Use Visioning in All Areas of Your Life

I have written about visioning in the past and have even done a post in the past about the book I will mention today. Sometimes it is good to revisit a book from the past. The book I am speaking of is written by Lucia Capacchione Ph.D., Visioning 10 Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams. If you have never read it do yourself and your life journey a favor and get a copy. She goes in depth in her 10 steps in the visioning process and how to do vision collages. Early on Lucia provides a statement that I feel captures the essence of visioning: “Visioning is purposeful daydreaming applied to everyday life. It is about thinking with our heart and allowing your true wishes to become reality”. Visioning has also been described in the idea of “Seeing with your mind’s eye”. I know when I would ask college students where do we see visioning used in life students would share areas such as sports, architecture, inventors and many other career areas. Visioning is looking outward to creating a reality from what we carry in our hearts and minds. Lucia rightly describes how visioning begins with dreaming. She provides a helpful section discussing how dreaming is a foundation for our visioning. She uses in the introduction of her book the example of the dream of Walt Disney that turned into a vision for Disneyland which then turned into the reality of Disneyland. My favorite quote about dreaming is “It is not that we desire too much, but that we desire too little. Our appetites are not too big, they are too small.” By C.S. Lewis. We limit ourselves in our lives by having little dreams or saying we are too old to dream. But we can have new dreams at every stage of life. A good example of this is the story of John Goddard. When he was a teen about 14 he came up with a list of about 120 things he wanted to do with his life. By the time he was 40 he had accomplished most of the list. What many people don’t know is he kept dreaming and by the time he died in his 80’s his list was over 300. We can keep dreaming and visioning. Now in turning your dream into a vision in Lucia’s book she says to focus your mind on key words and phrases that describe your dream. Write these down on paper. Meditating on what you are forming think what is in your heart for a title of your dream? Then craft a verbal affirmation or a personal declaration related to your dream. This leads to a focus phrase that will be hook in your mind as you look for images for your vision collage. Another thing I like about her book is that she explains how moving from words to pictures helps in building a vision poster in collage form to solidify your vision and dream inside of you. So at this point you move beyond word sorting & sifting through pictures and key words that expand your Theme Phrase you created. Lucia in the book recommends looking though magazines and cut out pictures and words the speak to your about your vision theme. Be concrete and specific in your search. Sometimes your inner critic will speak up and say this is silly or a waste of time. If that happens tell your inner critic to “take a hike”. Make room for imagination and be your own Dream Weaver. Now with your pictures and words cut out, do some matching and development of your Collage Design. Move the pictures and words you cut out of magazines around the surface of your poster. Allow an order to form and then prepare to paste the pictures and words to the poster. I have provided just a few basics from her book here to create an appetite to get a copy of her book or request it at your local library. Look at your present life journey and see where and what a vision collage experience may help you keep moving forward to what you want in life. Reflection: Take some quiet time and vision yourself into the future 5 years ahead. Do some dreaming and think where do you see yourself and what do you want for your life? Create a theme for that 5 years in the future. Then get a small poster board and look for pictures and other key words to motivate your vision. Include the theme you created on your poster. Then create your vision collage pasting the pictures and words on your poster board. Keep your vision collage somewhere you will regularly see it.

Writing Important in the Healing Process

Since I often in my counseling practice recommend journaling to clients I decided to reread Writing As a Way of Healing by Louise De Salvo Ph.D. Hers is a book I often recommend to clients. She was not a therapist rather she was a professor of Fine Arts with a specialty in memoir writing. Yet this book shows she understood the power of writing as a way to heal. Early in the book she discussed Dr. Pennebaker’s research on the effectiveness of journaling with trauma. Let me list some guidelines on writing for healing that she distilled from Pennebaker: 1. Write 20 minutes a day over a period of four days. Do this periodically. This way you won’t feel overwhelmed. 2. Write in a private, safe, comfortable environment. 3. Write about issues you are currently living with, something you are thinking or dreaming about constantly, a trauma you’ve never disclosed or resolved. 4. Write about joys and pleasures too. 5. Write about what happened. Write, too, about feelings about what happened. What do you feel? Why do you feel this way? Link events with feelings. 6. Try to write an extremely detailed, organized, coherent, vivid, emotionally compelling narrative. Don’t worry about correctness, about grammar or punctuation. 7. Beneficial effects will occur even if no one reads your writing. 8. Expect, initially that in writing in this way you will have complex and appropriately difficult feelings. Make sure you get support if you need it. (pages26-27) Other than helpful tips on doing your own personal writing she provides stories how writing has helped people even famous writers such as Henry Miller, Virginia Woolf and others. De Salvo is also transparent in how writing helped her in her life with various situations. The examples she gives at times reveals how writers gain insight even from reading other writers. On page 54 she shares how May Sarton gained insight into writing laments by reading Henri J.M. Nouwen’s book, Out of Solitude. Reading through this book again gave me more insights and a deeper appreciation on the importance writing is in healing the many areas of our lives. Through writing we can bring closure to areas that need healing. It is also a process to flesh out new realities by visioning what we want for our life story. Reflection: Let’s do a creative activity to write about growth in our inner self. Look over this list of principles from my book, Living More Than OK: Critical Thinking, Creativity, Savoring Life, Goal Setting, Self-Esteem, Resilience, Purpose, Thankfulness, Taking Risks, and Spirituality. Take a clean sheet of paper and first at the top of the paper draw a symbol or paste a picture from a magazine of a symbol that you want to depict the inner life you desire, (maybe a tall tree, a flower, a lake, or ect.). Secondly below your symbol write 3 principles from the list that you would like to improve in your life. Then lastly write a paragraph about how growing in your 3 chosen areas will help improve your inner and outer personal life.