by Om Swami
It is no secret that the top athletes in the world extensively use visualization techniques as part of their mental training. Through visualization, they are able to perform better and in accordance with their own expectations. Thought is a force of energy. All the matter in the universe – and, of course, on our planet – is a form of energy. The human body is a colony of sixty trillion living cells. They have no underlying structural reality to them. At one time, scientists believed that the nucleus of an atom was a material particle, but later research and quantum physics disproved this completely. A nucleus has a proton, electron and neutron. A neutron has a quark. And neither of them have any structure; they are just a flux of energy in space.
Similarly, your body is simply a conglomerate of the tiny cells that are nothing but living manifestations of energy. With visualization, you can treat them, repair them, heal them or even kill them. During my time in the Himalayan woods, I used visualization to get rid of unbearable aches and pains in my body. Visualizations allowed me to live in the harsh Himalayan conditions on one meal a day without compromising my physical health.
You can use visualization to heal yourself; to cure chronic ailments and even to get rid of tumours in your body. The quality of the visualization has a direct influence on the degree of healing. If meditation is already a part of your daily routine, visualization can work wonders for you. On countless occasions I have used visualization to relieve my asthma and allergies. Any inflammation caused by allergens can be treated with this form of meditation. You don’t have to take my word on its face value. You are free to test it and experience it for yourself.
How to Do It
Sit in the standard meditative posture. If you can’t sit cross-legged, sit in a chair with your back straight. Once seated, take a few deep breaths. Imagine a certain calmness coming over you. Visualize that you are not a body made from some physical structure but trillions of cells (this is the truth anyway). Imagine these cells are white in colour and illuminating. Further, shift your attention to the ailing area of this cellular body.
Visualize that the cells in the ailing part are angry and red. They are swollen because of their negativity, and this has caused your current ailment (inflammation, clogging, swelling, cancer, a tumour or some other anomaly). Visualize calming, radiant, bluish and white waves of light pacifying these cells. Envision how they recede upon pacification and return to their original state. Imagine that they are no longer inflamed.
It may sound far-fetched, but give it a try to see its effectiveness for yourself. You can also hold a dialogue with these aggrieved cells, telling them you mean no harm and that they can relax and calm down. At the root of the last statement is a sense of compassion. These cells are living entities, micro-organisms that are part of your body but independent at the same time. If you emit thoughts of compassion for them, it works wonders. Countless times I have tried this successfully on myself, and on multiple occasions on others to help them heal quicker.
I am not suggesting that meditation is a panacea or that visualization will absolutely rid you of all ailments. But at the same time, if you do it thoroughly and regularly, there is no reason why it can’t completely transform you. In Ayurveda, disease is not matter but force. In quantum physics, this universe and every material particle in it, including our own bodies, are also the mere play of forces of energy. Thought is a force too; it has energy. The proof of this is that a thinking brain consumes more energy than a sleeping brain.
The force of a visualization (which is a chain of intended and purposeful thoughts) can help you tap into the right energy cycles or alter the course of existing energy patterns in your body. The world around you has infinite energy; a thought is the only entry point into that world of energy. And meditation is the art of staying on a thought for as long as you wish.
Other than using visualization to get rid of your physical ailments, you can also use it to heal your past and the negativity stored in you. It is one of the most efficient methods for erasing your psychic imprints.
ERASING PSYCHIC IMPRINTS
Whatever we experience in life, everything we do leaves an imprint on us – a psychic imprint. These imprints conjure up our thoughts, chart our tendencies, our habits, our nature, and almost everything about us. Patanjali states in his Yoga Sutras that psychic imprints resulting from karma accumulate over many lives, conditioning the mind and causing us grief. The easiest way to create a new habit or get rid of an existing one is to erase the corresponding psychic imprint.
The mind’s uncanny ability to store and recall thoughts in the form of images and words makes up our memory store. In your quiet moments, when you recall painful incidents, you feel indisposed. The more you try to forget them, the heavier they become; the faster you try to run away from them, the quicker they get to you. It is not possible to erase the memory per se, but it is possible to erase the impression a certain memory has left on you. Erasing the imprint or reducing its impact automatically makes the memory harmless. There are two ways of erasing those imprints: the yogic and the intellectual methods.
The Yogic Method
This method requires patience, discipline and persistence, but it’s an incredibly powerful method of erasing any undesirable imprint. The success in all yogic methods depends on the aspirant’s ability to sit still, concentrate and visualize. Maintaining one posture stills the primary energies; concentration stills the five secondary energies and readies your mind. The actual erasure is a process of visualization. The longer you can hold on to your visualization during your session of meditation, the quicker the healing. It is like performing surgery. You are the surgeon, your mind is the patient and visualization is the procedure. Therefore, the patient (mind) needs to be perfectly still (with a steady posture) while the surgeon (you) concentrates and does the procedure (visualization).
