One of my favorite tools in the whole wide world gotta be "future visualizations". What are they, you might ask? In a nutshell, people lay down, relax through a guided meditation, then follow my visualizations instructions (think: you find yourself in a green field, ..., it’s now five years in the future,....). And discover a whole new world in the process.

To be honest, I usually try to convince people to do one because I can feel that the future they are imagining is inauthentic. But as with anything intuition, or other types of “magical data”, it’s hard to make a case for why something might be wrong or right. It can only be “validated” through trust, i.e. through one’s own personal experience or by believing an “authority” figure/knowledge source. These visualizations are a shortcut to a lived personal experience that, though they haven't been lived yet, definitely feel very real. And thus trustworty. 

Personal experience of your own possible future is very sticky, and inherently authentic. Also, fun fact, it can be absolutely baffling to the unsuspecting present-day you. I love it when people come out of these visualizations with a sense of “where the hell did that come from, I have never even considered nor imagined that, but yeah I love it”. What I’ve seen over and over again is that our rational mind can be terribly uncreative in imaging our best future and, frankly, most times it is plainly wrong in figuring out what is truly good or interesting to us. Thus, intuition, feelings as decision makers, our subconscious as crystal ball? Yep, all of that and more. Simply because it creates amazing results.

Wanna try them out? Here is a link to a future visualization that I always use for important decision making or finding creative ways forward. 

https://youtu.be/bP1cvxjlAMc (Opens in a new window) (about 20 min)

It starts with a nice, quick relaxation, then the “Imagine you are….” visualization begins. You get the chance to explore three possible futures and spent a couple minutes in each. One of them will be your “if everything stays as it is” future. The other two are your choices. I recommend coming up with them beforehand. For example, I wanted to know what it would be like if I published my Daily Shots on Medium very frequently. And I didn’t have another thing for my second choice, so I just went with “what is something I should know”-type of future. In general, you can pick whatever you want. (Also, the language of the video might be bit esotheric, just ignore that part if you feel uncomfortable with it, there's no need to believe in any of these concepts in order to get great results.)

Here are a few tips for getting the most out of this meditation.

One, be relaxed and in a good to great mood. I like doing visualizations after my nightly shower because of the pure relaxation that is this hot water magic. Also, it’s important to be in a good mood, ideally a state of gratefulness and self-love, because that would mean your mind is open for creative explorations. These visualizations are like guided day dreams and can be just as weird as your typical knocked-out-you dream states. And that’s really important, because…

Two, you know you’re onto something good if everything is just strange (important: just go with the flow no matter what). That’s the beauty about visualizations, you are actually seeing things from a very different angle. If they had been obvious from the get-go, you wouldn’t need to lie down and listen to a guided meditation to figure things out. So strange is good because you know you’re tapping into new knowledge. Like dreams, things might not make sense right away. But what will definitely be really obvious are…..

Three, feelings! That’s the most important takeaway. No matter the images, I want you to be observant about how you feel walking down that particular future. Like me checking out the Medium-publishing option, I didn’t see much. But I felt a lot. Feelings of exhaustion, rat race, being stuck, and so on. There was no need to explore further, it couldn’t have been more obvious how it would do me no good to put any effort towards such a future.

And last but not least, take time to journal and reflect afterwards. First, write down everything as detailed as possible. While you do, I’m sure your brain is already throwing you some extra information to what you just experienced. Like, “oh that scene reminded me of that one time in High School when…”. Which for some reason will be relevant for you to answer your initial question about the future. And second, abstract. Connect the dots, come back with clear takeaways, with statements like “so this means that…”. And voilà, there you have your answers.

Bonus tip, do this whenever you have any type of semi-important to hugely-life-changing decision coming up. Because the deeper, larger, and frankly more intelligent part of you already has an opinion and way better data. And this is how you get it to talk to you.

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From Daily Shot of Insight, Feb 27, 2021 and Feb 4, 2022

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