Visualisation.....The power of your imagination

I knew about about visualization for a long time, so it wasn’t necessarily new to me, however I did not fully understand how it worked or how to do it properly, so in my limited perspective it did not work for me. Who can relate to that?

Fastword, and I now have the missing links to visualization…and that is not only to bring about the image, but the associated FEELING with it.

We do this every day unconsciously, to bring about more of what we don’t want. The reason for this is that we keep replaying the movie and images from the past, so we end up getting more of the same.

Instead, lets use it get more of what we DO want.

The important psychological premise here is that:

“All images or mental pictures tend to produce corresponding physical conditions and reactions”

Every image or picture that we hold in our mind will create a physical reaction in our body and as a result will impact our behaviour and experience.

Visualisation is also known as Mental Imagery or Visual Mental Rehearsal (VMR) and is a specific technique that has been proven to be incredibly successful in producing a specific outcome.

This technique has grown significantly in the last few years and studies have shown that the brain does not know the difference between something imagined or something real, so therefore it is in our best interest to become incredibly aware of the images we are holding in our mind.

“Visualize the most amazing life imaginable to you. Close your eyes and see it clearly. Then hold the vision for as long as you can. Now place the vision in God’s hands and consider it done.” Marianne Williamson

This technique is widely used by many leaders, sport athletes and NASA to improve outcomes.

Visualisation is usually completed by having focused attention on various imagery and includes aspects of all of our senses, such as taste, touch, smell, feel etc.

The aim here is to DELIBERATELY put images in your mind of what you DO want rather the unconscious images on repeat that we are unknowingly presenting the brain with, which inevitably keeps you stuck in a repetitious pattern.

How to visualize:

1.      Consider an area of life and the VISION you wish to hold for it

2.      Bring to your mind an image of the vision achieved in terms of a crystal clear image with associated feelings

3.      Repeat this process of bring the image to mind, married with the associated feelings (work of Dr Joe Dispenza) one to several times a day. The repetitive action of this is what installs the neural pathways in your brain

You can do visualizing just by the simple act of closing your eyes and visualising, as part of your meditation practice (ideal) or use a guided visualization script. Which ever option you choose, ensure that you become present moment aware and intentionally relax.

The secret sauce here is to marry the vision, with an image and associated FEELINGS as if it is already achieved.

Visualize this thing that you want. See it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blueprint, and begin to build.” Robert Collier

Enjoy this practice and have fun letting your imagination run free.

If you would like to learn how you can unleash your imagination, get in contact for a free 20 min chat by emailing, info@chantalkhoury.com.au.

Chantal is an Accredited and Certified Nutrition & Wellness Coach, EFT & NLP Practitioner that helps empower and inspire mums and women just like you to lovingly nourish and nurture their body and mind so that they can show up as the VERY best version of them self, authentically, on purpose and by design.

Your True Personal Power Within

The magnitude of the power within you is IMMENSE! I’m sure you, just like me had NO IDEA what that even meant.

It was something I had a sense of, but I could never put my finger on it or even comprehend what that was. All I knew, was what I knew and I most certainly was not taught it anywhere.

It wasn’t until a I took a journey within to fully understand myself, which then led me to further study and training to understand the power of the mind. Then I blew my own mind…..

All of your power lies within your mind, in fact, the life outside of you is a projection of your mind, to be more specific, a projection of you current belief system. So we created our current reality in our mind first before it was project out onto the screen. Some, obviously to our taste, and some not to our taste. This is happening at an unconscious level of our mind, until we make it conscious, which is where we have our super power of choice. It is the very reason why I LOVE NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) so much, it seeks to make the unconscious conscious and is very outcome orientated.

This can either be scary or empowering, I choose empowering, because you are in charge of changing that at ANY time – this is your power.

We live by two thought systems at any given moment in time (the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung), one keeps us out of our power and that is “the false self”, the other being our “true self”, keeps is in our authentic natural power.

The true self does not just know the following on an intellectual level, but it is a deep sense of self identity. The true self knows it is:

Credit: @vincentledvina

• Worthy

• Loveable

• Deserving

• Grateful

• Authentic

• Open to the flow of life

• Comfortable with oneself

• Not needing validation from the outside world

Imagine living your life with THIS knowing instead?

How different would your life be?

How would you show up on a day to day basis?

What would that look  like for you?