How to Do It
Sit still with your back straight, preferably cross-legged, but any other comfortable posture will do just fine for this practice.
Close your eyes.
Do deep breathing – just normal deep breathing – for a few minutes. Discriminating faculties of the conscious mind will become somewhat passive as a result.
Recall a person or an incident that caused you great grief in the past. Your mind will automatically pick up all related emotions and thoughts. Try, though, to stay focussed on that one person or incident.
Imagine releasing soft white light from your heart chakra in the form of compassion and forgiveness. Anahata chakra, known as the heart chakra, is a psychoneurotic plexus situated near your heart, in the centre of your chest – the vertical middle point between your throat and navel, between the two nipples. If you experience guilt because you did something wrong, visualize forgiving yourself, even if you feel that you are at fault for what you had to go through. You will travel through a whole spectrum of emotions as you do this practice. Bring back your attention and focus on the calming white light. Visualize yourself being infused with it. Do not hesitate to engage in self-dialogue. Your focus, however, should not be to brood over matters but to erase and eradicate the imprint. It is not about right or wrong; it is just about forgiving for your own good. Clean the whole canvas of images. Repaint it with your favourite scene. Imagine yourself in bliss and smiling; envision living your dream, being happy, being healthy.
Take a few deep breaths again and slowly open your eyes.
If you believe in God, say your favourite prayer, or simply express your gratitude for all that you have been blessed with.
One session should last for a minimum of fifteen minutes. Be consistent. Do not expect results in the first session. Once you do this a sufficient number of times – around thirty – you will experience a miracle; you will find that recalling that incident or person no longer aggravates or irritates you. You will experience peace upon such recollection. You have successfully metamorphosed your emotion. It is a beautiful
and empowering feeling.
Most yogic methods require an average of twenty-eight days of daily practice before they show any results. It takes usually six months before an aspirant starts to perfect their practice. Once you are able to practise intense visualization, you can accomplish just about anything you can imagine. Subsequent healing sessions accomplish much more, and quickly.
The Intellectual Method
Think about what happens when a child gets a new toy. He is fascinated. The more he gets to play with it, the quicker his attractions start to wither away. He gets over the toy. Earlier he would even sleep with it, talk to it, play with it; now, the toy is dead. Its sighting does not trigger any emotion in the child. Similarly –and just as naturally, albeit ironically – when you experience abuse, rejection, failure, deceit, lies and pain, your mind gets a new toy. The more you try to avoid it, the stronger the attraction. Here is an easy way to get over those emotions.
How to Do It
To carry out this practice effectively, you either need a mirror or a voice recorder. The steps:
Look in the mirror or turn on the voice recorder.
Recall a negative or painful incident from your past.
Start narrating it verbally, either by talking to the mirror or recording on your dictaphone.
Try to recall every minute detail around the incident. For example, let us assume someone you deeply loved broke up with you. The news itself was most unexpected. And the timing and manner of the break-up and the demeanour of your loved one – combined with your lack of anticipation of the event – made this a most traumatic experience. Years have passed, but you have not got over it. As part of this exercise, recall the incident. Do this boldly. Think of the colour of the walls, what you ate prior to being given the news, what all of you were wearing, what was going through your mind, how the other person looked, what objects were there in the room and what were the surroundings. Recall all of these and speak them out.
Take a few deep breaths and close the session.
You will experience pain and hurt. You may experience an emotional outpouring. Be bold. Do all this multiple times over a number of sessions. Play with this toy. You can later listen to your own recording. As you do, you will recall even greater detail. Over a period of time, as you do your sessions, the whole incident – the person and that phase of your life – will cease to matter. After fifteen to twenty sessions, its impact will simply disappear. Forever.
It is paramount to recall as much detail as possible. And here is why. Remember Bo? If you do not recall the detail, you will not be able to erase the pain. If you are unable to erase it, whenever you see similar coloured walls, people with similar expressions, even food like you had that day, it will silently trigger the negative or draining emotion in you. Hence, I cannot stress enough the importance of recalling as much detail as possible. The information recall in the fifth session, for instance, will be much greater than the first. So repeat this exercise till you get over the incident completely. The devil is in the detail.
You can also do this exercise with a friend who is willing to listen to you without judgement. You could take turns. You could help the other person heal, and they could help heal you. That is why sharing – talking it out with someone who is non-judgemental – can make you feel lighter. Each time you talk it out, it further reduces the hurt of the painful emotions associated with the traumatic event. This is the reason that people tend to share their ordeals with friends. It is the mind’s natural coping mechanism. When you speak about matters of concern or pain, their imprint softens.
No imprint means no pain. No pain means you are healed. Healing of the mind is almost like returning to your original state of peace and bliss; of joy and happiness; of compassion and tolerance.
