Balloon Visualization Technique

Visualization is an excellent exercise for our minds. It can help with numerous things in daily life. It can help with memory recall, remembering where you left your keys or set your phone down is a nice life hack to have. It helps with proprioception (knowing where in space your body parts are), which is great for not stubbing your toes, falling up stairs, or hitting your funny-bone when no one's around to laugh. My personal favourite, is visualizing the process of Pinterest DIYs to see if they're made-to-fail or if there's an actual possibility it'll work. I'm not going to list them all, but visualization helps in a lot of little ways, and it's the little things that make up life, isn't it?

I'm going to share with you my favourite visualization technique. It's great for practice, and can also be used in a meditative way, if you so choose. It's simple enough to do, yet complex enough for you to actually feel your mind getting a work-out. 

Close your eyes, breathe, and relax. Imagine a balloon. Seems pretty obvious, right? Well, it gets a bit more complicated than that. Try syncing your breath with the inflation and deflation of the balloon. See how many breaths you can keep that up for, it probably wont be many at first, which is totally fine; it's like any other practice, you'll get better the more you do it. That's essentially it, that's the mental exercise. 

If you want to take it a step further, and give it a bit of a meditative quality, you can take note of certain things. How big are the full inflations of your mental balloon? That may give you an idea of how fully and deeply you're inhaling. How small are the deflations? Alternately, this may suggest how fully you're exhaling. Remember, you've got to fully exhale before you can fully inhale. Also, a fun little thing I like to do, is notice the colour of the balloon when I don't intentionally colourize it. I treat it like a mood-ring, certain colours mean different things. You can also do chakra-work by intentionally colouring your mental balloon to the corresponding chakra colour. 

Let us know your personal experiences with this visualization technique! Was it easy, or surprisingly challenging for you? Were there any small changes you made to make it better suit you? Comment below! :)