20 years of visualization, I've come full circle!

Visualization and the use of imagery are something I use extensively both for myself and for my clients. It's a tried and true method that I can rely on again and again. When I talk about energy healing, people seem to think "Reiki". Umm...no! Sure I could channel healing energy during a healing session but it isn't my primary focus. Reiki, prana, and any other energy channeling modalities are beautiful but I'm more of a goal oriented person. Tell me your issue, and we'll figure out how to work with it. Also, I don't like suffering for too long, so if there's a faster and more efficient way to solve an issue, I'm in! So while I've read and studied various healing modalities over the past 15 or so years, I would always come back to some form of visualization. I might channel energy at the same time, I might even give you Bach flower remedies, or work with crystals but those are to support whatever I'm doing for the client and the focus will always be on solving the issue primarily with imagery!

It's a very efficient way of working for me and there are so many layers to working with imagination that I have sort of developped my own way of working. You see, for me, imagery is a feedback feed forward system so if somehow the visualization doesn't go as intended, I get more insight on what might be behind the scene and from there I can work to solve the problem. And I took a long winding road to get here.

My journey with visualization and imagery began about 20 years ago. Though I have to say that, in a way, the beginning took place long before that, when I was about 14. Some of you already know that I've been in the so-called 'woo woo' world for as long as I remember. I think I was pretty psychic as a kid, until something happened to shut it off, well, it isn't totally off, as many of you know, I still get a lot of information here and there. Dreams have always been important since I was a little kid. I started learning Tarot when I was 11, yup old news, you already know all this. And then when I was 14 I received a book on shamanism as a gift. I had no guidance, no teachers no one to ask from or turn to. Western shamanism was nothing like the magic culture I was used to, back in Thailand.

The magic tradition in Thailand was more focused on rituals, mantras and prayers. Actually, I would say that you could classified those practices as either ceremonial magic (rituals) and then faith (prayers). The Buddhist stuff is more of ceremonial magic but remember my mom is Muslim so I grew up being very familiar with prayers, loads of prayers. So when my 14-year-old self, for the first time, encounter something involving imagination. It was exotic and so unfamiliar. I couldn't grasp the concept of it. And the book didn't quite explain the mechanism of it, not in a way that my young self would have understood. But I kept the book, I still have the book. Even after 30 years and moving across the globe, I still keep the book. I went back to it again a few years later, still didn't make much sense to me but I knew there was something important I needed to understand.

Then 20 years ago, not going home for school break, I was wandering around St. Petersburg, spending that summer in Russia, I did something I used to do a lot as a child, visit a bookshop! There, I came across a book on The Silva Method. I was intrigued. I finished the book in no time then went on the internet to download MP3 audio file with this method of meditation. First, this was when you pretty much couldn't use the phone and internet at the same time. Remember those days? Second, meditation? Where I'm from, you'd be sat in silence and usually there would be no real guidance and you just have to be there with yourself, your mind, so visualizing a happy place was not my understanding of meditation. Although I later learned that visualization did exist in my culture but it had become so marginalized that it would not be easily found, but anyway, that's another story. So for me, it was new, and to be completely honest I was a little agitated, I mean, is that what people in the West call meditation? How can that be? How do you work on yourself with just imagining yourself on a beach or something? I could not comprehend!

Nevertheless, I listened to those audio files religiously. And it was kind of nice and relaxing! I kept up with it for quite some time. After my graduation from Russia, I began to regularly meditate, the old-fashion way. Then I came across a different version of the Silva method. By this time I already had acquired some CDs for the original Silva's recordings, the Silva Mind Control, Silva Ultramind I think I even got the Silva Ultramind Remote viewing (no I still can't do this, but promise to get back to it at some point!). Then there seemed to be an explosion of all sorts of visualization-based meditation. I tried a lot of them, and a lot of them are based on the Silva method.

I went through phases with visualization. It wasn't always easy, while many think it should be, especially for someone pretty visual. But no, there were times I thought, heck, believed, I couldn't visualize. I hit blocks and walls. There were also times when the instructions said to visualize something but I could not just do it. I would force myself to create the image but I would be sweating and getting frustrated because I couldn't. And I later realized it wasn't because I was unable to visualize. As it turns out, it's my feedback feed forward system, if I can't see it, then something else was going on, that does not allow me to see what I want to see, because if I can see it, it can happen. If it isn't supposed to happen or if something else is at play, I can't see it. Basically, as I see now (pun intended), it's the same channel where I get 'information', so basically if I try to visualize something but my psychic sense picks up something else, then there's a clash and that's when I can't visualize, so to speak.

It took years for me to learn this. Again, no guidance, no teacher, no help. I was on my own. It wasn't because I didn't want help. But this is not something widely practiced in my culture so no point trying to find help from there, my parents definitely couldn't help. I had already moved to Finland and back when I first moved here, god forbid if you even speak of yoga or meditation! People are more open to these things now but back then, I felt like I was in a blackhole, with no way out. And a lot of the online courses I tried are done the western way, which is, buy the product, download the audio/videos and that was all. There was no teacher-student or master-apprentice relationship, you get only one aspect of something and often with no foundation, I mean, download a meditation for this or that, but no background knowledge of how it works. So I had to find my own way, as usual.

But I kept going, I've worked on things, on myself, I've observed, learned, tried, sometimes even divinely guided, helped other people, and then I learned some more. And around spring last year I enrolled in hypnotherapy and NLP training. Then it dawned on me. José Silva was interested in psychology. He must have been familiar with hypnotherapy or at least working with the subconscious mind. Though, one can say that, his method focuses more on the parapsychology, he was interested in psychology and he must have known a lot about mind. His method involves working in the alpha brain state (light trance) and imagery. Now, to think about it, in hypnotherapy, you put people in trance before you either give hypnotic suggestions or work with metaphor, which works with symbols and what is imagery if not a system of symbols?

These two modalies may seem to be very different and are used for different purposes but I can see the similarities in their principles and structure. Throw in a bit of psychic senses like clairvoyance which also works through the subconscious mind and images and I'm getting a full picture of the mental magic that I'm so keen on figuring out and learning. I have to say once again that this way of working has helped me a lot and I keep coming back to it time and time again. I have gone back to reading that book again and it has become clear to me what the book is actually about. And after 20 years of this journey, that is, if you count from the day I actually started practicing, not from when I first read about the power of imagination, I feel like I've come full circle, back to a powerful tool that aims to work with the subconscious mind, on a deep level, on the level that brings profound change. And if you're like me and want to release past pain and suffering as soon as possible so you could finally 'live', then you might want to try a healing modality that works with the mind on a really deep level. I mean, I don't like wasting my life away if I could help, I want to live now. What about you?

If you're interested in working with me, you could book a session here.