Liz la Force, BBA EU Business School, Founder of Love4Life Academy

“Tuning into the subconscious to guide young entrepreneurs to reconnect with their authentic power.”

Liz encouraged the meeting to adopt the concept of “adding the heart (and the body) as another dimension to thinking and reflecting on what has happened to us to allow us to ‘feel into what it did to us’”.

To accomplish this requires an exercise in guided visualisation, in three parts:

1. Relaxation of the body.

2. Tune into and open the heart—with some love—to look at what happened in 2022, being aware of the “inner critic”.

3. Watching an “inner movie” depicting some of the beautiful and less beautiful events of the year that may have impacted on us.

Liz guided the group to adopt a relaxed body position for this exercise (sitting comfortably with a straight back, legs together, hands on lap, closed eyes, relaxed deep breathing). Start by giving attention to your feet, feel them on the ground, your legs, pelvis, lower belly, chest, heart and lungs. Notice how each part of the body feels, what it is connected to.

Focus now in turn on the lower back, spine, shoulder blades, arms, elbows, hands and fingers. Is your body feeling more relaxed, perhaps a bit heavier? Pay particular attention to your neck— often a source of tension—and your head and skin. Relax and let go of tension. Focus now on your heart, placing your hand on your heart; imagine a beautiful white light shining into your heart from the inside to the outside; be aware of how big, or small this light is, how warm it is. Allow this light to spread into your body, filling the body and making it easier for you to look back on the past year with compassion and an open mind.

Imagine stepping into a white room. Sit on the chair in the middle of this space facing a white screen. Push the button of the video to start your “movie” of 2022, showing events that made an impact on you. Look at them. Which emotions arise while looking back at these events? Tension, joy, sadness? Allow the events to unfold, trying to really remember the moment, how it made you feel, how it affected you. Perhaps consider how these events caused you to change in some way.

Ask your body to show you the events that really made an impact.

Breath in and out a few times and feel your feet grounded.

Pick one event from 2022 that you would like to reflect on, positively or negatively. The event could be personal or business-related. Keep it in your mind. Breathe deeply in and out, be aware of your body again.

Open your eyes and retrieve the memory you have selected. Stretch. Come back to the present. Go to breakout rooms and ask each other the following questions:

1. How did you act/react when this event happened?

2. How did this event (and your reaction) make you feel?

3. How would you like to feel the next time a similar event happens?

4. What do you need to do to make this new feeling happen?

After a 20-minute breakout session in groups of four, Liz asked participants if anyone was willing to share their experiences which had been discussed.

Now envision what it is that you really want to change from 2022 to 2023. What is the feeling or action that you want to bring into 2023? Envision yourself doing it, feeling it, in a particular situation in 2023, even at a certain specific date. How would you act differently than you did before? Making it as “alive” as possible, infuse the event with colours and scents, projecting yourself into 2023. How does your body feel, as you lead and change your life?

Bring yourself back to the present with that memory still alive and store its imprint somewhere in your body. Touch the place – e.g., your forearm, cheek – where you want to store the memory. Your body, and your subconscious will remember, allowing you to access memories through touch in the future.

You have just renewed and reset a past experience, and this can happen with any memory at any time. If we don’t do this regularly, we run the risk of carrying a lot of negative baggage with us into our future.

Questions?

Sharing her own experience, Liz travelled the world on her own discovery journey. This journey is different for everyone, but entering a new environment, e.g., through travel, helps to open yourself up to new senses, a new consciousness, new discoveries, through experiencing different people from different cultures and even different languages. We can visualise and actualise this at any time, or change any of our daily habits, e.g., by taking a different route to work.

Is this exercise a kind of yoga? The practice of visualization has been with us for millennia, connecting with our energy dimensions, helping to get to know ourselves better on a different level. There is so much more to us than we are aware. We can discover these parts through exercises such as those outlined in this article.

Another participant shared with the group a memory of swing dancing to establish a connection, which brought back a memory, and an “extraordinary connective experience at the time”. These are the types of experiences which we really feel in the heart that make us feel alive and truly human.

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