In today’s fast-paced world, it’s easy to get caught up in the stressors of everyday life. And without proactive efforts to manage these stressors, you may experience cluttered thoughts, difficulty concentrating, increased levels of anxiety, sleepless nights, and a decline in your overall mental health. Meditation is a powerful tool in helping people become more in tune with their minds and body for reduced stress, improved attention, and increased overall wellbeing. However, some people find it difficult to shut off their thoughts long enough to sit through even a five-minute meditation session that’s focused on clearing their minds. The good news is, that’s not your only option. There are other—and dare we say even more beneficial types of meditation—that don’t require you to completely clear your mind. Guided visualization meditation is one of the simplest, yet most powerful, self-awareness tools to help move your attention away from everyday worry and stress and instead focus on your imagination.
What is guided visualization meditation?
Guided visualization meditation is a relaxation practice that draws on your ability to visualize and daydream. Through guided imagery, you can quite literally learn how to use your imagination to “create the state you want.” In other words, you can change how you’re feeling by changing your focus.
What’s the science behind it? During this type of meditation, your amygdala—the small structure in your brain that’s responsible for your fight or flight response—has difficulty distinguishing between something you image during a visualization meditation and something that’s actually happening. If you imagine yourself on a beach, your brain will think you’re actually on a beach.
Who can benefit from visualized meditation?
Just about anyone can benefit from visualized meditation! In fact, millions of people all across the world meditate. And some of society’s most successful people attribute a large part of their success to their meditation practice. Here’s a shortlist of successful people and celebrities who rely on meditation: Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Arianna Huffington, Angelina Jolie, and Hugh Jackman all practice mindfulness and meditation. And it’s no wonder why—meditation offers a long-list of benefits for both the brain and body.
How imagery benefits the brain and body
Guided visualization meditation benefits both the brain and body on all levels: mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual. There are many reasons to try this type of meditation, but here are some of the top ways imagery benefits both the brain and the body.
1. It helps manage your mental state
Visualization can help transport you to another world, or a “mental escape” so to speak, far away from the things that usually take up your headspace. This can reduce stress, relieve anxious feelings, help manage many mental health disorders, and increase your overall sense of well-being.
2. It increases your ability to focus and feel connected to your mind
Feeling a little disconnected from the world around you? Maybe your mind is racing or you feel like you’re constantly stuck in a cloud of brain fog. If that’s the case, know that you are not alone. In fact, according to a study by Harvard University, our minds are lost in thought 47% of the time. That’s a pretty staggering statistic.
Guided imagery meditation gives you something specific to focus on and improves your ability to focus, learn how to concentrate better, and even develop skills faster.
3. It makes you more creative and enhances problem-solving skills
As children, our imaginations run rampant. However, as we grow up, we use our imagination less and less. But studies suggest that being more imaginative has many benefits, even as adults.
Just ten minutes of meditation a day can make you more creative, unlock innovative thinking, and improve problem-solving skills. Guided visual meditation, at its very core, is all about letting your imagination run wild. This type of meditation enhances creativity and problem-solving by helping you learn how to come up with desired outcomes in your mind.
4. It lowers heart rate, blood pressure, and helps treat many other physical conditions
Visualization meditation doesn’t just benefit your mental state; it also positively impacts your heart rate, blood pressure, brainwaves, breathing, and many other physical conditions that are associated with stress and anxiety.
For example, studies have shown meditation can help manage irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), fibromyalgia, psoriasis, chronic pain, and rheumatoid arthritis.
5. It helps improve sleep
We’ve all had nights where we crawl under the covers only to start worrying about work or what feels like a never-ending to-do list. These racing thoughts can make it difficult to get a good night of sleep. Worse yet, it can cause daytime drowsiness, making it even more challenging to get through your daily tasks and responsibilities, which only adds to your stress.
Visual meditation practices allow us to let go of our day and drift off to a place filled with peace and relaxation. It teaches us to be less in our heads and more aware of what’s happening in our minds.
By placing ourselves in a calm, safe, and relaxing environment through specific sounds, sights, smells, and feelings associated with imagery, you can find inner peace and bring the body to a resting state, improving sleep and fighting insomnia.
Try guided visualization meditation with AQ™
Here at Mindwell Labs, we’re on a mission to awaken your genius through technology and the science of mindful awareness.
As discussed on our website, our trainings are comprised of guided lesson, meditations, and written exercises to bring you the most complete system for lasting psychological transformation. Our meditations are uniquely architected to improve your attention and other mental markers like rest, anxiety, etc. Each meditation has four parts:
1.Breathwork
2.Progressive Relaxation of the Body
3.Visualization
4.Analysis and Discussion
Our goal is to bring you the most powerful benefits of multiple meditation traditions in a single concise package. We bring together the wisdom of the East with the clinical research intelligence of the West at a high level – think clinical neuropsychology meets Buddhist sutras. Through these meditations, you will also develop a new cognitive ability, that brings tangible real-world benefits: better planning, greater creativity, more powerful intuition, and more successful outcomes.
Our meditations are designed to induce both tranquility and insight. The breathwork and body scan techniques bring relaxation through conscious control of the body. Visualization gains insight into the unconscious mind. Analysis and discussion bring integration and understanding to the emotional catharsis.
Our visualizations have been described by Sagar Bhatt, founder of the Anxiety Labs podcast as both “hypnotic and psychedelic”. We believe meditation is fun. And a unique way to gain access to the subtle inner workings of your unconscious. Much like in Freudian psychoanalysis, we believe we can understand our unconscious and expand the powers of intuition and creativity by examining the images by which these processes are represented.
There is no teacher in these meditations, just a guide. No guru. No psychologist. No authority. Just two friends, side by side, gazing in wonder at the landscape of the human mind, on a journey together. We believe that this real view creates the way to lasting transformation.
Yes, these meditations are fun. Yet they are also a call to action: to move beyond the sentimental “easy-peasy” cliches of current American New Age spirituality. The Eastern traditions of meditation are vast and deep.
Current American mindfulness is just a wading pool in the ocean of the Indic Inner Sciences. The water is perfect. Jump in. And take a walk along the inner terrain.
These meditations are our message in a bottle, thrown out into the ocean of samsara. We hope a few come back to our own shores. And along the way, we are able to introduce you to yourself.
For general questions, please reach out to hello@theaqapp.com.
