Visualization – Frantic Shanti

Tall Like a Mountain: A Meditative Visualization

In dealing with anxiety, I’ve come to accept that while fearful thoughts come and go, I remain the same.

Visualizations have been helpful in realizing this. One of my favorites, the one made famous by Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD — creator of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program — is the Mountain Meditation, and I value this visualization particularly because it is so meaningful in its description.

For this meditation, you settle into your seat and bring your attention to your body. Scanning your different parts, from your feet to your head. Feeling yourself breathe as you go. No need to change anything; you’re simply noticing sensations.

Imagine your ideal mountain…and then become it.

As you sit with eyes closed, shift your thoughts to a beautiful mountain, tall and stately. Imagine the details about it, it can be whatever kind of mountain you choose. Steep or gently sloping, rocky or carpeted with greenery. Allow the image to form itself: the mountain is stable, majestic and unperturbed regardless of the season or weather.

Then, once you have a clear picture of your mountain…allow yourself to become the mountain, settling into its form and taking on its characteristics. Feel yourself grounded in its stillness.

Sitting as the mountain, imagine the seasonal changes and the different weather that each brings. Through the snow of winter that blankets everything, the spring thaw as nature awakens and buds burst open, the summer teeming with life under the warmth of the sun, and autumn with its changing colors and cooler breezes that move you into a quieter state in preparation for the coming winter again.

All these bring wind, precipitation and occasionally harsh conditions whether they be cold or heat. But the mountain still sits as it always has, unmoving and unbothered.

And so you, as the mountain, also sit in the midst of different conditions. When you take on the garb of the mountain, you link with its strength and stability and unchanging nature from day to month to year. This meditation encourages us to see through the chaos of our everyday lives and find the persistent calm behind it.

This is one of my favorite meditations because it carries so much meaning. Below is a YouTube video of Dr. Kabat-Zinn leading a 20-minute Mountain Meditation:

Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mountain Meditation

If you would like to read a version of it, PalouseMindfulness.com has provided their own adapted transcript of Kabat-Zinn’s Mountain Meditation in a pdf file. Alternatively, googling “mountain meditation” will also bring up a nice variety of recordings.

I encourage you to try this when you feel you need extra grounding.

Believing in My Abilities: A Superpower for 2023

I’m calling 2023 my “year of calm”, because I’m going to be nuturing a deep, conscious, peaceful state of being. This is my superpower.

Since my cancer diagnosis six years ago, I’ve worked at combatting the rawness of emotion by making space, and one of the things that I’ve found is very important in doing so is the feeling of self-efficacy: the idea that I, in fact, can step back from frightening or obsessive thoughts and ruminations. Not to repress them, but to observe them without getting sucked in.

Breathing deeply, relaxing, I create space around myself. Relief from the rawness of emotion in my face. Grounded, I watch the world from the safety of my calm bubble.

I flex my superpower of quieting my thoughts by visualizing this scenario: I imagine that I’m being chased by something scary (monsters, zombies, another cancer diagnosis…). But a split-second before something grabs me, I slow everything down, feeling into my extremities and making space all around me. I imagine this as a pearlized bubble forming around me and the calmer I am, the deeper my breaths, the more protected I become. If I believe in my ability to calm myself, no matter how close the monster is to me, they can’t touch me.

My calm demeanor allows me to float in my bubble. I see everything around me, including the things that terrify me. But from within that pearl, sounds are a bit more distant and the view is a little clouded, as if I am watching through a gentle haze. Inside I am firmly grounded and aware in my body. Confident that I’m safe in the present moment. And as long as I believe it, I am.

This might seem like an overly simplistic view of anxiety and it’s not meant to belittle what someone else might experience. I’ve been through those feelings of anxiety run amuck — at that point in my life this would not have worked. What I was experiencing was very real and intense. Having emotions constantly “in your face” chips away at the perception that you’ll ever being able to get a handle on them.

When I believe in my ability to calm myself, I calm myself.

After years of practice in grounding, mindfulness and meditation, I can attest to the fact that believing in my ability to calm myself has been critical in helping combat anxiety. Acquiring that level of confidence was a process of consistent mindful meditation, on good days and bad days. But now that I’ve gotten a fingerhold on it, every time I am able to calm myself, my self-efficacy is strengthened.

