An Introduction to Visualization + exercises
Labyrinth by Leonora Carrington.
Visualization is the ability to mentally call up a visual representation of something that you’re not seeing in the mundane world. Despite its name, this skill does not engage only the visual sense.
Why learning visualization is important? Well, visualization is essential to access beings and realms that are not of the physical dimension (some might call them of the astral dimension, and the act of accessing them astral traveling). It is also a key part of spell-crafting, as the ability to visualize the desired outcome of a spell is a big factor of success.
If you have aphantasia (the inability to form a mental image of something), you don’t need to worry. Although the exercises that are in this post may not be the best fit for you, it’s important to note that imagining visuals is just one form of ‘seeing’ in the mind. For some people, energetic information can be processed as a feeling of knowing – you know there is someone near you, something went wrong etc. Other people gain the same information by smelling, or hearing. The fact is that the human brain can process energetic data in various ways. Jan Fries’s exercise may help you to figure out which yours is best at.
The exercises bellow were picked from various sources and are designed to: a) build basic visualization skills; b) build basic memory recalling skills (very useful for astral traveling); and c) get in touch with the land through visionary practice. Before moving on to them, however, I would like to list some tips that may make all of this easier. They are:
Don’t lie down to visualize, as you might fall asleep. Sit up.
Meditate briefly before a vision to still your mind. Simple mindfulness meditation will do.
Learn to visualize with and without background noise. You may not always have the opportunity to do all your magical work in silent places.
Don’t rely on recordings for more complex visionary work. Learn to use your own memory and inner navigation skills.
Always treat what you see in vision as real. This helps to break down the common barriers of our culture and to not shut down possible communication with other worlds and beings.
When you finish your vision, get up and ground yourself.
Keep notes of your visions and look back on them. They may reveal information that will help you in the future.
Manage your expectations. This takes practice.
1. Building basic visualisation skills
The following exercises are designed to help you build some foundational visualization skills, such as being able to conjure at least some of your senses while in vision and to hold basic geometric forms in your mind for a short period of time. If you have no difficulty carrying those out, you can move on to more complex exercises without a problem.
🖤 Getting in touch with your senses (Jan Fries).
This exercise engages all the five senses to make future visions more vivid, realistic and intense. The ability to amplify all sensory channels at once may even help to produce mind expanding experiences once you’ve trained it well.
1. Make yourself confortable and take a few deep breaths.
2. Focus on your touch and say what you’re perceiving aloud. It may go like this: I feel my bare feet touching the floor and my hands over my lap… I feel my belly moving as I breath… I feel cold air over my skin…
3. Focus on your hearing and say what you’re perceiving aloud. It may go like this: I hear the words that are coming out of my mouth… I hear rain outside… I hear a car passing by my house…
4. Focus on your vision and say what you’re perceiving aloud. It may go like this: I see my favorite mug in front of me… I see the lines in my hands… I see dust in the air…
5. Focus on your palate and say what you’re perceiving aloud. It may go like this: I taste the toothpaste I brushed my teeth with… I taste the spicy food I just ate at lunch… I taste the bubblegum in my mouth…
6. Focus on your olfaction and say what you’re perceiving aloud. It may go like this: I smell my perfume… I smell the cookies that are in the oven… I smell the herb tea I’m drinking…
🖤 Elementary visualisation (Starhawk).
This exercise helps to build basic skills for those who have a lot of difficulty holding images in their mind. It focuses on very simples shapes, textures and colors.
1. Close your eyes and imagine you’re staring at a white wall.
2. Practice visualising simple geometric shapes: a point, a circle, a triangle, a line etc.
3. When you can visualise all shapes well, visualise the wall in other colors: red, yellow, blue, orange, violet and black.
4. Finally, practice visualising the geometric shapes in various colors.
2. Recalling & remembering
The following exercises are designed to better your visual memory and ability to realistically recall events, locations, and routes. This skill is very important for astral traveling.