WITNESS MEDITATION – FOR MENTAL HEALTH
Thought is the energy through which you match or mismatch the frequency with the reality. Thought is an extraordinary force, and an average human brain is the playground of sixty thousand or so thoughts daily. There are some thoughts we hold on to and we pursue them. These can intrude upon our emotions and feelings, completely transforming them for better or worse.
Un-abandoned thoughts become desires, expectations or resolutions. They can give us direction or even misdirect us. The most important thing to remember, though, is that thoughts are devoid of any essence. In their own right, they have neither meaning nor value. It is what we do with thought that matters. On its own, the life of a thought is no more than a fraction of a second. It emerges, it manifests in our mind and it disappears. Between its emergence and disappearance is just a moment. If you do not react to the thought at that moment, it quietly goes away without disturbing your state of mind. Mostly, however, we grab hold of the thought, cling to it. A whole chain of interlinked thoughts follow and, before we know it, we are completely bogged down. A positive thought has a trail of positive thoughts and a negative thought has a trail of negative thoughts.
Witness meditation is the simple method of learning how not to react to your thoughts. If you have practised mindfulness, discussed in the next section, witness meditation is much easier. To do witness meditation, you don’t need to be in the meditative posture, but it’ll help if you are. So sit cross-legged if you can, or in a chair. Keep your head, neck and back in a straight line. Rest your hands in your lap if you are sitting cross-legged or on your knees if you are sitting in a chair. Take a few deep breaths, and think of yourself not as the doer or the maker of your life but simply as a witness.
Watch the thoughts as they come. Don’t react to your thoughts: don’t pursue them; don’t reject them; don’t accept them. Just watch them as if you are watching a movie. Let them be free; don’t hold on to them. If it helps, think that these are the thoughts in the mind of someone you don’t know. When thoughts of the past come, imagine that these thoughts don’t belong to your own life but to some unknown person’s life. Become a stranger to your own mind. Be completely indifferent to its flow of thoughts.
Steadily, you will see your thoughts slowing down, and you may also experience moments of complete cessation between them. If your own thoughts cannot provoke you, nothing external can provoke you either. Every external occurrence triggers an internal thought that may alter your state of mind. If you can just be the spectator and not the reactor or an adopter of the thought, the thought becomes powerless. You are taking the kinetic energy out of that thought, so it cannot bring a whole chain of thoughts with it. The thought will disappear right away.
Witness meditation helps you stay calm and stress-free – and resultantly physically fit. There will be no adrenaline rushes, no indigestion and no hypertension. You’ll realize that you’ve always been an ocean of bliss, and no external force can move you.
MINDFULNESS – JOURNAL FOR EMOTIONAL HEALTH
A sage once asked his disciples, ‘I have two bulls in my mind. One is eternally calm and happy. The other one is always restless and agitated. If the two go to fight, who will win?’
Some voted for the calm bull, arguing that calmness brings strength, while others vouched for the agitated one, saying that for fighting well, it is adrenaline that was needed.
‘It depends,’ the master said. ‘Their victory depends on their strength. It is not necessary that one will always defeat the other. If you constantly feed the calm bull more than the angry one, it will grow stronger; its chances of winning every time go up.’
Mindfulness is one of the most powerful methods of improving your emotional health. It allows you to choose which of the two bulls you want to feed. The one you feed more often will win more frequently. Simply put, mindfulness is about being aware. When you feel negative, down, pensive, angry, sad, jealous and so forth, being mindful helps you emerge stronger than your negative emotions. It takes away the resistance and force from the negative emotions and you immediately feel better. If you are mindful, you can check the flow of thoug
hts; you can remind yourself that you do not wish to be negative or angry.
Just before you experience a surge of energy waiting to burst into words and actions, you have a moment to ponder over the choice you are about to exercise. You may gently remind yourself that you do not wish to let your blood boil – that you are not allowing negativity to get the better of you. Mindfulness transforms that fraction of a moment into peaceful contemplation; the juggernaut of negativity passes by.
As you cultivate the practice of mindfulness, you will find it increasingly easy to choose a preferred response in any situation. Often, a person’s behaviour is governed by automatic responses. Someone yells at them and they either shout back or withdraw. This happens in a split second. They end up exercising a choice without realizing it. This is loss of mindfulness.
Writing a mindfulness journal is one of the best methods of starting to understand yourself. With this method, you identify your automatic responses and their triggers, so you may ‘feed the calm bull’ of mindfulness.
How to Do It
Each time you feel negative, agitated or indisposed, make a quick journal entry. It is best if you can do it right at that moment, but if you cannot, it is fine to do so after you have regained your composure. In your journal entry, answer the following four questions:
The episode: What was actually happening at the time you experienced negativity? Anything specific?
The cause: What triggered your negative emotion? Did someone say something or were you reminded of a past incident, for example?
The degree: To what extent did your negative emotion overpower you? For example, could you control yourself or did you end up doing something that you regretted later?
The future: Should a similar situation arise, would you respond in exactly the same manner, or would you respond differently?