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How to Use Visualization to Become Free of Stress

Thoughts are being down played by many people indoctrinated in the modern spirituality. The mind is seen as a noise factory and thoughts are deemed as distractive minions that keep us away from the staying in the now. Such a perspective is usually the result of a minor misunderstanding that your mind is your enemy.

Your mind is not your enemy, it’s the most beautiful part of your form existence. It’s the centre of images, cognition and perception. Instead of fighting against the mind, you can make it your ally to beat stress. You can use the power of visualization, to relieve stress and generate positive vibrations in your body.

Mind creates stress because of false identification

It’s true that mind is the source of psychological stress. Mind can be looked at as an “image producing factory”. Look at your mind and you will see that it generates images continuously. The most prominent one being the self-image – an image of what you look like and what you are going through. Mostly the self-image is just the image of what your face, and body, look like in the mirror or something close to it.

This self-image is just an image, it has no apparent existence. Your mind associates a lot of conditioning and beliefs to this image and that’s how a contracted sense of self is created. This image or “little me” is bound to be stressed all the time because it lives in an uncertain world.

The truth is that you are not this body, but the awareness that resides in this body. That’s about as close as you can get to identifying your true self while using words to describe it. You can realize this through visualization. Just imagine, what remains if your remove the thoughts, images, sounds and emotions? This is a beautiful meditation practice.

Whenever mind creates stress by projecting the “false” self-image into the future, you can practice this meditation of visualizing your true self. On the other hand, you can consciously visualize a positive setting when your mind is trying to churn out negative images. Visualization of a positive setting, such as financial abundance or meaningful engagement, can create positive vibes in your body.

Beating stress through creative visualization

Just imagine yourself reclining on a hammock by a golden beach with a cocktail in one hand and an engaging book in another. You can immediately feel your body relaxing. Why does this happen?

To your body there is no apparent difference between what is physically present to what you create mentally. In fact this is the reason why you feel fear while lying on your warm bed when you think of a monster. You body actually believes all the images created by the mind and reacts to it. If the mind creates a beautiful and soothing image, the body will react by getting relaxed and calm.

A person, who keeps thinking negative thoughts, envisioning a fearful future, is bound to feel a lot of stress in his body. This is just a habit, in some people it’s almost an addiction. These are people who stay stressed for no apparent or obvious reason. They feel stressed even when everything is fine.

Every time you feel the twinge of stress in your body, you should realize that your mind is cooking up a fearful image. To come out of this stress you will need to consciously visualize a relaxed setting. You can consciously control your mind to visualize an enriching scene, where you are totally at peace and enjoying the experience. Your body will immediately feel relaxed and de-stressed.

If you are asking – how to visualize clearly? – it just means you are looking to put in effort. That will be the wrong way to go about it. Just visualize in an effortless manner allowing scenic and peaceful images to flood through your mind. Visualization to beat stress is not about efforting but just relaxing into a waking dream state.