Yes, I Can! by Robin Nixon

One of the best guards against ill health is to have a healthy mind. Luckily it’s well known that positive thinking in the form of creative visualization can have remarkable healing effects – simply by imagining being well you can become so.

In many studies of ill people, even including those suffering from cancer, it has been found that by concentrating on healing the illness mentally, you can reduce and sometimes completely eradicate the problem. For example, cancer patients are often asked to spend as much time as they can visualizing their white blood cells bustling around their body (and especially at the sites of any cancer) destroying and removing all cancerous cells they find, allowing normal cell growth to resume.

How this works is not exactly known, but from a biological point of view it is thought that your unconscious mind works with your autonomic nervous system and immune system in response to the suggestions given them by visualization, and this helps them to closely target the causes of the illness.

Of course modern medicine provides a range of treatments for many diseases, including cancers, and you should always maintain any treatment agreed with medical professionals. But by visualizing at the same time your chances of beating illness are substantially increased.

Building strong core muscles

As we age, if we don’t keep active and allow our muscles to weaken, this can help cause our joints to calcify, leading to arthritis. If you are young you won’t really think about this, but once you reach middle age you will start to notice your first joint aches and pains, and that is about the time when you should start doing what you can to maintain your muscles in good condition.

Obviously this is a physical thing you need to do, since you can’t create muscle simply by thinking about it. However, what you can do is build your muscles more quickly and easily (and achieve the motivation to keep looking after them) through visualization. And by toughening your core muscles (which run through the central section of your body, consisting of the spine, pelvic girdle and hip joints) in particular, you’ll achieve improved posture, reduction of lower back pain, toned muscles, and improved physical performance.

Here is a combined physical and visualization exercise you can practice to emphasize to you and your unconscious mind the importance of keeping these muscles fit and strong – and to help your desire to continue with this exercising.

• Sit up in an alert position and while you maintain a steady breathing rhythm try to pull your navel inwards and back to touch your spine.
• Don’t just imagine this, actually do it if you can. This is called abdominal bracing.
• As you hold your navel in, feel the muscles that are being employed and imagine yourself pouring energy into them from deep within your core.

Encouraged by physiotherapists and Pilates trainers this technique is held to be the answer to core stability so try to hold this position until the exercise is over, which should be up to five minutes if you can, but at least thirty seconds for a beginner. And remember to keep breathing evenly all the time.

Looking after your heart

By ensuring that your heart is as healthy as possible you will obtain a wide range of benefits due to increased blood flow and oxygen distribution around your body, such as increased energy levels and endurance, lower blood pressure, reduced body fat, reduced stress, tension, anxiety and depression, and improved sleep.

The only way to become and stay fit is to exercise, so the following visualization is targeted at motivating you and increasing your desire to exercise aerobically as frequently as possible or, if you have never jogged before, to go out and try it. You are going to go for a twenty minute jog so in your mind’s eye make sure you are wearing suitable clothes that are loose fitting and airy such as shorts or jogging pants and a t-shirt, and that you have on a good pair of running shoes.

• Now imagine yourself in the suburbs or on a country lane and start jogging, feeling how your shoes fit just right and your feet feel like they are bouncing with each step.
• Your legs feel strong and powerful, as your arms go back and forth in counter-rhythm to your them. They feel strong but are relaxed and simply swaying to keep you balanced.
• As you jog notice a very slight sweat building up on your brow and mop it away with the soft armband on your sleeve. Also note how your body feels more supple and is moving more easily.
• Be a little surprised that far from being tired you actually feel energized and can quite happily keep this pace up for the full twenty minutes.
• As you continue, imagine passing trees, houses and side streets. Nod or wave to people you know, and enjoy that they are seeing you exercising because they know that you are being serious about your health.
• Continue running as you breathe in cool and exhale warm air. Feel how the oxygen is refreshing your lungs and energizing your body.
• Continue the visualization until you have completed the full jogging session.

Twenty minutes is all it took, which isn’t very long (maybe enough time to drink a cup of tea or coffee and not much more). Now, while it’s all fresh in your mind, start planning for when you will actually go out and jog for real.

