By Christine Falcon-Daigle
Not long ago I saw a cartoon depicting a unicorn lying down on a therapist’s couch with the therapist saying: You must believe in yourself. Recently, this became poignant to me when I had the honor of attending a memorial service for Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and Hoffman graduate, who considered the Process “a powerful and effective tool for change.”
Upon his return from the moon, Edgar Mitchell had a profoundly life-altering shift in consciousness – what he later came to understand as a samadhi experience – where he felt a sense of oneness and a profound awareness of the interconnection of everything in the universe.
Once we recognize our connection to a larger consciousness – that essence at the core of our being, the part that is pure love and light – how do we ever go back? For me, the week at the Hoffman Process was the first time I had ever connected with my self in that way.
One of the best things about life after the Process is that you have tools and practices that support your integration. One of the most powerful tools is visioning. I have learned that I can manifest anything I want; that I, in fact, do manifest what I think. If we’re not consciously creating what we want, we may be unconsciously creating something we don’t want.
Research has demonstrated that our thoughts literally affect the material world. These results have been replicated in many experiments. It is our capacity to dream, to envision, to imagine the kind of life we want, and the kind of world we want to live in.
The incomparable Jean Houston, one of Edgar Mitchell’s long-time friends and colleagues, spoke at his memorial about physicist Albert Einstein visiting her kindergarten class. One of the little boys in her class raised his hand and asked, “Mr. Einstein, how do I get to be as smart as you?” Albert thought about it for a second and said, “Read more fairytales.” A few minutes later, another little boy raised his hand and asked, “Mr. Einstein, how do we get to be smarter than you?” After a long pause, Einstein said, “Read more fairytales!”
To me, what he was saying was that the power of the imagination – the capacity to envision what we want to create before we create it – is one of our most valuable assets!
Bob Hoffman, like Dr. Edgar Mitchell, was a visionary – he created the Hoffman Process before the field of neuroscience was even on the radar. All the research that is coming in now about how the brain works, and its resiliency, supports the powerful transformational work that has been the result of the Hoffman Process for the past 48 years.
Many graduates of the Process report achieving their dreams – dreams that, before the Process, they couldn’t seem to access or manifest. Sometimes they didn’t even know they had dreams, or were allowed to have dreams!
At the beginning of 2016, I registered for Ed McClune’s teleclass on visioning. I also spent a few hours on a rainy Saturday creating a vision board, with my husband, that represents everything we want our home and work lives to include. Guess what? Almost six months into the year, we are moving toward the exact situation we created together in our vision!
So ask yourself: How do you want to be living? What does it look like? Who is in that vision? Write down all the details. Then spend time dreaming about it, in exquisite detail. You really can have exactly the kind of life you dream for your self!
If you’d like to learn more about visioning, check out our Practices page and click on Visioning:
https://www.hoffmaninstitute.org/practices/