Because as anxious as my thoughts can be, and as loud as they may seem, they are only inside my head. Remembering that has given me the greatest superpower in the world.

What Would You Like to Think About? – Visualizing a Positive Headspace

Some time back, I listened to a lovely guided meditation on the Insight Timer app by Emma Polette in which she instructed the listener to “feel how you want to feel”. I wrote a post about this because I thought it was a perfect morning exercise, one that helps train you to establish a sense of awareness of how much control you yourself have in how you feel.

Well, I wanted to revisit this concept but with a focus on thoughts, since so many of us deal with overactive minds.

Take a comfortable seat and think…what would you like to fill your head up with?

Find yourself a quiet spot and turn your attention to your thoughts. Regardless of how much brain chatter you’re currently experiencing, consider what you would like to be thinking about.

That’s it. Your mind may be cluttered with worries, but IF you could think about something pleasant and calming, IF that’s where your mind’s focus could be, what you be thinking about?

Allow yourself to sink into this. Maybe your mind would be focused on potential successes in your career, troubleshooting a problem that you haven’t had time to devote attention to? Maybe you would simply focus on the task at hand, without intrusive thoughts invading your headspace? Maybe you would sit quietly without feelings of self-blame or incompetence? Or imagine yourself breezing through a situation with a difficult individual?

Ah, headspace! There’s nothing more delicious than getting a nice big helping of perspective.

The act of asking ourselves what we would like to be thinking about requires us to take a step back and make space for it. The realization that we have the ability to decide what to think about unshackles us from our thoughts. The more we do this, the more we widen the gap between what we think and our concept of ourselves, making it easier to observe the thoughts before us rather than to be sucked into the torrent of images and feelings that course through our minds.

What we fill our minds with is so powerful in terms of affecting certain wanted outcomes. It is often during periods of mindfulness meditation that things I’ve forgotten come back to me, I realize solutions to problems or come up with useful ideas. That’s what a calm mind is perfect for.

And so often, people lament that things are not they way they want them to be. So why not use that opportunity to truly feel into and savor what your mindset would be if things felt good? And then, if it’s available to you, maintain that mindset.

What would you be thinking…and how would that feel? A sense of peace and self-confidence? Perhaps space, distance from negative thoughts.

Give it a try and see how it feels.

Presence by Touch: A Visualization

Staying present is key for not letting your thoughts take you on a wild ride.

Maintaining presence, however, takes practice so I’m always on the lookout for new ways to imagine the state of being in the “now”. Some of these are simpler exercises than others, but the upside of a more “complex” technique means that all my mental energy remains on staying present instead of, say, worrying whether I embarrassed myself at a party three nights ago.

The following is a visualization and mental exercise rolled into one:

What if only what you’re touching exists and everything else falls into nothingness?

Seated, close the eyes. Breathing deeply, allow everything that is around you to fall away in your mind, leaving only those points where your body makes contact with the surface beneath you.

Imagine that the soles of your feet sit on top of sole-shaped pieces of support material. Your buttocks and thighs contact like-shaped material, as does any place your back rests against your chair. If you touch your fingers to the side of your chair seat, small oval-shaped pieces of material appear where your fingers make contact.

Everything else disappears against a background of light (or darkness, if that is more calming). The chair and floor and even the room you are in? Gone. The point of this visualization is maintaining focus on only what you are physically experiencing at any given moment.

It is a strange sensation to imagine, floating through the ether but still feeling support from the slightest bits of material that touch you. This is the ultimate in being 100% present and turns the concept of object permanence on its head.

You don’t feel it? It doesn’t exist.

Our brain wants to fill in the parts that we can’t see because the brain has formulated an image of what is out there. However, in this practice we try to do the opposite–let go of what we do not have immediate physical evidence for.

This is a good analogy for dealing with thoughts that our brain fabricates based on the expectations that it has. What if we let go of them, if only for a short while, and simply sit in the stillness of what is happening right now?

Launching into Space: A Visualization for Creating Distance

In my continuing quest to find ways to calm myself and soften anxious thoughts, I often resort to visualizations. They are effective in putting the breaks on distressing thought patterns, creating space and encouraging a broader perspective.