Building stamina

As well as strength you also need the stamina to persevere with changing bad habits and becoming healthy – stamina that will keep you going through thick and thin, giving you the energy to work on things over the long term. Physically stamina is the kind of energy that you draw on to run a marathon, while mentally it’s the ability to stick with something until it’s completion, no matter how long it takes.

And so it’s time for another breathing exercise because, it turns out, such exercises can increase stamina and endurance for many activities such as running, swimming, martial arts and even singing. The technique used is called Chi breathing and the goal is to remove emphasis from the shoulders and chest, and instead do diaphragmatic or core breathing from deep within the abdomen.

• Sit upright and hold your hands over your lower stomach.
• Now breathe in as far as you can until you can’t draw in any more air, then let it all out again, until the very last gasp has been exhaled.
• Repeat this a couple of times then start to imagine that as you breathe in your hands are somehow sucking the air all the way down your torso and into them.
• When you breathe out again see them pushing the air back through your stomach.
• As you do this you should feel your abdomen expanding and contracting and your breathing movement should be felt all the way down to your pelvic area.

Because you are drawing in far more air than with normal breathing make sure that you don’t over breathe, because you will need fewer breaths per minute. Take your time to settle into a slow and steady rhythm that feels comfortable. Then, once you are in the rhythm, visualize the deep and long-lasting energy that each abdominal breath brings you. I promise you, when you practice this technique you really will feel how deeply you are breathing. And while you visualize imagine all your internal organs being renewed and energized, so that after the exercise you will feel like just a car that’s been in for a service.

Being happy and contented

Having looked after your muscles, heart and stamina levels, it’s now time to turn your attention away from your body for a while and to your mind as you seek to instil as high a level of contentment as possible. Now happiness is one of the main goals in life of most people anyway. But it’s also a vital part of becoming and staying healthy.

If you aren’t happy your body will suffer, but if you can raise your spirits your body will follow. And this will enable you to deal with health issues and any bad habits much more effectively. You can’t go wrong with the following simple exercise any time you want to lift your spirits:

• Spend the next ten minutes simply thinking about your future life, imagining that absolutely everything has gone as well as it possibly could, and visualizing how you have worked hard and succeeded at accomplishing all of your life goals and dreams.
• Then grab a pen or pencil and a piece of paper and write down everything you just imagined. And that’s it – visualization complete.

In a recent study a group of research subjects were asked to perform this exercise for twenty minutes a day over three days, while a group of control subjects were asked to spend the same amount of time completing a diary of traumatic events. When tested after these exercises, the students who had imagined the bright future measured significantly happier and also healthier physically than the control group. And this was the same when the two groups were reevaluated many months later – so we know this exercise has a very long term benefit too.

Being eager to learn

When we learn, we build new neural pathways in which our memories are stored. And when we want change we must also create new neural pathways. In studies it has been shown that people in the process of studying for a qualification (or who make a point of constantly learning new things) are able to remember and recall information much more easily.

It seems that the more we learn the more we are capable of learning.Therefore, if you want to keep your grey matter as flexible as possible and compliant to the changes you want in your life, you will make the whole process much easier if you adopt an approach of curiosity towards life and always ask yourself questions about anything interesting. To help inspire your curiosity and thirst for knowledge you can try the following set of affirmations, which ideally you should repeat out loud from time to time. (Of course you may not consider that all these affirmations are true to the way you think, so just choose the ones that fit best if you wish, and make up new affirmations too if there are things you would like to be more curious about):

• I am always keen to learn new things.
• I have an active and curious mind.
• I wonder what the world is all about and why I am here.
• I like to understand what makes people tick.
• I am curious about how things work.
• I am interested in other cultures and languages.

If you regularly practice the various exercises in this article, you will help bring your mind and body together into a healthier, more organic whole, and you also will experience greater inner completeness and feelings of wellness.

Robin Nixon is the author of Creative Visualization For Dummies, available in all good book stores and on Amazon Kindle. You can follow him on Twitter as @robinfnixon.

One of the things that makes it harder for us to achieve our goals is the perceived gap between where we are now and where we want to be. The two seem so far apart that getting from one to the other seems inconceivably difficult, and often this puts us off sufficiently that we may not even attempt undertaking the journey.

