You visualize every day. Unfortunately, it's probably not in your favor. By default, human beings have a negative bias, meaning we're more likely to think of adverse outcomes. Desiring to avoid our perceived threats can change our behaviors and bring our fears to life. What's even more concerning is that this confirmation can further validate negative beliefs, and a feedback loop of self-destruction ensues.

If our thoughts create our actions, if we could better control our thoughts, we could better manage our actions. Unforatuenaly, most of our mind is subconscious and operating on its own volition. So in truth, you can never really control your mind. However, what you can do is learn to consciously leverage the Hypnogogoic state, a natural part of the human experience, for your advantage. 

Understanding the hypnogogic state

In simple terms, the hypnogogic state is a liminal state of awareness between wakefulness and sleep. While the consciousness is transitioning from its waking state to sleep, it becomes increasingly malleable to new information. Meaning if you learn to work with this state of consciousness, you can improve your life areas.

How do you enter the hypnogogic state?

Now, this probably sounds challenging and like something hard to learn. It's not. I share a process on my youtube channel that can help you practice. When you dedicate time every day, you'd be surprised what you can accomplish. However, you can also google Yoga Nidra.

What is Yoga Nidra?

Yoga Nidra, or psychic sleep, is a branch of yoga focused on entertaining and sustaining a hypnogogic like state while in a guided meditation. Before modern sciences understanding the mind or the potential in this state of consciousness, ancient yogis used this state to plant new habits and philosophies into their consciousness.

We aren't doing that practice exactly.

I mention Yoga Nidra, not in an appropriative way but more as a reference for established practices with similar concepts to help you better build your unique understanding. Ultimately, every system works best when calibrated to your preferences; I'm just offering you an established template as a reference to develop the necessary skills before you embark on your evolving visualization practice

How do you start to visualize?

Before visualizing, you need to take time and think of what excites you. While you can work on imagining more than one scenario, it's best to start small and build up from there. I'd suggest honing in on one tangible thing you'd like to manifest to begin. Next, you'll need to unpack how it would feel to accomplish or experience your objective. 

Feel the completion

Think of the feelings you would associate with something you'd like to manifest. Let's say you want to write a best-selling book; how would that feel? You'd probably feel accomplished, proud, excited, and maybe even ambitious about your next project! 

You've likely experienced the emotions associated with achieving your goals at some point in your life. So you know how they feel. Now all you have to do is draw to mind that feeling when you enter a meditative state. Don't worry; I'll outline a practice at the end.

See your life with your completed goal.

Professional boxers and fighters have successfully predicted when they score winning punches in fights by visualizing the outcome. However, when they are doing this, they generally aren't thinking of the physical winning punch. They are thinking of what happens after.

The surge of excitement knowing the fight is over, the ref confirming the win, and final the seal of approval from the crowd's roar. They can see the camera's flashing, the undulation of a packed house of people, and their opponent receiving medical attention. They can feel the incredible sensation of cold water entering a parched mouth and taste the coppery flavor of blood. My point being, successful visualization is about absorbing and expressing the background details of your objective as much as if not more than the actual objective itself.

Get granular

You want to break your objective down into a series of parts. Let's view it as internal processes and external processes.

• Internal processes include thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations, etc.

• External processes include other people's reactions, sounds, sights, etc.

When you visualize things, you want to trick your mind into thinking you're living that scenario. When you consider the events of our lives contain both internal and external processes, you realize how vital they are to successful visualization. 

Putting it all into action

Let's run through a quick exercise to give you all the information you need to start your experimentation with visualization.

• Think of three small, tangible goals you'd like to manifest.

• Out of the three things, which one is the most plausible in your life now? 

• If you did accomplish it, how would that feel?

• What thoughts would be going through your head?

• What would your life look like during this manifestation?

• Who else would be there with you?

Repeat regularly

Once you've got a clear picture of how accomplishing your goal would feel and look, it's time to put it into practice. If I'm honest, you're going to get the best results if you do this at least once a day for at least 30 days. The absolute minimum I would suggest would be doing it every other day for 30 days. Eventually, it will be easier to create the thoughts and feelings associated with your objective, don't worry or feel rushed. 

More to come on this topic in the future.

I've barely scratched the surface on this topic, but I feel confident that this article offers enough information to serve as a starting point. My primary intent is to create a general outline of my methodology and off it free of charge to people looking for this type of information. Once I accomplish the broad foundation, I can expand on the original concepts further.