My clinical counselor offered the visualization I’m introducing here. It works similarly to “thought container“, which is a visualization in which you create a container for your stressful thoughts, put them in there, lock the container up and place it on a shelf.

You decide how you’d like your rocket to look. Serious and foreboding or cute and shiny?

However, this one goes a step further. For this visualization, imagine a shiny space capsule on a launch pad, of whatever style and era that suits you. Gather up your troubling thoughts and send them towards the capsule, marching them up the ramp and in through the door. You can wave good-bye as the thoughts enter and settle into comfy seats, safely belted in.

Your thoughts are not “bad”. They simply elicit negative reactions in your body. And right now you want to loosen their grip on you.

When all those stressful images are inside, close the airlock/door. It’s up to you how that’s going to look. Perhaps it’s a high-tech electronic door that shuts and locks remotely so you don’t have to be close by. Or maybe it looks like a massive bulkhead, with a wheel that you yourself physically crank shut and secure so that you can be sure that nothing slips out.

When the capsule is secured. Start the countdown to launch. Or just press a button and shoot it off into space immediately. You have full control here.

But here’s the thing: this is a visualization to create distance, not to completely eradicate those thoughts. Because that’s impossible. They will not simply disappear. However, you can give yourself a little break from them, which is what this lauch is about.

Your stressors are still there, but it’s easier to learn to deal with them from down here. Give yourself some space.

Where does the capsule go? To the Moon. It will rocket off the Earth and land on our satellite neighbor. Point your telescope at the Moon at night and you’ll see the capsule, knowing that those thoughts are there but far enough away that they don’t torment you. You’re not trying to forget about them completely. Instead, practice dealing with them where they’re not an in-your-face threat.

In this way, you don’t repress or avoid, you give yourself breathing space and the opportunity for calm.

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I admit that if you’ve been particularly beleaguered by stressors, it would be very tempting to treat the rocket like a clay pigeon and blast the whole thing to bits…and maybe there’s a great idea for a video game there. But truly, it may be easiest to handle them by releasing the thoughts into the ether.

Yes, they’ll be back. And so will the chance to take a deep breath and send them off again.

Being in Your Body: A Mindfulness Visualization

I came across a delightful mindfulness visualization on the Calm meditation app, presented by meditation teacher Jeff Warren who credits his teacher, Dan Clurman, with relating the idea of this exercise.

It is an effective and immersive way to ground yourself into the present moment with the emphasis on being in your body.

Imagine that your body is an hour glass and that the falling sand brings awareness as it fills the glass, from the bottom up.

Imagine that you are an hourglass and your awareness is the cool sand that falls from above. First, bring your awareness down into your feet and ankles, feeling into the sensations there, filling up not only that part of your body, but also inviting attention into the space between your feet and around them at the bottom of the hourglass. Feel the level of your awareness rise.

Now invite your awareness to fill up your legs, while still keeping attention on your feet and ankles. Notice how the level of these “sands of awareness” travels up and fills out the space up to your hips. Feel into how that feels, not trying to change anything, but simply noticing any sensations.

In this way, continue to work your way upwards, allowing these “sands” to gradually fill up your body as they empty from your mind. Allow the swirling thoughts to release and drop down to light up your lower limbs, your entire torso, your arms and shoulders little by little. Maintain awareness of the parts of your body that have awakened already, so that as you move along in this way, the sensations in your body build and you feel the liveliness of the present moment in them.

Finally, coming to the top of your head, feel into all the sensations vibrating through your entire body, perhaps gentle tingling in your feet and legs or a subtle pulsing in your arms and hands. Maybe the awareness of movement through your intestines, the beating of your heart and even the areas where your body makes contact with the surface that supports it.

In this way, you bring the whole of your body into the present, not focusing on just one part, but on everything that makes up your physical presence, and also the space around your physical presence, while at the same time relieving your mind of the pressures exerted by thinking. As your body fills, your mind empties and thoughts are replaced by a sense of peace and well-being.

I’ve tried this a number of times and found it to be both grounding and uplifting simultaneously and an effective way to bring myself out of my head and into the here and now. If you’re looking for a different way of engaging in a body scan, give it a try.

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Please note that a form of this meditation appeared on the Calm app on April 29, 2022, as an installment of Jeff Warren’s Daily Trip.