But using creative visualization you can help yourself overcome this barrier to success by preparing yourself (and your unconscious mind) to be ever alert and ready to take advantage of opportunities when they occur, and to also have the grit and determination to stay focussed on a goal until its completion.

Anyone can use the following technique to help achieve the goals they desire so please think of a goal you have that you are having difficulty attaining. If none comes immediately to mind, stop reading now and spend a moment thinking about it then, when you have chosen a goal, perform the following exercise:

Visualize this

Sit upright in your chair so that your back is straight and your legs are uncrossed and next to each other, with your feet slightly apart. Now rest one hand on each of your thighs with the palm facing upwards and take a few slow, deep breaths. In future when you practice this exercise you’ll remember what you have to do and should close your eyes for best results. But for now simply imagine that your eyes are closed as you follow these instructions:

• Lift your left hand up a couple of inches so that it’s floating in the air. Visualize that it holds the essence of you as you are right now, including who you are, everything you do, the things and people you know, and so on. Keep your hand in that position.
• Now lift up your right hand to the same height and imagine that it is holding the essence of you in the future with your goal accomplished, including who you are then, and everything about you, your life and the people you come into contact with. Keep both hands floating there.
• Spend a little while focussing on each hand in turn, and considering what each represents. Do they feel different in any ways? Is one heavier or lighter than the other? Does one feel warmer or colder? Do you get the impression that one hand is smaller or larger, older or younger, softer or harder? Or do you notice anything else that’s different between the two? Whatever you notice, simply be aware of it.
  
• Now imagine that each of your hands is an island and that between and surrounding them is nothing but miles of clear blue sea.
• See yourself as if you are up in the sky looking down onto these islands and note how considerably far apart from each other they appear. However, over the next few instructions you are going to visualize getting from one island to the other in a variety of different ways in quick succession, and (among other things) the gap between them should appear to diminish.
  
• Start by visualizing that a bridge appears linking the two islands together. It’s a very long bridge covering many, many miles, and there are numerous spans of roadway held up by towers anchored firmly to the ocean floor. Now imagine that you are down on the left island standing on the start of the bridge and see yourself running all the way across until you reach the right island.
• As soon as you reach your destination imagine that you are back at the start again, but this time you have a bicycle and can get across the bridge more easily.
• When you finish that journey go back again to the start and this time you are in your car, so see yourself drive across the bridge in next to no time.
• Now imagine that instead of a bridge there’s a long underwater tunnel linking the islands with a train that you take to get from one to the other. Follow yourself taking this journey.
  
• As soon as you get to the other side imagine that you are back again at the left island and that the tunnel is gone but, instead, you are in a plane. So see it take off and enjoy the journey as you fly from the left to right island. Look down and enjoy the view until you arrive.
  
• Now, quickly changing scene again, and imagine that you are piloting a mini submarine. See your underwater journey along the sea bottom among the seaweed and fishes until you get to the right island.
• Now imagine that you are a world class swimmer and simply swim from the left to the right island. Remember to put yourself right there in the water and feel its splash and the power of your strokes pushing you forwards.
• As soon as you arrive start another journey in which you can fly like an eagle. This time you don’t need any physical mode of transport, you simply jump up into the air on the left island, then flap your wings until you are airborne. Keep on going and gently land on the right island.
• Now return immediately to the left island and see that a zip wire has been erected between the two islands, so climb into the sling hanging from it, feel yourself get pushed off to a speeding start, and sense the wind as it whistles past you. Hear the whine of the roller on the steel wire as you whizz between the islands.
• Next time you return to the left island, find yourself standing on a Star Trek transporter panel when all of a sudden your body starts to fade and become wispy, as you feel all the atoms in it being beamed across to the right island. At some point you notice that more of you is now in the right island and then you fade back into your complete self over there.
  
