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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2436 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 29, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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Has anyone significantly increased their capacity to visualize? Like after practice inner visualizations are clearer, richer, and full of finer details?

I’ve been doing these perfect nurturer meditations that involve visualization, and they’ve been really great—and I’ve found the more I set the scene the more impactful they are. I hypothesize that with advanced visualization skills I could “practice” a variety of activities in my mind’s eye and use it to get better at a bunch of things; I’m just wondering if visualization is a tractable and trainable skill.

I think it is. I used to have almost total aphantasia. I had to start very simply, trying to see a line or a box or a number faintly, while meditating. Started counting breaths by trying to see the number of the breath from 1-10 and starting over. Had to strain to make it appear at all. I think the training helped. I stopped keeping track of this (in)ability after a while, but later when I tried IPF/perfect nurturer, I was able to do it to a large enough degree that I could benefit from it. And I found, like you did, that the stronger the imagination is, the more impactful the attachment reconditioning/trauma repair meditation would be.

Wow, that's interesting. I have limited imaginative capabilities, but not to the point of aphantasia. Mostly, when I think, I see words in my head almost like this site, and I feel punctuation and formatting, italics make me want to lean and semicolons make me feel a slight thump. Images are hard to muster, and even when they appear they tend to flash away or fade into blackness.

I have two thoughts:

  1. My limited imagination makes reading fiction hard, especially fiction with lots of descriptions, which gives me a headache and I lose track of my place. I find it much easier to read nonfiction or fiction where the main point is dialogue or monologue. Do you think your aphantasia affected your ability to read fiction like this?
  2. It's weirdly easier for me to imagine things after I wake up, possibly a similar phenomenon to hypnagogic hallucinations. Do you notice anything like that?

  1. Yes it was probably harder to effectively read fiction while my visualization was wrecked. But sometimes I could probably "know" the scene by seeing it on a subconscious level even if not consciously at all. Possibly related issue: my working memory was worse at that time too.

  2. Yes.

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