I would even encourage you right now to take a few minutes contemplating this, because THIS is the truth of you, it is not enough to just know it, you need to fully BELIEVE it in your mind.

Herein lies the problem, most at a conscious level will say, “Of course I believe I am worthy”, but it is not the conscious mind that hold’s our belief system, it is the subconscious mind (the part of the mind that is running everything)  and if it does not have that coded in a neural pathway, it is unlikely that you live in that knowing.

Examples of how the false self can show up?

• Are you constantly worried about what other people think?

• Do you flip between anxiety and depression?

• Do you have trouble letting go of the past?

• Do you take things personally and have a hard time managing your emotions

• Do you self criticize?

• Are you stuck in the same emotional patterns

• Do you expect others to act in a certain way in order for you to feel worth?

Answering YES to any of the above will mean that you are living within the false self thought system.

Now, let’s look at the other spectrum, the more empowering thought system.

How do you know if you are in true power, your true identity?

Credit: Alisha Rosley

• You will be immune to criticism and open to feedback

• You will have a sense of equality with others, you are not beneath nor superior to anyone

• You are not afraid to speak your truth, even when it feels super uncomfortable and is not the popular narrative

• You have a sense of knowing when to defer or when to assert yourself in situations

• You do not need any outside validation from external circumstances

• You do not have a desire for life to look a certain way in order for you to be in your truth

• You have the utmost love and compassion for yourself and others, holding them in their true power

 The power with you is huge, it is not something you need to fight or search for, it is within you NOW, you just don’t believe it to be true, so our role becomes removing the barriers, otherwise known as the self limiting beliefs to knowing that true self. It is yours to be reclaimed.

Are you ready to reclaim your power within?

If you are wanting to know your true self and experience living from the power within you, the check out the ways I can support you.

Chantal is an Accredited and Certified Nutrition & Wellness Coach, EFT & NLP Practitioner that helps empower and inspire mums and women just like you to lovingly nourish and nurture their body and mind so that they can show up as the VERY best version of them self.

The essential way of "BEING" in order to transform you and your family's health and wellness

I’m going to get to the point, i.e. you need GRIT and COMMITMENT.

 Achieving extraordinary results in anything, let alone one’s health takes work, commitment and grit. These are attributes that requires cultivation.

 We live too much for ‘instant gratification’. I see this so often in nutrition & wellness coaching. Quite often I’m asked, “I’ve been gluten free for a week, why am I not healed?” Needless to say the looks of disappointment when it is revealed it requires much longer to get the true results you are after.

The truth be told, quite often you can get symptomatic relief quite quickly with nutritional adjustments, but to truly heal the root cause and rebuild the foundations, takes months which can easily be sped up with the right mindset.

credit: @nerdyrockson

 If I look at the evidence of my son, I got dramatic improvement in a matter of days which provided me the motivation to keep going, but it wasn’t until 18 months or so after the journey began that I took a sigh of relief.

There were so many bumps in the road, so many times I wanted to give up because it all felt “too hard”, but I was committed and had grit and therefore persevered and by damn, it paid off.  My mentality  and commitment to myself was, ‘ I will until”. That grit paid off big time, what seemed like a helpless case, became the essence of resilience and vitality.

 How to commit in 2 easy steps:

1. Become so clear what you want to achieve & more importantly WHY. The why is so important.

2. Find a way to stay accountable. Trying to do it solo, is like getting on the slow boat to china by foot! Surround yourself with a mentor or a community of like minded people and watch your results soar. I know this personally to be true on so many levels. Any awesome results I have achieved have been under the guidance of mentors and like minded communities.

If you are truly ready to commit, and have the grit, then I’d love for you too join me in the next round of my  group 6 week Total Health Transformation program or as my VIP for 12 weeks to get a very tailored approach.

Chantal is an Accredited and Certified Nutrition & Wellness Coach with a very special interest helping busy and overwhelmed mums transform the health of their family using gut healing nutrition and transformational mindset practices.

- Accredited Certificate of Nutrition & Super Nutrition, special focus on Childhood Nutrition - Cadence Health

- Certified Level 1 & 2 Wellness Coaching - Wellness Coaching Australia

- MINDD Forum Health Coach - Mindd Foundation

- Accredited Real Healthy Kids Facilitator having personally trained with Sally Gray ND

- Clinical Evidence Based EFT Practitioner - Evidence Based EFT

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) Basics

I first came across this weird practice a number of years ago whilst dealing with my own physical health challenges. I got to a point where I needed to look further and deeper than the surface level physical stuff. Something I resisted for quite a while, until my practitioner told me that if I was not going to comply, then I should find someone else…..obviously a lot more politely than that…lol. It was the kick up the butt I needed and needless to say I’ve complied ever since!

