Unravelling Triggers: An Embodiment And Visualization Meditation For Rewriting Your Life
The holidays are loaded with emotional triggers of all kinds—family, relationships, time, finances, health and fitness, unmet expectations—the list goes on and on. We’re also living in a wild world these days, filled with uncertainties, social anxieties and challenges that can make it difficult to stay clear and focused. While it’s not easy to always remain centered, the more aware we are of our current experience and able to anticipate and manage triggers, the more likely it is that we stay connected to our purpose and path. And, when we and those around us are connected to our personal purpose and passions, the happier and healthier we are as individuals, communities and the broader world.
Transcending Triggers Through Visualization Meditation
Cultivating an awareness of your personal triggers is a key first step in transcending a recurring issue. This requires self-exploration and a willingness to slow down and examine the people, places and situations that trigger you, as well as the way you feel when a trigger gets engaged. Then, to transcend the trigger, you need to decide how you’d rather respond and begin visualizing that desired response.
Visualization meditation and related techniques have been proven to be highly effective in helping us move closer to where and who we want to be and what we desire to achieve in life. In a Psychology today article, Seeing Is Believing: The Power of Visualization, author and positive psychology therapist A.J. Adams, MAPP explains that research has revealed that mental practices are almost as effective as true physical practices.
Adams provides many specific, validated examples of this phenomenon throughout the article and writes, “Brain studies now reveal that thoughts produce the same mental instructions as actions. Mental imagery impacts many cognitive processes in the brain: motor control, attention, perception, planning, and memory. So the brain is getting trained for actual performance during visualization. It’s been found that mental practices can enhance motivation, increase confidence and self-efficacy, improve motor performance, prime your brain for success, and increase states of flow—all relevant to achieving your best life!”
I first learned a specific visualization technique as a teenager when I was a highly competitive swimmer, so competitive that 1/16th of a second could mean the difference between placing or qualifying. By repeatedly visualizing how I wanted to perform, my body and mind were able to remain relaxed during the high pressure environment of competition and could simply flow through the desired actions. By mentally “practicing,” I was better able to avoid anxiety or a physiological stress response and, instead, relax and perform at my full potential.
Over the years, I’ve shifted this visualization technique designed to help improve physical performance into a mediation to help prepare myself for the psycho/emotional triggers that are inevitable as we move through life. In doing so, I’ve been much better prepared to navigate and, ultimately, transcend triggers. Using this technique, I’ve been able to avoid falling back into bad habits/patterns and much better prepared to show up centered, compassionate and clear headed in the face of triggering events and people. By remaining in a calm state, I can better act in alignment with my values and personal commitments, regardless of what life throws me.
We all have triggers/stressors and the holidays, given that they usually come with an extra dose of them, are the ideal time to increase awareness of what pulls us off our desired path. We can then begin practicing ways to unravel triggers with the intent of rewriting an old story into one that aligns with who we truly are and want to be.
The Psycho/Emotional Visualization Meditation
To begin this practice, identify a current stressor or, in thinking about the future, a trigger that is likely to arise over the next week or so. For the greatest success, choose a trigger that is alive and fresh for you and that you can draw on emotionally. Perhaps you anticipate a family member saying something unkind or inappropriate to you at a holiday gathering, or maybe you expect to see an ex-lover at a party. Or, it might be that you know you have the proclivity to talk yourself out of your normal fitness routine and/or into eating foods that you know don’t align with your normally health-based diet.
Once you’ve identified a trigger that you believe has the potentiality to lead to a return to a bad habit or pattern or elicit an undesirable personal response, the first step in this visualization meditation is to play out the scenario in your mind in great detail and allow the feeling of the event to be alive in your body. Next, walk through the event in your mind backward to the moment you were first triggered.
The start of the trigger might be the moment an event or action occurs (such as someone saying something mean to you), or it could be minutes, hours or even days before the event in anticipation of the event itself. For example, you might find yourself triggered now as you are reading this, considering an event happening in the near future.
If you’re having trouble connecting with the exact moment you became triggered, think about the event that elicited an emotional response and ask yourself the following questions:
How does the triggering situation, idea, thought, action of another or personal behavior/decision/reaction make you feel?
Where in your body do you feel the impact the most acutely?
Now, walk yourself back in time to the moment where this feeling is no longer present and ask yourself what changed and how the trigger began.
The next phase in this meditation is to visualize the scenario, but in this instance, play out how you’d like to respond to the trigger. Rather than focusing on the stressor and all the possible, awful outcomes and feelings, visualize how you want to respond to it and how you want to feel while doing such. See and feel yourself acting in accordance with your best self, embracing healthy, possible alternatives, letting go of any tension and navigating the situation with ease.
The key is to actually feel the difference in your body as you move through this visualization meditation. By replaying the new, healthier response to the trigger over and over again with subtle variations, while focusing on the felt-sense of this new reaction, your mind and body begin to realign. You begin to change who you are fundamentally and rewrite your life from the inside-out.
While we cannot control the behavior of others and anticipate or avoid all triggers, we can prepare ourselves and our nervous systems to find presence and peace in the face of uncomfortable encounters and situations. As we visualize and feel the new way of responding, we train ourselves to embody this new way of being.
The overall idea is that, once identified, rather than focusing and even potentially obsessing on the upcoming trigger and unhealthy reaction, you instead place your attention on a healthy alternative response, preparing you to handle the situation consciously and non-reactively when it occurs.
Rewrite Your Life
As humans we have the extraordinary ability to create new neural pathways and our cellular body is constantly changing. Visualization techniques and meditation have and continue to yield amazing results. There are quadriplegics who visualize yoga sequences and get the benefits of the practice despite being able to physically do the poses. There are athletes who improve their performance significantly by visualizing over and over again themselves excelling in competition. As mentioned above, Western science is now able to monitor brain activity, demonstrating that the same areas of the brain are lit up when both visualizing and physically doing a specific activity.
This visualization meditation can be particularly beneficial to use during the holiday season, especially when there is a higher than usual proclivity to feel emotionally triggered, reactive and fall into bad habits and/or patterns.
The positive here is that with self-exploration, preparation and practice of an effective visualization meditation, we can transcend these triggers and stressors, increasing our resilience and developing as more evolved, happier and healthier versions of ourselves.
If you’re really struggling this time of year and feel particularly triggered and overwhelmed by a specific issue or in general, you may want to consider working with a life coach.
Through tools, practices (such as this visualization meditation), collective exploration and effective strategies, I offer coaching that is designed to help you unearth your true calling, put your passion into action and bring your soul’s purpose to life.
If you’re interested in doing this important and life-affirming work, please contact me today to discuss transformative tools to help you live your most meaningful and inspired life, no matter how blocked you may feel right now. Together, we strategize, unearth and implement goals consistent with your deepest desires as you actualize your full potential and live life to the fullest.
Holiday Blessings,
Katie