The more clear and defined our mental images are, the more they are able to take form in the physical world. As above so below. Definite form in mental world is definite form in physical world. Vague form in mental world is vague form in physical world.
 
Try to imagine “a lot of money” in your mind. Does it look clear or fuzzy? Now try to imagine “a crisp $100 bill” in your mind. Is that image clear or fuzzy? That is why having clear, well defined and specific goals is so important. Don’t worry about not wanting to limit ability to achieve by setting outlines to your goal. The aim is to make it manifestable first. You can always keep increasing the limits and expand the boundaries of your goal as you move nearer to it. This is the real meaning of practicality.
 
The best intentions are clear and focused. Be specific. If you want money, specify the exact amount. General intentions have very little power. Make your intentions like lasers instead of candle flames, and you’ll see them manifest much more quickly.
 
So many self help books tell us to visualize what we want. But how can we visualize what we want unless we know how what we want is like? All those advices never have much effect for us because our visualizations are just so vague.
 
The famous movement educator, Moshe Feldenkrais, developed some exercises for his students that demonstrated the power of visualization. He showed that one can use visualization to obtain all the physical benefits of stretching without actually doing any stretching.
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One way Feldenkrais demonstrated this was to have his students lie down and go through a series of gentle stretching movements on the left side of their bodies, getting in touch with how their bodies felt as they did this. He directed students specifically to feel the movements, and then to notice how much their lefts sides opened up, relaxed, stretched and realigned. Then Feldenkrais would lead his students through exactly the same exercises on the right side of their bodies. This time, however, they performed the exercises in their imaginations only.
 
When they had finished doing the exercises on the right side in the imaginations, the students would notice how the right sides of their bodies felt and moved. Typically, they found that their right sides had benefited at least as much from doing the exercises in their imaginations as their lefts sides had from actually doing the same exercises. In fact, the right sides often felt significantly better. By imagining the feeling of their muscles going through specific changes, the students changed their physiologies and gave themselves a full workout.
 
The imaginations can work wonders. But it can only work wonders if it has a rich fund of material from which to draw. That’s why Moshe Feldenkrais had people stretch the left sides of their bodies before imagining stretching the right side. By the time they started their visualizations, they knew exactly what it felt like to move their bodies in the way they wanted to imagine. The information was stored in their memories from actually stretching their left sides. They then utilized that information to visualize a similar experience on their right sides.
 
If they hadn’t had this physiological imprint in their memories, their visualizations would have had less impact because they would have been vague. As an analogy, imagine a thirty five year old couch potato trying to mobilized himself into action by visualizing himself as an energetic tennis star Andre Agassi. If his body is really acclimatized to lethargy, the couch potato’s visualization might not get him far. He might not know how to access the feeling of energy, even though he might like to.
 
It’s partly because our powers of visualization are limited by our experience that the person who was been chronically ill from infancy has a harder fight than the person who becomes ill after twenty years of radiant health. A person who has some experience of health to draw on can utilize that experience as a resource, but someone with no experience needs to search more deeply to find healing.
 
If we are missing experience that open up higher possibilities for us, that limitation will affect every area of our lives. We may unconsciously short change ourselves by asking for less that we can actually have. That is why it is so important for us to try out new things and to immerse ourselves in new experiences. So that we will expand the limits of what’s possible for us in our minds. Once we know what to imagine, we can imagine.[/hidepost]