While I am a subscriber to Calm, I do not receive compensation for writing about the app. I am simply a very satisfied user.

Making Space Through Breath: A Visualization

I’ve posted previously about the sensations I’ve experienced in the midst of anxiety, as if the stressor is right in my face, raw and unescapable.

Combatting this feeling has been my number one priority, since anxiety overtakes me before I even know it, triggering my fight-or-flight response. Once my sympathetic nervous system gets going, getting it “back in the box” can be difficult, possibly taking days, depending on the intensity of the stressor.

Anxiety can make us feel like we’re trapped and suffocating.

My current strategy is to create protective distance for myself in a very simple way. And it consists of visualizing an expansion of the space around my body.

It goes something like this: Imagine you are inside a deflated balloon. If you are experiencing tighteness in your head or chest, this serves as an effective analogy, particularly if your balloon is constricting you. Without letting your mind be consumed by the tightness, allow yourself to acknowledge the stressor that surrounds you.

Then, taking a deep breath in, exhale through pursed lips and inflate that space around you. Imagine how it feels to expand the balloon and release that clinging sensation. Feel the fresh air moving against your skin as the space around you continues to broaden.

Maybe you begin with the area around your head first, as if creating a bubble around it allows oxygen to flow freely, then move the expansion towards the torso, protecting and releasing the heart, lungs and other vital organs.

Or perhaps begin with the chest if that’s where the constriction feels greatest. Anxiety can squeeze your breath, so focus on mentally removing that weight from your sternum and ribs, visualizing an expansion of the free space around your chest with a deliberate slowing of breath. This takes some work, a back-and-forth between imagining space expanding around you and your breath taking advantage of the room that it has.

If your chest is mired too deeply in anxiety, turn your attention to your extremities, starting with the feet and hands, getting a foothold there and allowing the sensation of space to move slowly towards the center of your body.

The idea is to E-X-P-A-N-D the space around you, dispelling the feeling of closeness and suffocation that results in the wild urge to flee. Note that this is not avoidance of the stressful situation. You are acknowledging its existence…and then creating room so that your brain has space and time in which to think, to know that it’s protected from words and sensations and fearful possibilities. To know that it’s safe in the “now”.

Try this the next time you have a quiet moment. As with many of these techniques, it is helpful to practice in times of calm, to feel into what that sensation of space feels like. The more we practice, the clearer and more familiar that sensation becomes, and we can draw upon that feeling during stressful times.

Breathing into Limbs: A Grounding Visualization

I’m perpetually on the lookout for different ways to ground myself.

When things get tough and I feel my anxiety rising, I’ve gotten better at pausing and pulling a grounding technique out of my “mental tool bag” before the feelings become too intense.

One that I came up with recently works quiet well, especially if you can take a quick break and find a quiet corner.

As I breathe, I visualize my breath inflating my limbs, filling them with relaxation.

The idea behind this one is that you take a few deep breaths to help slow your breathing down, and then start imagining that your breath is going down into one arm, inflating it.

I’ve visualized it in two ways. The first being breathing into the arm as if it were a balloon that inflates in all directions, all the way down to the fingertips, until it’s completely full. I imagine it glowing from within.

The second entails imagining the breath filling the arm in the way that a fern leaf unfolds. The expansion starts at the shoulder, then upper arm, elbow, lower arm, wrist, hand and finally fingers. As the arm fills with the inhalation, it brightens. This visualization is best when your breathing has already slowed considerably, as it may take a longer breath for your entire limb to sense the serial expansion down to your fingertips.

If my breathing has slowed enough, I imagine the breath entering my limb gradually, just like a fern leaf gently unfurls, part by part.

Either way, I wiggle my fingers at the end of the in-breath, and then as I exhale, the fingers fall still again and the breath exits my arm as it arrived.

Then I do the same with my other arm, followed by one leg and then the other.

On days that I’m really rushed, I might only have time for one limb, particularly if I’m sitting at my desk at work. But that’s okay. Even that short bit is better than letting stress run away with me. That little pause may be exactly what I need.

If this “extremity inflation” sounds too complicated in the heat of the moment, I urge you to try it when you’re lying in bed with your eyes closed. Then you can focus on the sensation of expansion and get familiar with it, so that when you need to call upon it in a stressful situation, you’ll have an easier time bringing up that imagery.

