There are many forms of meditation practice that use visualisation. What is it, and how can we use it effectively?
Visualisation could be described simply as imagining something. That is, bringing to mind, in some form, something that doesn’t actually exist in reality. The value in visualisation is not so much in the act of imagining, as in what comes next.
Visualisation itself is essentially a cognitive activity. We use our cognitive mind to conceive of, and imagine something not there in experience. It is therefore very easy think that we should stay in cognitive activity - imagining more and more nuances in our visualisation. This, however, is likely to lead to avoidance and dissociation. We are effectively using our ability to visualise to distract ourselves from our experience - presumably our painful experience. This will likely lead to more pain in future.
However, we can instead take advantage of a curious feature of the brain: when we imagine something, we commonly feel in our bodies the same as we would if we experienced that very thing in real life. If we visualise something, we can then engage with the triggered bodily sensation, and thus realistically rehearse the visualised scenario.
What is happening here is that we evoke the same predictive processes in our brain with visualised scenarios as we do in real life scenarios. Thus, we can feed new sensory experience into our mental models of the world, changing them for real - making lasting change in our lives, initiated with changes to our predictive models entirely initiated with our imagination.
This technique can be used both for “negative” and “positive” experience.
When something is painful, or unpleasant, we can bring it to mind, watch how the body responds, and meaningfully explore our interpretations of this experience. It can be surprising to see that our attitude to our experience (meta-cognition) is typically far more important in determining its valence (pleasent/unpleasantness) than the immediate experience. So exploring our attitude, and the ideas we form about the meaning of the experience, can sometimes profoundly impact our experience of the unpleasant things.
Used positively, there might be something that we wish were the case, but isn’t. Using visualisation, we can help our mind rehearse for the positive possibility. We get to feel what it would be like were it to happen. And by doing this, we orient our mind towards it happening rather than it not happening and, perhaps surprisingly, make it more likely to happen.
Visualisation is a valuable tool that is often used in the Odoki Method, as, when used in a guided form, it can provide a very direct means to change people’s experience. “Oh, I didn’t expect that” is a common retort after an effective short session of Odoki visualisation.