🖤 Memory exercise (Josephine McCarthy).
This exercise taps into the mechanism that your brain uses in remembering. It engages with long-term and short-term memory to help with imagination. Engaging the long-term memory first triggers the short-term memory files which are more difficult to access normally.
1. Sit quietly and meditate for a few minutes to silence yourself.
2. Think of an event that happened five years ago. See yourself in that event and observe yourself from a distance, as though you were stood in the corner of the room. Then see the event from within yourself, looking out at the other people, around the room and watching out for any details you can remember.
2. Now remember an event from five days ago. See it from outside of yourself first, and then see it from inside yourself.
3. Repeat the whole exercise by remembering something from ten years ago and then ten days ago. Watch the memory from outside yourself and then from inside of yourself.
🖤 Recalling locations (Peter Paddon).
This exercise trains your capacity to accurately recall and describe locations and routes. It's a nice exercise to try before astral traveling through spaces that exist in the mundane world.
1. Pick a familiar location that is not where you are right now.
2. Recall the place and describe it. You can write it down or tell it aloud to someone else.
3. Repeat this several times, each time trying to remember more details. Keep going until you start recalling things that you weren't consciously aware of.
4. When you fell confident about your ability to recall the location, do the same exercise, but this time recall the journey from that location to where you are right now.
3. Land-based visionary practice
The exercises bellow are all from Josephine McCarthy and are designed to put you in contact with the inner manifestation of the land you live in. That's an important practice to get familiar with the local spirits, ancestors, and elementals.
🖤 The vision of the Inner Land (Josephine McCarthy).
This exercise takes you into the heart of the inner landscape of our land as it is in our era, which means the last five million years. Going into the inner land itself allows us to truly connect energetically to it and to interact with its power at a very deep level.
1. Light a candle, close your eyes and sit still.
2. With your inner vision, see a liminal space between realms, a space that can take you wherever you want. You can adapt that to your own practice: McCarthy suggests to visualise 'The Void', but you can also imagine crossroads, for example.
3. Form intent in your mind to venture into the inner world of the land where you live.
4. With that focused intent, step forward out of your liminal space and find yourself standing on the ground, with a slight wind in your face. You find yourself on the edge of a tall, ancient forest. The forest is silent except for the sound of running water, and as you look around you find a small stream that weaves its way through it.
5. Follow the water as it weaves in and out of the ancient trees. The deeper into the forest you go, the more your body starts to react to the surroundings. You begin to recognize certain scents, and long-buried memories flit in and out of your mind.
6. Find a clearing that the stream eventually tumbles into and step into its light after the darkness of the forest. Before you is an ancient gnarled and twisted giant tree growing out of an island of rock and earth, which is in the centre of a small lake. On the other side of the tree and island is a horizon with a stunning sunrise, and the waters of the lake seem to cascade over the horizon and tumble down into nothing. The tree emits its own light, which shines out among the trees.
7. Walk to the edge of the water and put your hand in the lake. The water feels full of life and power. The tree senses your presence and you can feel it reaching out its thoughts to you, asking you to sing.
8. Begin to sing songs that you know. As the power of the water and trees surround you, a deeper sound emerges from within you and you begin to sing the sound that is your soul. The sound flows out of you and across the lake. Everything around you begins to emit sound, and the sounds of each tree, each rock, the water, each being, all joins with your sound to create a wonderful harmony. Out of the forest come beings that are a part of this land, a part of this world, and they each have a sound too. You realize that these beings are connected to you somehow. They are your ancestors, maybe going back millions of years.
9. One of the beings comes forward and touches you on the forehead and allows you to touch them. Tell each other about the way that you live. Spend some time in silent communion with this being.
10. After the communion has ended, it is time to leave. Dive into the water and swim towards the horizon. You find fishes swimming alongside you, who also communicate with you. You swim until you come to where the water falls into nothing and you fall with the water, falling through space, through time, and through your liminal space. The water seems to fall through you, joining with the water within your body, filling you with life and vitality. You begin to lose the sense of falling, instead becoming filled with a sense of being water.