My limbs glow as the breath brings brightness into them.

What I particularly like about this visualization is that it’s a touch more complex, and therefore requires more attention from you. The inhalation all the way to the wiggling fingers makes it more difficult to be thinking about other things. So while it may demand more, I feel that it also delivers more, since everything else decreases to a dull roar in the background as you visualize the air rush in and inflate your body.

And of course, there are different variations of this that you can play with, such as expanding your entire body.

If you are able to practice with this, or even duck out to the bathroom for a few moments of eyes-closed peace, I think you’ll find it a lovely way to give your nervous system a needed break.

Grounding Through Mental Tracing

I’ve written before many times about different “grounding” techniques. Grounding is what helps move us out of the chatter in our heads and brings us into the present moment, where we can pause and realize that we are safe. It helps put space between our ourselves and both fears about the future and regrets about the past that may unnecessarily cloud our minds.

On days like those, I need to fine-tune my focus. This calls for a grounding technique that won’t be as easy to derail.

Body scans are some of my favorite grounding and calming go-tos. But recently, I was introduced to tracing the outline of the hand with your mind, a focus on just one part of the body. I tried this and found that it worked brilliantly!

As kids, we traced our hands to help us draw; now, it can help us stay present.

Just like when, as a child, you started a drawing using the outline of your hand by placing it on a piece of paper and tracing the around your fingers with a pencil, you can do the same thing mentally. Imagine the sensation of a point of pressure (say, an invisible crayon) moving up your wrist to the outside of your pinkie, around the fingertip, and down the other side into the hollow between the fingers…and doing the same as it moves up and down each finger until it ends up on the outside of the thumb and travels back down the wrist.

What makes this so effective for me is that it is a simple visualization that requires a bit more concentration, and yet it is still uncomplicated. That means that it gives my monkey mind a little extra to focus on, but not so much that it becomes a struggle.

Try it next time you need grounding and want to trying something different.

How Do You Want To Feel?

I’ve really been enjoying a guided meditation on Insight Timer by Australian trainer and life coach Emma Polette, entitled “Morning Visualisation Meditation”. In fact, it’s been the first meditation that I’ve done every morning for the past month. What makes me like it so much? It reminds me that I can choose the emotional state with which I enter into my day.

Emma facilitates this by instructing the listener to “allow yourself to feel how to want to feel today.” I love this concept! So many of us want to be calm or happy or courageous, but we look at it as a cognitive endeavor and get nowhere with it. Emma reminds us to actually feel what it feels like. If my goal is to feel peaceful, then I imagine what it would feel like, if I were actually peaceful – I generate those feelings in my body.

By feeling into the sensations of a positive state, we can lessen the severity of negative emotions. It takes consistency and practice, but is worth the effort.

This takes practice and focus, but the payoff is wonderful. Think of it as establishing a new habit – repetition is necessary in order to seal it into your daily routine. The more you bring up those feelings in your body and really feel into all the different sensations associated with them, the easier it is to invoke that feeling the next time. And that next time might be a time of stress, when you’re in particular need of soothing.

Just as you may associate a meditation cushion with a sense of grounding, or a certain time of the day with a mindful mood because that’s when you always meditate, you can also improve your ability to bring up positive sensations that help keep you present and calm. All it takes is consistent practice.

I should mention that this is not to suggest that if you’re feeling strong negative emotions or succumbing to anxiety it’s a flaw of some kind. There will be numerous occasions when we get swept up by distressing thoughts. Sometimes it will be hard to release them. And that’s okay.

But I find it very empowering to start my day in a positive frame of mind, knowing that I am not helpless against stressors. Just as how in mindfulness meditation when we realize that we’ve lost focus and have slipped down a rabbit hole, we simply return to the breath, we can also notice how it feels in our bodies to experience stress or anger or whatever negative emotion settles down on us.

It might be a tightness in the chest that shortens our breath and sends our heart racing. It might be a cold sensation in our stomach and lower abdomen that elicits nausea, or it may be a hot flush that toasts our cheeks. With the awareness of what we are experiencing in the moment, we can gently breathe through those bodily sensations, relax the agitation and then remember how it would feel to feel the more pleasant sensations that we’ve practiced every morning.

How would you rather be feeling right now? Can you feel it?