Visualization and the Law of Attraction: If You Cannot See It, How Can You Attract It?

When one of my friends was a child, just eight years old, she wanted to live on a farm. This was because of reading books about horses and farms, and she told me she would visualize her horse running alongside the school bus on her ride home every day from school. At twelve, she was drawing her house, her pastures, and her barn out on graph paper and to scale. When her parents were divorced, she tells me that she used those drawings and the three dimensional farm she pictured, with corn growing, a tree swing, a wooded path, and horses in the green pasture to give her comfort during some painful times.

Through college, a marriage that didn't work out, some financially difficult times, she kept this vision, never letting go of the dream. You know that I am going to tell you that she did get her farm, and she is still there today, taking in and caring for older horses. The how- she- got- there- story is a longer, more circuitous tale, but here is the important message: she began a visualization journey, sending out her desire to the Universe as she built and grew the image in her mind and thereby attracting what she wanted in her life. Her personal vision gave her comfort in tough times and peace when times were OK. She didn't know exactly how to get there, but she sure knew she would, somehow, someday.

Visualization is a key aspect of the Law of Attraction. Psychology, meditation, coaches and transformation specialists all use this tool in their practice to help transport us, change us and give us peace. It has been said that visualization is the bridge, the mechanism by which our inner world is linked with the outer world. Once this bridge is in place, it will be possible for your inner world to flow smoothly into the outer world all around you. Here are a few ideas to help you see what it is you really desire:

Use all your senses: If it is that top job in your company you want, then ask yourself what it would be like to be the position you want. What view would you see from your corner picture window office? Can you smell the leather of your big office chair? Do you appreciate the respect given to you and give it back to others? What would you be wearing and doing, how would you "be" in this job? How would you interact with others?

Use music: Music is an incredibly powerful emotional stimulus. You have felt this yourself when you hear a love song from when you first fell in love, a patriotic song during the 4th of July, calming classical music when you need peace, or lively jazz that makes you want to dance. Pick a musical piece that helps you visualize what you desire, and play it while you visualize your dream. In time, your images and the music will paint a fantastic vision.

Use movement: Both in your visualization and in the "real" world, movement makes the visual-sensual picture come alive. Maybe your dream is to see the world. Feel yourself moving along in the jet, hiking on the Napali Coast, walking through St. Petersburg, photographing zebras in the wild. In the real world, dance, yoga, working out and other forms of body movement are great ways to put your body in the perfect zone for visualization.

Use your emotions: Visualization is more than just painting a picture in our mind. We must attach emotions to that picture. When you are in the job of your dreams, do you feel power, achievement, ambition? When you have money to spend, do you experience relief, excitement, opportunity? When you are traveling the world, is it awe, wonder, appreciation that runs through you? Whatever your vision, you can make it a more real and powerful message by accompanying it with your real and true emotions.

Use resources: Having trouble getting the details down in your vision? Get online or go to the library and research your dream. If it is travel, then there are plenty of visuals out there for you to reference. If it is money, why not find a few examples of what people do with their money? Maybe it is the farm my friend dreamed about - find a coffee table book on beautiful farms. Or better yet, walk down a country road!

Use flexibility: You may find as you try these visualization tips that what you thought you wanted isn't really what you want at all. Yet many of the people I work with discover the initial vision was really just a step on the way to a bigger, more meaningful and more satisfying dream.

With a clear, colorful, emotional, sensual picture in your mind, you are sending out energy that will attract your deepest desires. Dreams really can come true.

Meditation MP3, Relaxation Music, or New Age CDs - Which is Best for Creative Visualization?

Listening to music is one of life's great pleasures, enjoyable not just for the sounds themselves or the artistry that creates them, but also for the mental and emotional states music helps us reach. The music industry has responded to our need to relax and reduce stress by producing special recordings to soothe our frazzled nerves, but a meditation MP3 can do much more than relaxation music. These sophisticated recordings can connect us with powerful inner talents that have been lying dormant for years, waiting to be unleashed.

The Tremendous Power of Music for Creative Visualization

If you're interested in this topic at all, there's a good chance that, like me, you've listened to a fair amount of instrumental, "New Age" CDs in your time. Names like Kitaro, Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre, Andreas Vollenweider, Yanni, etc. will be familiar to you. I always preferred instrumental music over vocals, as the vocals distracted me from visualizing whatever it was I wanted to concentrate on. Although I enjoyed music in its own right, I freely confess that I have long used it as a tool, helping me to forget about quotidian problems and focus on a better future. And it works! Music is very, very powerful when you learn to ride the waves of emotion that can be generated by particularly resonant recordings. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was actually using music to alter my state of consciousness.

What is the Difference between a Meditation MP3 and Relaxation Music?

