Your mind is your most powerful tool for achieving relaxation and promoting positive changes in attitude, your perspective, or your feelings. Imagery is the language that your mind uses to communicate with your body. When you picture stressful or negative events in your mind, your body will react to those ideas and you will feel stressed. If you imagine relaxing and loving experiences, your body will respond by loosening up and releasing chemicals that make you feel more positive.

Imagine for a moment that you are biting into
the sourest lemon you can imagine. You bite straight
through the tough yellow skin and into the flesh.
Lemon juice pours out over your tongue...

Most people begin to salivate when they imagine this sensation. You literally have a physical reaction to the imagery.

Here’s another great example. Imagine the sound of fingernails being dragged down a chalkboard (sorry to do that to you, but I’m trying to make a point here). Bringing this to mind for just one second is enough to make most people cringe. These two simple examples reveal how mental imagery can affect you on both an emotional and physical level.

If quick visualization exercises like these can bring about physical changes so easily, imagine how much you can benefit from say, a 30 minute guided imagery meditation, in which you listen to relaxing music and are guided to vividly experience pleasurable and positive experiences! 

"The mind is everything.
What you think you become."

Buddha

"What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve"

Napoleon Hill

We are all constantly conjuring up images in our minds. Heck, just the simple act of daydreaming is a form of visualization. However, casual mental wanderings like this are not nearly as powerful as focussed, goal specific guided imagery. Most of our daily mental activity is fairly undirected, and most of us do not focus on one idea for long enough for it to become ingrained and embodied. Guided imagery takes the natural experience of visualization further, by guiding the images in your mind towards specific life enhancing goals.

The consistent use of positive imagery leads to far deeper changes than common daydreaming does...changes that can result in real healing, and real improvements in your quality of life. 

"You can bring into your life more power, more wealth, more health, more happiness, and more joy by learning to contact and release the hidden power of your subconscious mind."

Dr. Joseph Murphy

Unfortunately, many of us inadvertently use our minds to conjure up negative images. So much of our day is consumed with worrying about the future, or by mentally re-living uncomfortable events that are already in the past. Just as positive imagery can lead to positive results, negative imagery can lead to negative results such as increased stress levels, increased blood pressure, insomnia, a weakened immune system...the list goes on. This is why it is so important that you find time to introduce positive imagery into your life.

By putting just a little time aside to experience a guided visualization, you can eliminate the effects of stress and negative thinking, improve your health, and boost your quality of life in many ways.

Want to try guided imagery meditation for yourself? Click here to download a free guided meditation now.

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Article by Christopher Lloyd Clarke from www.The-Guided-Meditation-Site.com.

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