The Simplest "Exercise" of Transformation

Standing in both the present and an already-accomplished future

When we are whole-bodily both in the present and the future, free of existential problem about either, then the present reveals affordances that move you toward the future.

Finding an Aesthetically Powerful Vision

You may start with being attracted to changing something in your life or your world. This can be a spark for exploring visions to find the most aesthetically powerful vision which has a felt-sense of a connected thread to the present.

To discover an aesthetically powerful vision may require exploring in various dimensions. For example, if you are single and looking for a partner, you can explore time scales: is there the most potency in the vision of asking someone out? In the vision of having moved-in together? In a vision of domestic life with children? In a vision of enjoying each other in old age? Imagine many variations across dimensions, exploring what variant of vision is the most attractive.

Simultaneously, for the vision to reveal affordances, there needs to be a felt-sense of a connected thread to the present. This doesn’t mean continuous with the present. By analogy, if you’ve ever done basic energy work, there is the distance the hands can be held apart where you can feel energy connecting the hands. Similarly, the interesting place to “hold” the future is at the greatest distance into the future at which it still feels energetically connected to the present. This can vary by domain, perhaps two months for a health matter and twenty years for a relationship matter, or vice versa.

With these visions of the future, allow the perceptual imagination to enrich it with detail: what does the future look like in detail, sound like in detail, feel like in detail? To take a minor example, if you have a vision of a more pleasing domestic environment, what will the room be like in the future, in enough detail to create a set for a movie? To take a major example, if you are changing careers, what will the experience be like of being in that career, including how your body feels in the clothes you are wearing?

However much sensory detail you create, create more. More immersive. More immersive.

You are searching for your most aesthetically powerful visions. Be careful of borrowing others. If you borrow others, it must be because you find it compelling yourself.

Infusing Every Cell with the Vision

When you have discovered an all-sensory-channel vision of the future that is full, detailed, immersive, aesthetically powerful, and energetically connected to the present, use the inbreath to breathe the felt-sense of that vision into the whole-body, infusing the felt-sense of that vision into every cell, from head to genitals to feet, inclusive of the subtle body (what can be felt as bodily even though beyond the surface of the skin). Use the outbreath to release any felt-sense not in alignment with the vision. Simultaneously with this, continually relax any existential problem about the present.

Breathe in and out, in and out, taking the vision into every cell, releasing obstacles from every cell, until an already-accomplished future is bodily known.

You are aligning the energetic orientation of the body with the future, as a searchless activity. It is the continual recognition that from a present that is fundamentally OK, there is attractive change.

From this feeling-stand in the future, affordances (opportunities for interaction) will become evident in the present, just as the vision of playing a game transforms an empty meadow into a field of play: what is lacking is not what the meadow offers, but the vision that reveals how it can be interacted with.

Other Methods

This is a method among other valuable methods. For example, having an orienting ideal that guides activity can be a useful method, but it is different because an orienting ideal is no longer energetically connected with the present, but rather a generative seed for planning but does not organically reveal affordances for action.

This method is appropriate for futures that would not happen on their own. There is no value added envisioning the perfect completion of a cup of coffee you just started drinking. Such a micro approach tends to create manipulative orientation toward living. Ideally, here, the infusions of the future are powerful and relatively infrequent, driving long-term change, although you certainly may infuse the whole body with a vision repeatedly for a period of days or weeks in order to align it―there is no intrinsically correct dose. Sometimes, a single dose of infusing the whole body with a vision provides energy for decades.

Transformation

Transformation flows ceaselessly and deliciously when you are standing in the fundamental problem-free sense of the present, enjoying the felt-sense of attraction to an already-accomplished future.