Relaxation music is generally not designed to be an emotional roller-coasters at all. Its main objective is to help us relax and relieve stress, an important goal in the modern world to be sure, but a somewhat limited one nonetheless. Typically, such recordings feature soothing nature sounds such as waves crashing on a shoreline with seabirds calling out overhead, whale songs, or a waterfall or rainstorm in some imaginary, moss-covered rain forest in the Pacific Northwest. There are even more esoteric recordings based on "space sounds" - electro-magnetic waves detected by the Voyager and other space probes. Such recordings can definitely help us achieve a relaxed, Alpha state, wherein the brain's dominant frequency slows down and becomes more powerful. This can be very beneficial in combating hypertension, and opens the door to deeper levels of the mind. But it is only the beginning of what is possible with sound today.

The Meditation MP3 Revolution - Towards Complete Mind Control

Meditation MP3s are more than just music. While they generally do feature some kind of instrumental music, which may be classical, New Age, or traditional relaxation fare as discussed above, they include specially-designed tones that are intended to encourage the listener's brain to operate at a particular frequency. It has long been known that the brain exhibits a frequency-following response, tending to mimic the wave forms of sensory stimuli. Sound waves are the easiest way to harness this phenomenon to our advantage, and a raft of brainwave entrainment recordings has resulted. The specific techniques employed include binaural beats, monaural beats, and isochronic tones.

These special recordings can be used to take you places far beyond the reach of ordinary New Age CDs or relaxation music, entraining sound frequencies that are below the normal range of the human ear (20Hz - 20 KHz) and which correspond to the Alpha, Theta, or Delta brainwaves associated with the subconscious and the unconscious mind. Even the more exotic waves discovered quite recently, like Gamma and Lambda waves, can be entrained with a well-engineered meditation MP3.

For the purposes of creative visualization, a meditation MP3 targeting the Theta wave, or the boundary region between Alpha and Theta, can be extremely effective, as the mind is particularly receptive to "reprogramming" in this state. (For more on Theta, see my companion article here on Ezines, Exploring Theta Waves - The Exciting Implications of Theta Brain Waves for Learning and Memory.) The right recording can get you to this state in as little as 10 - 15 minutes, and what you do once you get there is entirely up to you!

Communion With The Infinite - The Visual Music of the Shipibo Tribe of the Amazon

The Magical Art of the Shipibo People of the Upper Amazon

Underlying the intricate geometric patterns of great complexity displayed in the art of the Shipibo people is a concept of an all pervading magical reality which can challenge the Western linguistic heritage and rational mind.

These patterns are more than an expression of the one-ness of creation, the inter-changeability of light and sound, the union or fusion of perceived opposites, it is an ongoing dialogue or communion with the spiritual world and powers of the Rainforest. The visionary art of the Shipibo brings this paradigm into a physical form. The Ethnologist Angelika Gebhart-Sayer, calls this "visual music".

The Shipibo are one of the largest ethnic groups in the Peruvian Amazon. These ethnic groups each have their own languages, traditions and culture. The Shipibo which currently number about 20,000 are spread out in communities through the Pucallpa / Ucayali river region. They are highly regarded in the Amazon as being masters of Ayahuasca, and many aspiring shamans and Ayahuasqueros from the region study with the Shipibo to learn their language, chants, and plant medicine knowledge.

All the textile painting, embroidery, and artisan craft is carried out by the women. From a young age the Shipibo females are initiated by their mothers and grandmothers into this practice. Teresa a Shipiba who works with us on our Amazon Retreats tells that "when I was a young girl, my mother squeezed drops of the Piripiri (a species of Cyperus sp.) berries into my eyes so that I would have the vision for the designs; this is only done once and lasts a lifetime".

The intricate Shipibo designs have their origin in the non-manifest and ineffable world in the spirit of the Rainforest and all who live there. The designs are a representation of the Cosmic Serpent, the Anaconda, the great Mother, creator of the universe called Ronin Kene. For the Shipibo the skin of Ronin Kene has a radiating, electrifying vibration of light, colour, sound, movement and is the embodiment of all possible patterns and designs past, present, and future. The designs that the Shipibo paint are channels or conduits for this multi-sensorial vibrational fusion of form, light and sound. Although in our cultural paradigm we perceive that the geometric patterns are bound within the border of the textile or ceramic vessel, to the Shipibo the patterns extend far beyond these borders and permeate the entire world.

One of the challenges for the Western mind is to acknowledge the relationship between the Shipibo designs and music. For the Shipibo can "listen" to a song or chant by looking at the designs, and inversely paint a pattern by listening to a song or music.

As an astonishing demonstration of this I witnessed two Shipiba paint a large ceremonial ceramic pot known as a Mahuetá. The pot was nearly five feet high and had a diameter of about three feet, each of the Shipiba couldn't see what the other was painting, yet both were whistling the same song, and when they had finished both sides of the complex geometric pattern were identical and matched each side perfectly.

The Shipibo designs are traditionally carried out on natural un-dyed cotton (which they often grow themselves) or on cotton dyed in mahogany bark (usually three or four times) which gives the distinctive brown colour. They paint either using a pointed piece of chonta (bamboo) or an iron nail with the juice of the crushed Huito (Genipa americana) berry fruits which turns into a blue- brown-black dye once exposed to air.