• For your next journey notice that there are two huge trampolines, one on each island, and so start bouncing higher and higher on the left trampoline until you are ready to take a giant leap that will take you up and at just the right angle to come landing down on the right trampoline, where you bounce a few more times until you come to a rest.
• Finally, see yourself simply standing on the left island and then deciding that you wish to be on the right one. So close your eyes, count to three and open them again, at which time you can see you are now on the right island.
• Now bring your focus back up to your original vantage point in the sky and imagine that you can see that all the means of transitioning between the two islands are in position all at the same time. You can see the bridge and the tunnel linking the two, and for the modes of transport such as the plane and submarine you can see silver strands of energy showing the route they take between the two islands.
• Now remember that the two islands are your hands and that these bridges, tunnels and silver strands are connecting your hands to each other – it feels like there are numerous forms of both matter and energy connecting them together.
• Now slowly bring your hands up until they are at eye level. Then bring them closer towards your head so that each hand is near one of your ears with your head exactly between them.
• Now, with your consciousness lovcated right in the middle of your head, feel all that energy, and all the pathways you made being absorbed into it.
  
• Soak everything in until the bridge, tunnel and silver threads have all been fully assimilated.
• Let your hands fall back onto your thighs, breath a few slow and deep breaths and, when you are ready, open your eyes again.
  

By practicing this exercise you make many new and different metaphorical connections between who and where you are now, and where you want your desired goal to take you (and who you want to be then). This symbolism is especially powerful because it is what your unconscious mind specializes in (just think of how symbolic and visual your dreams are). So by providing these images in rapid succession your unconscious clearly gets the message that you absolutely want to achieve the goal you have set, and it will do everything in its power to help you.

Now you may wonder what on earth your unconscious can do to help you attain your goal, and the answer is a great deal. For example, because it is ever awake and ever vigilant (even when you sleep), your unconscious will make you aware of any opportunities it spots that may come along, even when your conscious attention is elsewhere. For example, a link you might not normally click while browsing the Internet may seem interesting to your unconscious which may then prompt you to investigate it, possibly leading to some information you can use. This works in the same way as when you learn a new word and then hear it everywhere for a few days, because you are primed to look out for it. Your unconscious mind will also help you find the motivation and stamina required to keep working on goals that may take some time to achieve.

On a physical level, every time you think something, new neural pathways are created in your brain. So by visualizing all these different ways of getting from the left to right island, you form a group of related pathways which, by nature of the way our brains work, will then be added to when you consider real world means of achieving your goals. In much the same way that you must often provide a seed crystal in order to grow larger ones, this group of visualizations will work as a seed over which your real actions and methods of achieving your goals will grow.

For dozens more powerful visualizations that will help you achieve the things you desire and the changes you need in life, please check out my book Creative Visualization For Dummies.

According to the Bible and other religious texts we are all descended from an original pair of ancestors, while evolution shows that we all diverged as a species from a common ancestor. Either way, every one of us is related in some way to each other. That’s why we can procreate – our DNA is pretty much the same as each other’s Yet we often categorise the people who come into our lives in order. For example as relations, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and so forth. But we forget that if we can go far enough back, every one of us is a member of the same family.

Just take a look around. Other people are not so different from yourself. They me seem stronger or smarter, braver or more happy, and so on, but deep down they feel the same as you do. They have the same insecurities, the same need for love and acceptance, and the same bodies and minds. However, experience shapes us in the form of our upbringing; the people around us, our environment and so on. People born in India are likely to become Hindus, or perhaps Buddhists (as might people from other eastern countries). Folk from the Middle East, Northern Africa, Indonesia and so on will follow Islam, while much of the western world supports Christianity. No matter how strongly held your religious belief, if you had been born in a different country the chances are extremely high that you would have a different faith.

And the same goes for ways of thinking. The national culture (or perhaps more accurately psyche) of a country like Japan is very different to that of (for example) the US due to widely differing cultures, covering everything from language, to food, working and, in fact, just about everything. And these differences can lead (and have led) to the declaring of borders, which can then go on to cause border skirmishes, invasions and wars. Much of human history over the last couple of thousand years has been devoted to wars over territory, ideology and religion. Yet we are (and always have been) members of the same family, except that we call it the human race – somehow that phrase serves to separate us from the other species on our planet, but it doesn’t imply a sense of family. Nevertheless we are all brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, and sons and daughters (I am from the UK but spent some time in a small city in Texas, and must admit it was welcoming to be called “Brother Robin” by some of our neighbours – the Southern Baptists happily acknowledge that we are all family)