11. Slowly become aware of a golden light shining on your face and remember your humanity and that you are alive. Remember the candle flame that burns close by. Remember your body. Slowly sink into your body awareness and open your eyes.
🖤 The vision of the Goddess in the Cave (Josephine McCarthy).
This exercise is la doorway to the underworld goddess who expresses the feminine ancestral consciousness that sleeps within the land. This feminine figure is based on the lore of the British Isles, but the template can be used to access the same type of consciousness in other lands, as the vision will eventually display the characteristics of the land upon which you live.
1. Light a candle, close your eyes, and sit still.
2. With your inner vision, see a flame burning quietly within you. In vision, reach your hand into your inner flame and cup a fragment of it in your hand. Carefully join your inner flame with the candle flame. As the two flames merge, they grow bigger and the floor beneath them fades away. They plunge into the Underworld and you lean over to look down and watch it.
3. See very old and worn stone steps carved out of the side of the tunnel and climb into the darkness, staying close to the wall as you begin. The steps pass by old roots, rocks, and earth. The flame has landed below you and you carefully step your way down towards it. As you climb down, the light of the surface world fades into the darkness.
4. Come to a stop at the bottom of the tunnel and look around. The flame casts a glow that allows you to see into the darkness. To one side you see a large crack in the rock, and you squeeze yourself into a very narrow passage between two rock faces. The flame follows you and together you make your way down the narrow, twisting, descending path that is taking you deep into the land. The flame goes ahead of you, and a few yards ahead it seems to vanish around a corner, leaving you in total darkness.
5. Stretch out your arms to touch each side of the rock face around you and walk carefully, feeling the floor before you with your feet. The path goes around a corner, and a faint green light glows from a crack in front of you.
6. Squeeze once more through a rock crack and emerge in a cavern where the rock walls emit a very faint green glow. To one side of the cavern is a pool of water, and on the far side of the cave is an old woman who seems to be asleep in a large rock throne that is covered in shells. Her long white hair appears to be growing into the rocks around her, and her robes are full of sleeping creatures. Between her and you, the floor is littered with sleeping animals.
7. Very quietly and carefully, pick your way through the sleeping animals to the water and wash your hands, face, and mouth. If you are urged to, get into the water and completely wash yourself.
8. Stand back up and turn to face the old woman. See that she has one eye open and is watching you. She beckons you to her and holds out her hand, expecting a gift from you. Reach into your pocket and give her whatever appears in your hand.
9. Once she is happy with her gift, talk with her and tell her about yourself and about the land where you live. Listen carefully to what she might have to say.
10. When you have both finished, thank her and then carefully pick your way back through the sleeping animals to the entrance of the tunnel. By the door is a lit candle, and the old woman tells you to take it with you to light you way back.
11. As you go back through the narrow tunnel that leads to the stairs back to the surface, notice for the first time that ancient carvings are etched out on the rough rock walls. The carvings continue all along the walls and up along side the stone steps: look at them as you climb back to the surface world.
12. As you emerge back into your own world, go and sit back in your chair before the candle flame. Look at the candle flame with your inner vision and allow its stillness to wash over you. In that stillness you remember your experience.
13. Once you have recovered your memory, open your eyes and look again at the candle flame. When you are ready, blow it out.
FRIES, Jan. Visualization. In. Visual Magick: A manual of freestyle shamanism. Mandrake of Oxford: 1992.
MCCARTHY, Josephine. Visionary Magic. In. The Magical Knowledge Trilogy. Mandrake of Oxford: 2011. (⭐️)
MCCARTHY, Josephine. Visionary Magic Basics. In. Quareia: The Apprentice. 2016. (⭐️)
PADDON, Peter. Traditional Witchcraft: Visualization. Pendraig Publishing: 2014. (⭐️)
STARHAWK. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. Harper & Row: 1979.
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