Do you have a personal vision of your desired health? If not, I encourage you to make one, and here’s why!  

You may have heard about creating a vision board to bring about that which we would like to add to our lives. Vision boards are becoming more popular and many who create them adamantly claim they work, at times with uncanny accuracy. I have used this tool with great success myself and can say that the creation of a health vision is an amazing and free tool to use towards better health and vitality.

As a Functional Medicine nurse and health coach, I have seen the challenges so many people face in getting well. It is easy to get stuck, discouraged, and even hopeless in the face of illness. In these moments, I realize how valuable it can be to create a health vision. Having awareness of how our thoughts, attitudes and feelings impact our physical world is powerful and empowering. At first it may seem like magical thinking that you can create your best health through a vision board. Yet the truth is, whatever we spend our time and energy thinking about will eventually lead it to appear in the physical world in some way. Let’s explore this idea further.

Our brains have an inherent quality referred to as neuroplasticity. This term refers to the brain’s ability to develop new nerves, neural pathways, and connections between those pathways throughout our lifetime. When someone is learning a new skill, no matter what age, the part of the brain that controls that activity will grow stronger. However, research has shown that just thinking about an activity can begin changing the brain! When an individual visualizes an activity such as running, playing piano, or playing a sport, the circuits in our brains that control these activities become activated. This means that thought alone can stimulate creation of neural pathways that control the activity we are thinking about.

The area of science called quantum physics reveals this process on a deeper level. Quantum physicists have come to understand that our universe is an interactive place between the physical world and or minds/consciousness. It appears that we cannot observe the world without altering it in some way. For example, experiments have shown that light appears as a wave of energy and stays as a free floating wave when not observed. Yet when it is observed, it solidifies into a particle. If a simple observation can change the physical world, then we have more power over our external environment than we realize! There is a constant interaction between our thoughts and our environment. This is why it is so important to focus our thoughts on what we want our highest expression of health to be.

There are many tools and techniques you can use to experience this phenomenon for yourself. There is no one correct way, but I will share what I have learned to work best for me. When I work with vision boards or affirmations, my vision unfolds more efficiently. This involves focusing on what I want in the end and not focusing on “how” I will get there. It requires you to trust the process. I suggest you start with something relatively easy to accomplish, and as you get more practice with this process, take on what may seem larger and more challenging to attain. It is a learning process and will not necessarily feel natural because it is not the way most of us were raised to think.

Here are 5 steps to creating your Vision of Health

1. First, relax and quietly ask yourself “What does being healthy look like to me?” Are you dancing? Hiking? Deep sea fishing? Able to play with your grandchildren? When you are clear about this, write it all down in detail. Use a notebook and even add pictures that represent what you want—the brain works best in pictures. Read it daily and reading it aloud is best.
2. Next, ask yourself “How will I feel as my health improves?” Then feel all of the good feelings associated with your vision. It is important to conjure up the positive emotions as if the vision was already yours. This stimulates the immune system and parts of the brain that support our health.
3. Keep it to yourself. Don’t spend too much time talking about things. Keep the energy focused inside of you, which also helps to avoid unsolicited comments of discouragement from others.
4. Take action. Act upon the ideas, inspirations and obvious next steps that bubble up from this process.
5. Let it go. Once you spend time on your work, let it go until next time. Trust that the process is working. Expect things are on their way and remember that the Universe is an infinite field of probability.

“Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe and enthusiastically act upon …must inevitably come to pass.” —Paul Meyer