Visualisation: What You See Is What You Get, In Glorious Technicolour

The great saying of Benjamin Franklin, “What the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve,” has been taught and applied in the strategy of visualisation. With visualisation you being in the five senses. You learn to see, smell, touch, and taste the colourful image you are conjuring up in your mind.

Robert Malmo at McGill University conducted the definitive research on the relation of mental function of physical activity. It is to Robert Malmo’s credit that there pleasant strategies of goal setting, visualization and affirmation can dramatically improve the abilities of the mind and body.

Malmo discovered that thinking is a physical act. With electrodes strategically placed on volunteers bodies he traced the relationship between thinking and bodily tension, noting how muscle tension changes when thoughts go from happy to unpleasant topic. His research established that every thought triggers neurons in the motor cortex of the brain which directly connect with the muscles of the body. Because thinking mobilises the entire sensormotor system, the mature and the quality of our thoughts determine every bodily activity, whether we feel full of vitality or tired and lethargic.

When we turn the same anxious or negative thoughts over and over in the mind day after day, then it is certain that we are afflicting our muscles and glands and slowly reducing our own physical wellbeing. When we repeatedly think thoughts of disappointment and thoughts or memories of hurt, despair, anger, or fear, we are physically injuring ourselves; we are engaging in self-destruction.