A Blueprint for Making Your Best Life: Imagine It, Feel It, Realize It
Meditating to feel your breath is great for lowering blood pressure and enhancing focus.
Many of us not only know this but have experienced these benefits first-hand.
But, if you meditate to discover a pathway for a more purposeful life, simply feeling your breath is not quite enough.
Here’s a quick review of how meditation works with the brain:
We have neural pathways embedded in our brains that determine the course of our habits and behaviors.
The neural pathways are why we take the same routes to work, do things the same way every time, and even gravitate toward the same types of people.
We truly are creatures of habit, and these neural pathways create the track on which we live.
But, if we want to level up how we show up and enhance our lives, we need to get off the track and take on new habits and behaviors.
This can be challenging and takes discipline.
It requires an intention, aka the WHY.
It requires awareness.
And, if you really want to create new neural pathways that will ensure these new habits and behaviors become a new normal, we need to do the work to create the tunnels in the brain.
This is where meditation practices change the game.
Let’s look more deeply into this process:
Start by feeling your body. Feel the parts and then the whole. Feel your breath in your body.
Next, envision your best life in which you operate as your highest good— your best self!
Go big. Feel it through the senses and push past your typical habits and patterns.
How do you feel, how do you think, what do you do every day?
Use all 5 senses to imagine it clearly.
Be specific with people, places, and activities— this all matters.
Next, feel it through and through. You will feel your body light up!
Rehearse the vision by feeling it for longer.
Meditate with it for at least 12 minutes. This is how you change the brain to become the person of your highest good.
Be sure to meditate every day at the same time for the same length of time (or longer!). The discipline of your practice helps to embed the new neural pathways.
Finally, check in with your life once a month to see how things are going and revisit the vision and what you hold onto in your meditations.
See it. Feel it. Become it.
Your best life is 100% possible!
P.S. Check out Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One by Dr. Joe Dispenza. (NYC: Hay House, Inc. 2012) if you want an in-depth read about this process.