. Tinker with a musical instrument or just let go and dance like no one is watching to the sounds and rhythms of your favourite song. Take some time out to experiment with creative materials. You don’t need a master plan or an end goal, just play, and see what happens. You’ll be surprised at what comes out. Every time you experiment creatively, you are nurturing and growing your creative capacity.
“I saw the angel in the marble, and I carved until I set him free.”
~ Michelangelo
Feel gratitude
The feeling of gratitude activates all our primal radiant circuits. In Energy Medicine, it is believed that these unique energies are the pathways to your joy, bliss, and wonder. In Traditional Chinese Medicine they speak of these “extraordinary vessels” as ancient energies that lay below our conscious mind and stresses. They can’t be influenced by our conscious minds. Instead, they bypass our limited thinking and just go where they are needed. When activated they give us waves of energy that feel good. When strong they can light us up with a sense of enthusiasm in our souls. We become more intuitive and move more into our right brains, our creative brains, allowing ideas, concepts and dreams to flow.
There is nothing better than to imagine something, someone, or somewhere that you are grateful for to expel unsupportive energies that are blocking the bliss molecules in your body. Remind yourself of that glow you get when you’re around someone you find attractive. You suddenly feel this delightful energy effervescing out from your core and chest. Think of that gush you get when you’re falling in love. Picture giving your best performance, acing your important business meeting, teaching an inspirational class, or creating that perfect project. I learnt through my Interior Design career that when I imagined it “right” I would get this distinctive ping of buoyancy in my body that would electrify my spirit.
Practice guided meditations
Meditating can take us into fantasy worlds that can bring us our hearts desires. Imagining a situation or an object, can often open us to the possibility of attracting what we are most wishing for in our lives. It frees us to new possibilities. When we don’t take the time to foster our right brain thinking, we can get ensnared in the external world’s sufferings. Now we find ourselves expecting the worst to happen. Suddenly life feels rigid and unbending and it becomes easier to fail. If we imagine more positive outcomes the path to success suddenly materialises more effortlessly.
Try imagining your favourite colour or a special moment in time and infuse it into every cell of your body and watch how you feel about the world change. I like to take my fingertips and tap my 3rd eye when I’m experiencing elated moments in my life. The neuroreceptors on the skin become trained, when touched later, to summon higher potentials again. Remind yourself that the story you choose to play in your mind can make you happy, sad, anxious, or peaceful. Our imaginations are very powerful for activating our states of being.
Rehearse in your mind
Athletes are taught to imagine running their race or performing their special sports in their minds repeatedly before their event ever takes place. Rehearsing before you do something important helps to prime the brain, by carving pathways into your recalls, making it easier to triumph when you do it for real. Imagining helps you memorize and master your skills in a faster way. The latest research now proves that what we imagine can seem just as real to our brains as the actual experience.
Release pain
When we are in pain, we can use several visualization techniques to help us feel better. In the Eden Method we use a protocol called “Siphoning the Pain” to help remove congested energies that might be causing discomfort in our bodies. While utilizing the magnetic properties of one of our hands, we can hover it over the area that’s in pain and imagine we are extracting it out of our bodies. As we visualize sucking up the pain we can direct it, in our mind, to pour out our other hand trusting it is now dispersing it out of us into the earth below. This type of directed imagery can be an effective alternative to pain management medication. Our minds are powerful, and we can minimize our suffering by just picturing ourselves being healthy, radiant, emotionally balanced, and alive. Another great technique is using our breath, by imagining the exhale is releasing our pain and the inhale is replacing it with fresh pain free energy.
Heal emotional discomforts
Have you ever heard the saying “Fake it until you make it?” Your imagination can play a particularly powerful and liberating role in releasing and diffusing emotional pain. Believe you are being infused with the energies of love and gratitude as though you are acting in the starring role of the best movie ever and let that feeling propel you towards a more joyful life. When we are fueled by hope and a desire to create something better for ourselves, it begins to weaken the hold of our emotional turmoil’s and gives us the tenacity to find more positive ways to live in our world.
Boost your intelligence
If you continue to conjure solutions to problems that currently exist, your drive to prove how that solution might work forces you to educate yourself, seek out information, thus boosting what you know about any given topic. Make time to read and learn new things every day. When you read, you are exposed to the amazing ideas of others. By utilizing this rich abundant source you will awaken your own impulses to evolve your life both personally and professionally. The more you use your imagination the stronger your ‘imagination muscle’ will become. Make it a habit to bring this higher intelligence into your daily conscious awareness and discover how much more satisfying and enriching your life can be.
Stay forever young
Continue to dream and imagine a world even better than the one you grew up in. Not only will you create the possibility of an amazing life through fulfillment of your dreams, you will also remain healthy to enjoy that life when it materializes. By remaining curious about the world around you, no matter what your age, you will continue exercising your brain, which reduces the atrophy that can typically take effect as we age.
JUST IMAGINE!
Love Becca