A Powerful Visioning Process for Effective Bulimia Treatment

Using Tested Visioning Exercises to Get Happy and Healthy

There is no one visioning process, but several, that I’ve learned and have used in my life since 2005. Each of them have been profound in my personal transformation.

Two primary visioning exercises I want to share with you include the vision board A Powerful Visioning Process for Effective Bulimia Treatment and life visioning (or daily visualizations). I’ve used both of these methods to do everything from recover from my 20 year eating disorder, attract the man of my dreams, land a great job, and go on some amazing travel adventures.

What I’m trying to say is this stuff really works!

We all know the enormous power of the mind to get us into trouble or to help us heal. Both are by choice – although it doesn’t always seem that way. By using a visioning process to develop your mind as a healing tool, you can develop what I call “mind medicine.”

Your body follows the leadership of your brain. As we utilize our imagination by envisioning ourselves in a healthy and happy state, our body starts to follow this positive mental sensation and new habits begin to form.

Visioning Process #1: Create a Vision Board to Beat Bulimia

One of the most powerful tools I’ve used as part of my life visioning process is a vision board. A vision board is where you cut out images and phrases from magazines (or print pictures from the Web) that inspire and excite you. You take these pictures and paste them onto a big piece of paper, poster board or a wall to make a collage.

There is no right way to make a vision board, but I do have few recommendations:

How to use a vision board to cure an eating disorder

To be honest, a vision board isn’t going to literally cure your eating disorder, but it can help. Having a vision board to look at every day keeps your mind focused on your future self instead of the ‘what-is’ of your current reality. Looking at your vision board for 10-15 minutes each day will send positive thoughts to your subconscious. Your subconscious mind is where the work is done to change your underlying beliefs and attitude.

It’s important to feel the feelings of your future life now. You want to “feel” the way you imagine your future life will feel like – now. In this way you’re adding emotional juice or energy to your vision to magnetize yourself to it.

By consciously sending images of a healthy, happy future to your subconscious mind, you are activating new parts of your brain that will positively affect your habits and eventually overcome your eating disorder. By creating positive feelings tied to this future, you will change your energetic vibration and the law of attraction will begin to send you more of what you’re feeling. Feeling good is key to this process.

Replace the Negative with Positive

As part of every visioning process, we start to change the connections in our brain as new positive images begin to replace the old. Because our perception of body image is tied to our self-image, it’s important to retrain our brain in order to begin to see ourselves differently. Who we are to ourselves is a product of perception – good, bad, ugly, fat or perfect. It’s up to us to change the perception.

In addition to positive images in the brain, we also want to create positive emotions to support those new images. The emotions can be guided by what we feed our mind – we have the power to change our beliefs and behavior. By reinforcing positive self images with powerful, positive feelings we start to teach our brain that we want change to bring us more things that make us feel good.

Change Your Belief, Change Your Behavior

We can reprogram our brains to think positively and to attract what we truly want for ourselves. If you want to get technical, take a look at this scientific example of how it works:

Experiments have been done in reference to assisting long-term memory using the chemical protein Kinase A, which resides in the brain cells. Through mental exercise, this protein can move from the body of a brain cell, or neuron, to the nucleus of that cell, creating yet another protein that changes the structure of the cell’s nerve endings!

This means new connections are available between each of the brain cells. As the new connections form, memory expands through various exercises that move the protein around. The neural connections then strengthen and new pathways are created that strengthen long-term memory ability. In other words, we can actually reconfigure the chemistry of our brains through techniques that create a kind of mental workout for change!

So what the heck does that mean? We have the control!

With guided imagery and positive affirmations we can reprogram our mind to embrace health. As we use this visioning process we actually change the connections in our brains. That’s fantastic, right!

Visioning Process #2: Life Visioning (Daily Visualizations)

Life visioning, or what I like to call daily visualizations, are something you can do anywhere and anytime. While the vision board may be for a particular area of your life like a new relationship or a healthy mind and body free from bulimia, this visioning exercise is something you can do for more specific things.

The visualization process

You can now step powerfully into your future experience with confidence that you’ve already rehearsed the outcome you want. You have “pre-paved” the future you want to experience in your energetic vibration (your vibrational reality). This makes you much more likely to experience that outcome – or a better one – than if you had merely stumbled into your future.

This is deliberate creating at its best.

Body Image is all in Your Mind

Before I could start my bulimia recovery journey, I had to realize I had a specific body image in my head that had to do with an imaginary me that I made up as a child regarding what I looked like in terms of my body and self image in general. Because of cultural influences, peer pressure, and my family dynamics, I didn’t see that my body was fine just the way it was. I created a severely distorted image of my body and constantly reinforced how ugly or fat I was because I was seeing myself through this distorted perception.

As I learned one visioning process and then the next to replace my negative and misguided mental pictures with a new perception of what is beautiful and healthy, my bulimia recovery finally began. These lasting recovery exercises helped me gain control of my thoughts and stop binging. At last I could enjoy normal eating patterns and the sensation of finally having a healthy body again.

Stay Focused on the Positive

The visioning process isn’t magic, though it sometimes seems like it is!

Remember to…

The vision board is great reinforcement and helps you stay focused by keeping your attention on your positive future.

Emotionalization: The Power of Our Emotions

My definition of emotionalization is adding [energy] emotion to our vision. When you do your visualization exercises just imagining or seeing your vision in your mind isn’t as powerful as if you feel that vision. It’s much more important to allow your body to experience the feelings of being, doing and having that future you are imagining than how often you visualize. Emotions are the juice that bring our visions into reality with any great speed. No emotion – no speed.

Emotions and Recovery

Emotionalizing our beliefs helps us see what they are and how they affect us. As you go deeper into your bulimia recovery program, using various therapies will help you identify what you are feeling on the deepest levels. Often we can’t get to these places on our own because our feelings and emotions come from a profoundly subconscious place that is hard to access. And accessing this place can often be a scary thing! Professional therapy sessions or loving support groups can help you get there safely.

As you get in touch with your feelings it actually gets easier to understand what makes you happy, what scares you, what makes you miserable, and what turns you on. By getting in touch with your emotions you start to replace the negative feelings with those that empower your vision of a healthy you. By truly feeling and identifying your emotions using the visioning process and other bulimia therapy programs, you will begin to practice living into your future self. The more you do it, the better you’ll feel. The better you feel, the more you’ll want to do it.

Choosing Life

Remember, you can be whatever you want to be. You can choose health. Just by being here on this site, you have already chosen recovery from your eating disorder. You can reinforce your choice by downloading our free eBook, which has real-life stories from former bulimics who used the many recovery techniques to overcome their eating disorder problems. This can be you!

We want to accompany you on your healing journey. Drop us an email or let us know how you’re doing. If you do make a vision board, take a picture and send it to us – we believe in your vision. Allow us to send back positive reinforcement and hope along the way.

Share your bulimia recovery story with us, too.  You’ll be helping others to stay inspired as they too work towards overcoming bulimia.