Whenever I used to read posts on the Internet from someone feeling depressed and lonely, and who perhaps craves friends and/or family, often because they have difficulty forming lasting relationships I have often felt prompted to post something in reply to them, but I never knew quite what to say that will be of any help. It seemed to me that there’s nothing you can say in a single post (or even a dozen) that will cure, or even ease, someone’s depression, and it would be presumptuous of me to think that you could. But nowadays I’m learning to live more in the now. Today is all we really have – yesterday is gone, and tomorrow is yet to come. So I am more inclined to try and respond where appropriate. So what I might do is leave a short message with a URL to a website I may have found particularly inspirational. The person can then ignore my message if they choose or if they follow the link I hope it may help lead them on the way out of their current problems – at least I have done something. I still hope I’m not imposing, though.

And the thing is, for anyone feeling the way I described, the best cure of all is  to adopt my approach – to reach out and to help others. After all we are all family, and families look after their own. I have found that there is nothing more conducive to bringing you out of a difficult patch or a depression than helping other people. I’ve been through a few myself, and things have only turned around when I have made the choice to stop worrying and complaining to myself, and to go and seek out others that in some way I can help. And I will be frank. Sometimes I have done helpful things for others purely for my own benefit and not to help specific other people. But by doing so, I have found great friendship and fulfillment and what has started out selfishly has turned into a positive outcome for more than one person.

So this post is dedicated to anyone who feels stuck in one of life’s ruts. Perhaps you feel abandoned and lonely and don’t know what your next step will be. Maybe a depression is setting in and you can’t pull together any motivation. Maybe you simply want a friend. My advice to you, then, is seek out someone who needs something. It could be a nighbour who needs a hedge trimmed, an old people’s home that needs volunteers, a scout group that wants a leader, and so on. If you look you’ll find something. Go out and help that person or group of people, and your life will turn around.

Remember, everyone you know and everyone you come into contact with, and therefore everyone you help, is a member of your family.

My book Creative Visualization For Dummies has much more advice to offer on forming better relationships simply using the power of your imagination and postive thinking.

There’s a fascinating psychological principle known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is a cognitive bias whereby someone who knows a little about a subject is unaware of just how much there is that goes into it, and therefore assumes that they must know pretty much all there is to know about it.

On the other hand, as people learn more about things they tend to discover how much more there is that they don’t yet know. And the more they learn the bigger the gap between their knowledge and the totality of information about the subject there seems to be.

Therefore many highly skilled people often rate their ability in their chosen field as much lower than it really is, so much so in fact that they will often rate their skill level as being lower than the layperson rates his or hers.

Conversely, unskilled people who know just a little about a subject not only rate their skill level far higher than it really is, they often place their ability as higher than experts in the field rate themselves. So, on the one hand you have an unskilled or semi-skilled person rating his or her skill level as higher than that of an expert, and on the other the expert rates their skill level as lower than the unskilled person.

What a perverse world we live in. It certainly accounts for the examples of cognitive bias often seen on shows such as American Idol and X-Factor, in which the big-headed, highly confident contestants are often excruciatingly awful, while the humble ones, with lower self-esteem often surprise with their genuine ability.

It also accounts for how people are all too ready to disagree with things like climate change, because they know just enough about it to think that they know most of what’s needed to know. They look around themselves, see a snow shower, and decide that there’s no such thing as global warming. They also may think there’s a big conspiracy and that only a few scientists support the theory (assumptions that help reinforce your own belief), when in fact over 95% of scientists skilled in the study of climate agree that the world is heating up.

But is there something that we can take from this phenomenon to use in our own lives, apart from (perhaps) choosing to give more credence to things skilled or studied people have to say? I believe there is. For example, if you are qualified in a field but tend to have doubts about your own ability, think about Dunning-Kruger, and perhaps you’ll realize that you are actually quite knowledgeable and capable after all. This may raise your self-confidence and ability to do your work.

There again do you ever find that you take on a task or project only to discover that it’s a lot more difficult than you at first thought? If so, maybe the little you know about something is making you over-confident, and by taking stock you may learn to catch yourself before you begin something that looks easier than it really is. Perhaps you’ll choose to take a course, buy a book or search the Internet first to see if there’s stuff you ought to know before you start.

