Hey. Welcome back to your daily mindfulness. Over the last number of days, we've explored a lot of different strategies related to cultivating happiness and wellbeing in your life. Today, I want to share a strategy you can use around visualization. Now, when it comes to mindfulness and meditation, well, at least mindfulness, specifically, visualization is not as much of a component of it.

However, we do bring mindfulness to the stories going on in our minds, the visual images going on in our minds. And we're learning to work with that in a more skillful way, which is often letting it be there as it is, or redirecting our attention. Today, I want to talk about what happens when we notice maybe a visual in the mind that is more negative or not optimistic and how we can start to change that. Now, I think, a lot of times when we, well, the first example that comes to mind, is like stage fright. When we think about having to give a talk or go into a new group of people and have a conversation, and we feel some nervousness around that, one of the things that's happening, is the mind is already imagining all the way is, this isn't going to go well.

We're thinking about how people might perceive us, we see them rolling their eyes, we see them not liking us. And these visuals in the mind condition a certain emotional reactivity, which could be stress, sadness, fear. However, one of the quickest ways you can work with that, is just change those visuals, and instead of imagining what goes wrong, you can imagine what goes right. You imagine going there and, uh, perhaps having a great conversation with someone. You imagine going to a party and someone smiling at you in that conversation.

That sort of visualization is going to be very different than imagining someone frowning or not liking you or turning away. My encouragement to you, is to look at what are some of those visualizations in your life when you feel yourself down, or not at your best, or not experiencing the wellbeing that you want, how are you imagining your life? What are you thinking about? What are you seeing? And it could be what you're seeing in the present moment as it relates to how you perceive yourself, but it could also be seeing yourself in the future and how you see your life unfolding. And as it relates to mindfulness, yeah, we're first cultivating an awareness of those things so that we're not consumed by them. But you could take it a step further and practice shifting some of those images. Being playful with it, imagining what would it like, the most beautiful image look like where your life feels inspiring or something's going really well and is really positive.

This is just another tool that you could put in your toolkit. It's not something you have to do in every single moment. In fact, that would probably be really tiresome to constantly have to manage the visuals in our minds. But in those moments where we are feeling down, it can be a powerful resource to start thinking more positively and start enjoying thinking about our life in the future. So we'll do some more of this in the meditation so you could get some practice, but as you go throughout your day, just start to notice this and have some fun playing with those images and transforming them.

I'll talk to you in a moment. Thank you for your practice, and take care.