This weird technique is known as Emotional Freedom Technique, EFT for short or more commonly known as Tapping.

After experiencing amazing results and really enjoying this technique so much, I decided to become certified so that I could incorporate it into my coaching practice.

Not only has it been a powerful tool for myself, but it has been fabulous to teach my children how to use it and help them become more empowered. Not only to recognise an emotion they are feeling, but deal with it too so that it does not become stuck in the body.

Below I’ll be describing some of the basics of Tapping that have been taken from the work of Dr Peta Stapleton and Evidence Based Emotional Freedom Technique.

What is EFT?

EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) is a brief novel intervention combining elements of exposure and cognitive therapy, and somatic stimulation. It is often referred to as ‘Tapping’ as it uses a two finger tapping process with a cognitive acceptance statement. It is a form of Energy Psychology.

EFT - The Technique:

Points are stimulated by tapping on them with 2 fingers, the index and middle fingers. The strength of tapping should be comfortable and you should be able to feel a resonance spreading out across the adjacent area of your body from the point you are tapping. Tap on each spot approximately 7 times before moving on to the next spot.

See below for Tapping Points:

Source Unknown

How does EFT Work?

EFT appears to affect the amygdala (stress centre in the brain) and hippocampus (memory centre), and both play a role in the decision process when you decide if something is a threat.

EFT has also been shown to lower cortisol levels, which is the stress hormone -too much cortisol can result in lowered immune function and ultimately affect our physical health.

 Stimulation of acupoints is believed to send a signal to the limbic system, and reduce limbic hyper arousal (Feinstein, 2010). This in turn, leads to “rapid reciprocal inhibition” and “long-term counter-conditioning” (Feinstein, 2010).

 EFT can decrease activity in the amygdala, which is part of the brain’s arousal pathway (Dhond, Kettner, & Napadow, 2007).

 The process of EFT has possible effects on the body’s physiological systems that regulate stress, emotional intensity and associated neural transmission frequencies (Diepold Jr & Goldstein, 2009).

What can EFT be used for?

Every Feeling or Thing, i.e. everything you have a feeling or sensation about -

• Food Cravings

• Body Shape-change and fat burning

• Stress and Anxiety

• Sports Performance

• Trauma, Memories

• Physical Pain

• Illness

• Addiction

Specifically in my practice, I’ll be using it for goal setting, dealing with general day to day stresses and emotions that arise, and removing limiting beliefs (health & wellness) & installing new beliefs.

EFT - The recipe

1. Acknowledge there is something to change and rate distress/discomfort out of 10 (10=most distress, 0=no distress). The rating level is known as SUDS

2. State problem in setup statement while tapping on karate chop point (3 times).

3. Tap through all 8 EFT points while saying a short reminder phrase.

4. Take a breath and re-rate your distress out of 10.

5. Tap again until rating is 0.

The aim if to get a SUDS rating level of 2 and below. This indicates that whilst you have the memory, you no longer have energetic charge and emotion to it. This could also be due to a cognitive shift to the event.

The Generalisation Effect:

After you address a few related problems with EFT, the process starts to generalise over all those problems. For example, someone who has 100 traumatic memories of being abused usually finds that after using EFT...they all vanish after neutralizing only 5 to 10 of them.

Why Tap on the negative?

• • Tapping doesn’t affirm the problem.

• • It states the truth and acknowledges it.

• • Taping calms the physiological response.

• • Once released, cognitive shifts (reframes) that come from the client will surface.

Further exploration of Tapping:

https://evidencebasedeft.com/free-resources/

Tapping will be incorporated into my longer term VIP 1:1 Packages, but you can also schedule a specific tapping session of 50 min. Feel free to get in contact with me to further explore your options for health IF you are wanting to go below the surface level and get longer terms results.

Chantal is a Certified and Accredited Nutrition & Wellness Coach with a very special interest helping stressed and overwhelmed mums transform the health of their family from the inside out using healing nutrition and transformational wellness practices.