Each of the designs are unique, even the very small pieces, and they cannot be commercially or mass produced. In Lima I met with a woman who had set up a government funded community project which amongst other matters established a collective for the Shipibo to sell their artisan work and paintings. She tells that a major USA corporation (Pier 1 Imports), enamoured by these designs ordered via the project twenty thousand textiles with the same design, this order could never be fulfilled, the Shipibo could simply not comprehend the concept of replicating identical designs.

The Shipibo believe that our state of health (which includes physical and psychological) is dependent on the balanced union between mind, spirit and body. If an imbalance in this occurs such as through emotions of envy, hate, anger, this will generate a negative effect on the health of that person. The shaman will re-establish the balance by chanting the icaros which are the geometric patterns of harmony made manifest in sound into the body of the person. The shaman in effect transforms the visual code into an acoustic code.

A key element in this magical dialogue with the energy which permeates creation and is embedded in the Shipibo designs is the work with ayahuasca by the Shipibo shamans or muraya. In the deep ayahuasca trance, the ayahuasca reveals to the shaman the luminous geometric patterns of energy. These filaments drift towards the mouth of the shaman where it metamorphoses into a chant or icaro. The icaro is a conduit for the patterns of creation which then permeate the body of the shaman's patient bringing harmony in the form of the geometric patterns which re-balances the patient's body. The vocal range of the Shipibo shaman's when they chant the icaros is astonishing, they can range from the highest falsetto one moment to a sound which resembles a thumping pile driver, and then to a gentle soothing melodic lullaby. Speaking personally of my experience with this, is a feeling that every cell in my body is floating and embraced in a nurturing all-encompassing vibration, even the air around me is vibrating in acoustic resonance with the icaro of the maestro. The shaman knows when the healing is complete as the design is clearly distinct in the patient's body. It make take a few sessions to complete this, and when completed the geometric healing designs are embedded in the patient's body, this is called an Arkana. This internal patterning is deemed to be permanent and to protect a person's spirit.

Angelika Gebhart-Sayer, Professor of Ethnology, University of Marburg writes that "Essentially, Shipibo-Conibo therapy is a matter of visionary design application in connection with aura restoration, the shaman heals his patient through the application of a visionary design, every person feels spiritually permeated and saturated with designs. The shaman heals his patient through the application of the song-design, which saturates the patients' body and is believed to untangle distorted physical and psycho-spiritual energies, restoring harmony to the somatic, psychic and spiritual systems of the patient. The designs are permanent and remain with a person's spirit even after death.".

Whilst it is not easy for Westerner's to enter and engage with the world view of the Shipibo which has been developed far away from our linguistic structures and psychological models, there is an underlying sophisticated and complex symbolic language embedded in these geometric patterns. The main figures in the Shipibo designs are the square, the rhombus, the octagon, and the cross. The symmetry of the patterns emanating from the centre (which is our world) is a representation of the outer and inner worlds, a map of the cosmos. The cross represents the Southern Cross constellation which dominates the night sky and divides the cosmos into four quadrants, the intersection of the arms of the cross is the centre of the universe, and becomes the cosmic cross. The cosmic cross represents the eternal spirit of a person and the union of the masculine and feminine principles the very cycle of life and death which reminds us of the great act of procreation of not only the universe, but also of humanity, and our individual selves.

The smaller flowing patterns within the geometric forms are the radiating power of the Cosmic Serpent which turns this way and that, betwixt and between constantly creating the universe as it moves. The circles are often a direct representation of the Cosmic Anaconda, and within the circle itself is the central point of creation.

In the Western tradition, from the Pythagoreans, and Plato through the Renaissance music was used to heal the body and to elevate the soul. It was also believed that earthly music was no more than a faint echo of the universal 'harmony of the spheres'. This view of the harmony of the universe was held both by artists and scientists until the mechanistic universe of Newton.

Joseph Campbell the foremost scholar of mythology suggests that there is a universe of harmonic vibrations which the human collective unconscious has always been in communion with. Our beings beat to the ancient rhythms of the cosmos. The traditional ways of the Shipibo and other indigenous peoples still reflect the primal rhythm, and their perception of the universal forces made physical is truly a communion with the infinite.

Howard G. Charing, is an accomplished international workshop leader on shamanism. He has worked some of the most respected and extraordinary shamans & healers in the Andes, the Amazon Rainforest, and the Philippines. He organises specialist retreats to the Amazon Rainforest at the dedicated centre located in the Mishana nature reserve. He is the author of the best selling book, Plant Spirit Shamanism (Destiny Books USA), and has published numerous articles about plant medicines. He was baptised into the Shipibo tribe of the Upper Amazon, and initiated into the lineage of the shamans of the Rio Napo. Howard is also an artist who's paintings have featured in major exhibitions in London and elsewhere. His artwork has also been featured on book covers.