Visioning

I’ve added a few blank pages at the end of the Yearbook for you to do some visioning for your year. This section will help to explain what visioning is and how to do it. This can be a really powerful practice, as you’ll see from my experiences below.

What is visioning?

You’re probably familiar with the idea of vision boards or dream boards, made popular by The Secret. Basically, it is a collection of images and words that evoke positive feelings in you, so that you feel more positive and attract positive things into your life. Usually these images are of specific things you want to manifest, such as a lover, a career, a new house, etc.

Vision boards are typically done on cork boards or big sheets of card and placed somewhere prominent. I’ve done this, but as I move into a tiny house this year, I can’t really have big boards of images taking up the living room. The other thing about having them up in front of you is that they become part of the scenery, and you learn to ignore them like most things around you as you get on with life. Not to mention it becomes everyone else’s business when you put it up on the wall, and you might feel as though you have to explain yourself.

By putting our vision boards into a journal, we can keep it private for us. Wayne Dyer said that when he’s trying to manifest something he keeps it as a private matter between him and God. That’s because in order to manifest something you need to have faith that it will show up. If you’re at all experiencing doubt about something you want to manifest and someone else questions you or confirms your doubts, then it’s unlikely to show up for you.

And of course, as a journal addict, I look for any excuse to turn something into a journal-based project.

So we are vision boarding in our yearbooks. But we’ll call it visioning, since there will be no board. When you do it in a journal you can be more deliberate about coming back and looking at the images. You can flip through it each morning or each week, or you can leave a page open on your desk or nightstand should you so wish. And it’s portable.

My visioning story

Before we get to the how-to, I have to share this with you. It is too good not to.

Over the 2015 summer holidays (I’m in New Zealand, so that’s Christmas break for me) I spent a lot of time visioning about my upcoming year. In particular I focused on getting a new property to build a house and moving out of our current house. At the time I had no idea how we would do it, because my partner and I did not have a deposit saved for a mortgage and Auckland house prices are RIDICULOUS (the average house price in Auckland at the time was over $750,000 NZD – it’s now a million).

But I visioned anyway. I shared this with my partner Carl because this is a dream we both had. I also shared it with my parents. We started to come up with an idea – that Carl and I could purchase the land with my parents, and live in two separate houses on the property. It seemed like a nice idea, but it seemed unlikely. My dad isn’t much for change and was very resistant to the idea. The kinds of properties we wanted were more than we could afford (even between the four of us).

The end goal was for Carl and I to have purchased some land by the end of the year. We wanted our own land so we could build our own house.

Well, we moved onto our new property in May. At the auction, not a single other person bid on the property. My parents sold their house with no trouble, and we moved onto the new property. Now Carl and I are in the process of finishing up our tiny house to move into (yes, we are living with my parents currently).

Let me just reiterate this – we went from not knowing how we would get our own property to moving onto a new property in less than six months. This involved convincing three other people that this plan was a good idea – one of whom told us he wouldn’t do it (yes, Dad, I’m looking at you).

In all honesty, I didn’t think much of this, until my dad sent me a photo of our pups at the front door waiting for us. The image was so strikingly similar to one of the images I had used in my visioning, that it reminded me and I pulled that journal out. What I found was amazing, in the truest sense of the word. So I took some photos of our new place, and found some photos I had already taken, to show you what I manifested.

The images on the left are from my journal, on the right from our new place.

The image on the right is what reminded me of the visioning I had done earlier in the year. My dad took that photo and sent it to me when we were out one day. He had never seen my journal, but isn’t it uncanny how similar it is to the image in the top right of my journal page? (We haven’t yet manifested the chickens and veggies – that’s coming soon!)

The house on the right we are currently living in, although Carl and I don’t own it (my parents do). We own a portion of the property, on which we will soon build our own house (after building our tiny house).

The gates on the right lead up to where we will build our new house. The image at the top is our view from the new build site. This year we got our building consent to build our new house up there.

Images on the right from the local park where I walk our pup, Duncan.

Image on the right looking down our driveway and out across the valley.

Now, you could dismiss this as a coincidence, and you can choose to believe that if you like. But to me it is nothing short of magic. Not long ago this seemed like little more than a dream. But I trusted that the universe would help me and it did. You don’t need to know how you will manifest something, you just have to trust it is possible.

So this is why I recommend spending the time and effort to do visioning in your yearbook. This. Stuff. Works.

That’s what I manifested in 2015. Here are some of the visioning pages from my other previous yearbooks, along with the results:

Last year Carl and I decided we were ready to start our own little family. We conceived easily and (despite a few minor inconveniences for me, such as migraines and morning sickness) have had a healthy, straightforward pregnancy. We welcomed our wee boy into our family in late December and had a reasonably easy year with him in 2017. Actually, I’ve only just noticed now that most of the baby images I’ve used seem to be of boys! Will have to do some visioning for a girl next time!

It’s important to me to be able to keep doing my creative work and building my business with our little one around, so these images are to help me move forward with that in mind. I’ve already made some changes to the content of this site in order to accommodate more of my own personal life and experiences in what I talk about and offer.

Last year I had grown this blog from a hobby to a business, by selling some of my own original courses online. I left a semi-permanent teaching position and worked more casual hours in order to have more time and freedom to build my business. This was a huge step for me! I’ve stepped into my own sense of power and look forward to growing the business more in the future.

 

How to vision in your yearbook

I recommend doing your visioning in the blank pages at the back of the workbook, so you can keep adding to it throughout the year.

Take a stack of magazines you love. Use magazines that have images you feel instinctively drawn to – images that make you feel happy or inspired when you see them. I love magazines with images of happy people (not fashion models), homes and interiors, gardens and nature, desks and offices. Magazines I don’t recommend are the tabloid mags that focus on the lives of celebrities – their relationships, weight loss, etc, or magazines such as Cosmo with models, fashion and beauty – these magazines are designed to make us feel crappy about ourselves, to make us feel like we are not good enough, which is exactly the feeling we DON’T want to evoke in the new year (or ever, really).

Set aside a few hours. Get a cup of tea (or beverage of choice), light some candles or incense, play some music you love.

Flick through the magazines and tear out whatever images or words speak to you. Don’t worry whether or not it represents a specific goal you want – just trust your intuition to guide you.

Put the images and text in a pile until you’ve worked your way through the magazines. Then, arrange them on the page and glue/tape them down. Put them together with words that work for you.

Don’t worry if it doesn’t seem to make logical sense – just follow what inspires you. If you look at the page and feel good, that’s great. After all, what we are most going for here is a feeling. Images don’t have to be literal – if you want to put a picture of the ocean on your page that doesn’t have to mean you will literally visit the ocean (although it could, if that’s what you want). It could instead represent expansion, nature in general, the Divine – whatever it means to you. A bed doesn’t have to mean sleep – for me it represents rest, comfort, relaxation, home, etc.Add washi tape for visual interest if you like. You can also use Sharpies to write directly onto the magazine images. Write words, quotes, affirmations – whatever you want.

Keep adding to your visioning pages throughout the year as you come across more images you love. Look through your pages often. Leave them open on a page to remind you. Keep coming back to them, but don’t obsess over them. Try to let go of the outcome. I mean, I didn’t sit and study the images in my journal from the past few years. I occasionally flicked through them, then in all honesty, didn’t do much else. And look what happened!

Try to approach this with an open mind, a kind of playful curiosity. After all, what’s the worst that can happen – you spend an afternoon playing with magazines and glue? That’s hardly the end of the world.

I encourage you to try this with as much faith as you can muster and see what happens.