Certainly when I consider my own knowledge about something, or my ability, if I rate myself highly I will ask myself whether I am being over-confident. And if I don’t rate myself that much I may wonder whether I am putting myself down. In either circumstance my first course of action is generally a trip to Google to check up on the facts. And that has to be a good thing that can only result in greater knowledge, no matter whether I over- or under-estimate my own ability.

I discuss this and other cognitive biases (and how to either avoid or make use of them) in my book Creative Visualization For Dummies, available worldwide on Kindle now, and also now in paperback in the UK (and worldwide in paperback very soon).

Some sports require skill and accuracy more than speed and stamina. These include activities such as archery, pool and snooker, darts, shooting, or mental sports such as quizzes, card games and so on.

You also need to be accurate in team sports where passing the ball without it being intercepted is critical, or when scoring a goal in football or a hoop in basketball, and so on.

Nowadays there’s hardly a professional sport that doesn’t incorporate visualization in some way or another in the training process, so why not take a leaf out of their book and use it for your own purposes, and those of your local soccer or baseball team too, for example?

Why use visualization?

Time and time again it has been demonstrated that by also visualizing participating in a sport you can increase your results as much as (or even more than) through practice alone. Of course you must also physically practice your sport, but when you visualize too you will improve your skills at a far greater rate.

Whether you actively compete in a team sport such as football, basketball or baseball, an individual sport such as tennis, golf or athletics, or simply enjoy a game of pool or darts in your local pub or bar, or even participate in quiz nights (a form of mental sport), this article has visualization exercises you can use to increase your ability and performance.

To help psyche yourself up for greater accuracy, imagine that you are throwing darts at a dartboard (as shown in the figure at the head of this article) and in your mind’s eye see yourself throwing them ever closer to the bullseye.

Visualize throwing darts

Start by aiming at anywhere on the board and see the dart land in an outer segment. Then throw more and more with each subsequent dart landing closer to the center, until you get one into the outer of the two bullseye rings. Keep on throwing like this, noting the weight of the dart in your hand, the feel of your arm and the action of your wrist as you throw, and hit the center bullseye over and again.

Now that your eye is in, try going round the board hitting sections of your choice. For example, aim for all the larger outer sections in order from 1 to 20, then the inner ones, and then do the same for all the small sections on the circumference (the double point areas), followed by the smaller ones further in (treble point areas).

If you have access to a dartboard try practicing throwing darts for real first and see how you do. Then perform the visualization exercises, take a brief rest, and try throwing darts again for real. You should see an improvement after even only one visualization session. And over time, by visualizing as well as practicing, your aim will steadily improve.

You can also try this technique in the following scenarios:

• If you have access to an archery board and related equipment you can try this exercise with those.
• Take a soccer ball and practice shooting goals from varying distances both in real life and as a visualization.
• Practice this exercise at your local bowling alley with minimal modification.
• Do the same with golf and many other sports.

Visualize scoring the winning goal

If you like to participate in team sports, another great visualization exercise is to imagine yourself scoring the winning goal. This can be in a soccer or American football match, in basketball or hockey, or any team sport with a ball and a goal. Simply visualize the last couple of minutes of a game in which the scores are level and then see yourself being passed a golden opportunity by a team member.

Now seize the day and make sure you don’t fumble. Receive the passed ball and kick it into the back of the net, or pitch the basketball into the hoop, or whack the hockey puck into the back of the net. Then hear the final whistle or bell sound as your team all run up to you to congratulate you. Your goal has helped your team to victory.

Of course, you may not play in a goal scoring position in your team, or may even be a goal keeper. In which case modify the exercise to a case in which you make the perfect pass to a team member who then scores that winning goal. Or you could save a goal in a penalty shoot-out, and lead your team to victory that way.

The key to achieving sporting success through visualization is to practice as much mentally as you do physically. The physical exercising will enhance your body and improve muscle memory and technique. The mental exercising will enhance your coordination and build the neural pathways you need in your brain for accuracy and skill.

This article is excerpted from my book Creative Visualization For Dummies, available now in the UK in paperback and on Kindle, and worldwide on Kindle now, and paperback very soon.