Meditation is a technique that helps you relax your body, mind, and soul. It became an important tool therapists use and recommend to their clients.

It is about letting your thoughts come and go and just standing there, on the side, observing them. Meditation comes with numerous benefits for us, as individuals, benefits that will also improve our relationships.

If you have already started practicing meditation, you have probably noticed that you have embarked on a long-term journey.

Yes, meditation can alleviate the symptoms of stress and decrease anxiety and depression, but all these benefits are visible after some time of practice.

Meditation can also help you improve your focus, boost your self-esteem and creativity, only if you practice it consistently.

In the beginning, it may be difficult to not let your mind roam. Thinking about nothing is not something people can do naturally, so it takes practice and focus.

On the other hand, visualization is something we people do naturally.

We often like to imagine how it would be if we won that competition. Or how our experience of speaking in front of many people will feel.

We like to picture and imagine the future, and many of us do this to prepare better for what we think will follow.

So, why not use this power we naturally have to imagine and visualize things to enhance our meditation experience?

Even though for some people it may sound counterintuitive to focus your attention on something when meditation is about letting your mind roam freely and not focus it on something specific, these two can be combined nicely.

There are many types of meditation and some techniques are particular to each of them.

However, these can easily be borrowed and combined with your meditation to enhance it.

So, which visualization techniques to add to your meditation practice?

1. Color Breathing

Color breathing is a visualization technique that can help you improve your overall experience with meditation. This technique is often used in meditation when you want to just boost your mood and start feeling better. At the same time, whenever you feel stressed, start color breathing even if you do not have enough time for a full meditation session. If you practice it consistently, you will train your brain to associate positive emotions with color and boost your mood, argues an essay writing service uk.

So, how to do color breathing? Firstly, you need to think about an emotion or feeling you want to feel after meditation. It can be joy, awe, hope, or love. Then, think about a color you would associate with that emotion. It may be your favorite color or another one you find soothing. After you have chosen your color, you could go to the next step.

The second step aims to incorporate color breathing in your regular meditation session. Prepare for your meditation session. As you start breathing deeply, visualize the color you have chosen and think about what meaning it has for you. Then, imagine how this color slowly embraces you. Feel that emotion it comes with. All your body is that color. As you inhale, you breathe in your chosen color. As you breathe out, you exhale all those negative or unwanted feelings. You can continue this meditation session with color breathing for as long as you like. Your mood will be boosted considerably by color breathing, noted an argumentative essay writer.

2. Visualize Your Goals

Setting goals is something we all do. We all want to graduate, get a job, be promoted, or win a competition. We all sometimes imagine ourselves actually doing this, which comes in naturally. The thing is, our brains have a hard time telling the difference between what is just in our imagination and what has actually happened. This is why so many people are having false memories, remembering something that never happened to happen. Or that things occurred rather differently (you can read about the Mandela effect to discover more on this topic).

Goal visualization is a technique that you can easily add to your meditation practice. Goal visualization can fuel you with positive emotions. For example, many people are anxious and nervous about being promoted and having more responsibilities at work. But if you imagine how this would happen in a happy and confident setting, your brain will learn to associate positive emotions with promotion.

How can you do this? By focusing in your meditation session on your goal and imagining how it would be to become reality. Who are the people who will be there? Where is the action happening? Focus on these details and whenever your mind might tell you that you can’t do this, combat her with your mantra. Find something that motivates you and keeps all these negative thoughts away.

3. Love Visualization

Love visualization is one of the kindest visualization techniques you can add to your meditation practice. Including love and kindness in your meditation can help you feel better and boost your mood. Why is this? Studies have shown that practicing regular kindness and love can help you be more present and kinder to the ones around you. Which is exactly one of the benefits meditation comes with, so you can enhance it by adding love visualization.

How to do it? As you meditate, think about a person you love. Imagine that person and see how she or he is sending you love. Imagine love as light, for example. Let this light reach and hug you. Then, send your love to that person and see how happy her or his face looks. You can then replace that person with someone you do not know so well or with someone you don’t get along with.

4. Guided Imagery

We all have a place where we feel the happiest and most comfortable. A place we often run away to when we are at our lowest. That place can boost our mood even though we can’t be physically there. Because you can recreate while meditating, that happy place of yours.

How to do it? Think about this place where you feel the happiest and that fuels you with good vibes. Then, when you start meditating and relaxing, start imagining this place by making use of all your senses. What do you see? What smells do you sense? How do you feel when you touch the ground? Do this as you breathe slowly and allow this harmony to embrace you.

5. Breathing Visualization

Breathing is an important part of meditation and many types focus on breathing. There are many breathing techniques you can use in your regular meditation practice, but actually visualizing it comes with more benefits.

Breathing is often combined with a mantra, as this is also a technique to train your body to relax. It is common for people who experience high levels of anxiety or panic attacks to practice this, as they can easily calm in those challenging moments.

How to do it? Just get comfortable for your regular meditation session. As you lay down, put one of your hands on your chest and the other on your belly. As you inhale, you can say your first mantra; as you exhale, your second one. Feel how your chest and belly are blowing up.

6. Muscle Relaxation Visualization

Considering the fact that we work for many hours straight, our bodies might start feeling stiff. And because many jobs are now office jobs, the effects of sedentarism are easily visible. There is a visualization technique that aims to help you relax your tensioned muscles and that can easily be added to your meditation practice.

How to do it? When you practice meditation, you can start focusing on a group of muscles you feel tense. As you focus more, they relax more. Let relaxation go through your body and reach other groups of muscles as well.

7. Memory Palace

A memory palace is a memorization technique that is used by many people to memorize long pieces of text, strays of numbers, or other complex information. This can help you both relax, as you come to visit your memory palace, but also boost your cognitive function while you meditate.

How to do it? Imagine a place you know very well. It can be your room in your parents’ house, your new home, or the mountains you roamed all your previous years. Then, attach to each object you come across in that place a set of numbers, words, or sentences. You have the same route every time you go there. Going regularly to your memory palace when you meditate is a nice visualization technique that can help you relax.

Final Words

Meditation comes with so many benefits for your body, mind, and soul. It boosts your mood and improves your wellbeing. It helps you relieve symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. It can help you feel better.

But visualization is also a well-known technique that comes with benefits. Among these are pain relief, improved sleep quality, and greater emotional wellness. These 7 visualization techniques can easily be added to your regular meditation practice to enhance it. Let the light, love, kindness, and relaxation embrace your body and make you more present.