Vision Boards – manifesting my desired future
25 Jul 2010 4 Comments
in Lady Business, Vision Boards Tags: art, artists way, c25k, craft, julia cameron, manifesting, vision boards
Today has just been a fabulous day of self-pampering and creativity. As Julia Cameron’s Artists Way book would say (http://www.theartistsway.com/) I’ve just spent an entire day on an artists date.
First up I went for a jog/walk in Hyde Park - restarting the Couch to 5K program now I have my new iPhone. It hurt, but it also felt insanely good to move and sweat a little. After a few Skype calls home I was ready to kick off the rest of my day.
After a mani/pedi I wandered down to the local arts store in Notting Hill and bought some mounting boards, a pack of Sharpies and some glue as today I was going to make a start on a few Vision boards. Vision boards are not a new concept and can be slightly different depending on which books or articles you’ve read. The concept is the same though – you pull together a collage of images to represent something you want in the future.
You start by going out and buying some paper (can be small, medium or large – whatever size you want your vision boards to be) and a whole stack of magazines of your choice. When you’re buying the magazines you should stick to the ones that appeal to you and are in the area that you want to vision board. If you pick a magazine up and after flicking through it decide it’s not what you were after, put it back. It’s not meant for you at this point in time. I walked out of the local WH Smith with no less than 10 magazines varying from Vogue Living, In Style, Delicious and Country Life. Anything goes – trust me!
Then the fun began. I got myself home and into a good space (both mentally and physically) and set aside a few hours for my afternoon of craft! I like to do a little mini meditation and think about the area that I want to vision board. If you don’t know you can also just ask a question that you might like answered and vision board that.
I poured over the magazines and tore out any images that appealed to me – you don’t spend too much time deliberating over which images as then your subconscious starts to kick in. Just get in there and tear away if you like the look of something. Don’t try and make it logically fit together, at this point it’s just about ripping out stuff that you like. After a while I had quite a large pile of pictures so I moved over to my two boards. I was going to vision board two things today - one for Lady Business itself and what I see in the future and one for the life I want to create as a result of the new business and way of life.
I spent around an hour sorting through pictures and making decisions based on gut feel as to which pictures should go with which board and then started cutting and glueing them onto the boards. It felt like a painstakingly long process but also so much fun that it didn’t feel boring. In fact it’s not dissimilar to doing a jigsaw puzzle except you are in control of creating the pieces of the jigsaw as well as completing it. At the end I had two vastly different boards but was amazing to see where I ended up with them.
The business one is a mixture of cooking, baking, chocolate, writing, fashion and entertainment – all in all very glamour and goddess like, naturally. I’ve got it in my room now as you should put the boards in a prominent place where you’ll constantly look at them so it’s going to stay there a little while until I find a permanent home for it.
The life one was totally different and Bel commented that it was very green. Looking at it now it’s very relaxed and chilled out, open spaces, country, farm, gardens, animals, travel and family. I guess looking at the two it’s been useful to understand what kind of life I want to create as only then can I hope to understand what kind of business model and way of working I will need to adapt to facilitate that lifestyle.
If you believe, as I do, that you can manifest your future, that the universe will deliver, that if you think it things will happen then you might find vision boards are a useful tool. The belief is that by surrounding yourself with powerful and positive images of what you want in the future your life and your circumstances will just adapt so that those pictures become reality.
If nothing else they’re a heap of fun – when is the last time you spent 30 bucks on magazines to just rip them up for art?
So here are my two masterpieces which now have pride of place in my room currently. My process has inspired Bel to do a vision board sometime next weekend so maybe you’ll be inspired to go through the process as well.
