6 Steps to Successfully Vizualize a Pain-Free Future
And I think the hardest part is to teach our body emotionally. What the future will feel like ahead of the actual experience. So what does that mean?
-You can’t wait for your success to feel empowered.
-You can’t wait for your wealth to feel abundant.
-You can’t wait for your new relationship to feel love, or your healing to feel whole’Joe Dispenza, You are the Creator of Your World
There’s a ‘trick’ when it comes to vizualization, whether you’re doing it for chronic pain or to improve any other area in your life. It is so easy to get it wrong, without realising it, that I felt compelled to dedicate a post precisely to this subject (because I’ve been guilty of vizualising incorrectly so many times myself!).
You see, the problem is most people tend to allow the wrong emotions to creep in during their vizualisation practice. So if you’re not quite sure you’re doing it right, or you’d simply like to take your TMS work one crucial milestone further, keep reading to find out how you should be visualising your pain-free life.
Vizualising with Outcome Independence
The problem is, whenever we vizualise something that we really want in our lives, we very often let in feelings of ‘lack’, despair and obsession with regard to our desired goal. We may start out by imagining ourselves having the object of our desire, seeing it in all its detail, but as we do so, or even after we do so, we end up feeling sorry for ourselves for not already having reached this goal. We might get thoughts like ‘I will never really get this’, ‘I am just kidding myself’ OR, ‘I should have achieved this already, therefore it’s not working!’ After we vizualise, we tend to remember what we had been imagining, and we ruin this beautiful picture with feelings of despair and extreme attachment to the outcome.
By doing this, we are violating the principle of Outcome Independence, which is a key principle in the TMS approach. In simple terms, being outcome independent means trying to achieve something without worrying too much about when, or even whether, you’re going to achieve it. All the work you do, you would be doing as a way of trying your best for yourself, regardless of the outcome. This will help you overcome one of our biggest enemies, Resistance. Because every time we wish for something too much, at the expense of enjoying our present day reality, we are in Resistance. And resistance creates tension, pressure, and perhaps pain!
6 Steps to a Successful Vizualisation for Chronic Pain
Here are the steps I consider crucial in order to vizualise a pain-free outcome successfully.
Make sure you find a quite spot, and that you have at least 15 minutes to your disposal. Make yourself comfortable by taking a few deep breaths.
Imagine yourself doing any activity that you desire without pain. Make the image as visual as possible; think of what you would be wearing, what your surroundings look like, and any sounds or smells you may be hearing or smelling. Put yourself in the picture, as if you’re watching a 3D movie!
Next, focus on how it feels to realise that you are doing this activity without pain. Imagine that you’ve just noticed or remembered that you’re now free of pain. Focus on these feelings most of all: self-confidence, freedom, triumph and empowerment. As you vizualise yourself, you need to feel these emotions. This is the trickiest bit of all and might require some practice.
If you start thinking or feeling emotions of ‘lack’ and self-pity, shift your attention back to your future self, and to the feelings you want to be feeling
Once the image is clear in your mind, and you’ve been able to cultivate that blissful feeling of ‘knowing’ that you’re now free of pain and that pain is no longer an issue in your life, take yourself back to the present moment. Imagine that what you’ve just vizualised has been promised to you, and that you are quite sure that this promise will be kept.
End the vizualisation with a feeling of trust and hope. Avoid wondering ‘when’ it will happen, but simply ‘believe’. Detach yourself from the end goal for the rest of the day, until your next vizualisation session.
In this kind of vizualisation, what you are cultivating are specific feelings, feelings which may be new or long forgotten by your subconscious. If you’ve been in chronic pain for a long time, you’ve probably lost touch with how physical and emotional freedom feels like. The trick is, you have to remind or teach your unconscious mind what it feels like, before it can recreate the experience in your body. I believe that Dr Joe Dispenza’s work best describes this kind of practice, which is why I’ve started this blog post with his words, and I will also end it with a quote from him:
If we are truly engaged in this process with passion, we might begin to emotionally experience our future through thought alone. In fact, when we are feeling the emotions of our future—whether that’s gratitude, joy, freedom, abundance, enthusiasm, love, and so on—the creative thoughts in your mind can become the experience. As the body receives the chemical signals of these emotions, essentially the body is receiving the signal that the event has already occurred (Dr Joe Dispenza’s Blog)
It is simple yet powerful. Once you can feel what it feels like to be pain-free, once you replace those negative thought processes and catastrophic thoughts that are blocking your progress, once you focus on success instead of disappointment, on empowerment instead of victimization, it could only be a matter of time before you see results. Dare to dream, and dare to believe that it’s possible.
If you need help with recreating those positive feelings associated with being pain-free, feel free to reach out to me via the Coaching page, and we can go through this step by step, since at the end of the day, being pain-free will ‘feel’ and mean different things to different people. You CAN do this!