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Hi Friends,

There was a visualization study conducted in 1996 by Dr. Blaslotto at the University of Chicago. He asked a randomly selected group of students to take a series of basketball free throws and then he tallied the percentage of made shots. For those of you who don’t know what a free throw is, check this video below.

Once the students’ free throws were tallied, they were divided into three groups, each of which had to perform a specific task over a 30-day period.

Group 1 was instructed not to touch a basketball for 30 days. No practicing or playing of any kind.

Group 2 was instructed to practice shooting free throws for half an hour every day for 30 days.

Group 3 was instructed to come to the gym every day and spend half an hour with their eyes closed, just visualizing making every free throw, without ever actually touching a basketball for 30 days.

Once the 30 days passed, all three groups returned to the gym to take the same number of free throws they had originally taken.

The students in Group 1, who neither practiced nor visualized, showed no improvement.

The students in Group 2, who practiced free throws every day for half an hour, showed a 24% improvement.

The students in Group 3, who only visualized making free throws without actually touching a basketball, showed a 23% improvement.

In other words, the measured improvement of those who solely visualized the free throws was virtually the same as those who practiced daily. For those of you with your own visualization practice, this study won’t come as a surprise. Visualization, like a consistent gratitude practice, can often get brushed aside as ungrounded and woo-woo, when in fact it can be highly effective, energizing, empowering, and so much fun.

I’m not going to dive into the brain science behind visualization, because I would sound pretty ignorant trying to do so, but here’s a blog post by a clinical health and rehabilitation psychologist that offers some straightforward, digestible science that supports the power of positive visualization to achieve goals and create desired change in our lives.

What’s extraordinary about the practice of creative visualization is that you can apply it to all areas of your life: deepening your relationship with yourself, and with others; improving your physical and emotional health; enhancing your creativity; aligning yourself with greater abundance, financial and otherwise; generating more connection and fun in your daily life. There are no limits to how and where you can integrate a visualization practice into your reality, and no limits to what that practice can inspire in your life.

At the beginning of this year, I offered a creative visualization workshop called Imagine It. I still receive notes from some of the attendees telling me how powerful the workshop was and how much the work we did together has served them this year. So I’m offering it again, and it begins on Monday, January 2nd (very soon!).

Imagine It is a two-week, live online (via Zoom) workshop. We will gather every day, Monday through Friday, from January 2nd -13th, to visualize myriad aspects of the beautiful lives we intend to create and enhance for ourselves through meditation, writing, discussion and Q&A with me. We will meet for one hour, Monday through Thursday, and two hours on Friday to send us into the weekend on a serious high. You are welcome to participate at your own pace if you can’t make the live gatherings. I’ll be sending out a video recording of the session each day after we meet. This is a wonderful opportunity to begin the new year with a consistent meditation and writing practice, or to continue the ones you already have going, but with community!

GO HERE for all the details and registration info.

Everything we desire we want because we believe that having it will add goodness to our lives. A new car, a new job, a new lover, whatever it is. We want these things because of how we believe we’ll feel if we have them. But the truth is, we don’t have to wait for our desires to manifest before we feel the goodness we imagine. With visualization, we can create the desired feelings in our imagination, we can convince our minds that we already have manifested that which we desire, and we can guide ourselves into better-feeling states all the time. And not only that, because everything is energy, our willingness to visualize the realities we want to manifest, and the improved feelings we create by doing so, automatically creates a better possibility of us realizing whatever it is we’re visualizing. It’s a win win win win win.

It’s not that different than the students imagining their free throws and then being able to make them at higher rates. First, they saw themselves doing it in their mind’s eye, and then they lived into what they had imagined. We can do the same for all different aspects of our lives. I hope you’ll join us next week.

I wish you all a beautiful New Year. I’m holding a vision that each of us will come into deeper alignment with our heart, our soul, and the divine energy that created all things, that we will grow in love of self, one another and our planet, and that our days will be marked with frequent moments of peace, and joy.

I love you all,

Scott

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For those of you who want to deepen your mediation practice and become a certified meditation teacher, my friend David Gandelman is offering a nine-month Meditation Teacher Training, and he’s rounded up about a dozen teachers (including me) to join him. Right now it’s $500 off the training, so GO HERE for details. David is one of the most gifted meditation teachers I’ve encountered, and he’s also a wonderful person.

Breath & Belonging is back on Wednesday, January 4th, so if you’ve been wanting to join me for a guided breathwork journey, what are you waiting for? GO HERE for details and registration. It will blow your mind.

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