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How to boost your power of  imagination to boost your life

by Harvinder Kaur
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To develop imagination, the writer, who is an educator by profession, shares some exercises and techniques she has practiced and taught over the years with great results.

The first step to manifesting what is not there is to imagine it. Not desire it vaguely, but imagine it intensely and vividly, engaging as many senses as possible. This mantra is well known in today’s ‘manifest anything’ age. But it doesn’t happen with everyone, or we’d have a much longer line of billionaires and the sky lined with pink balloons of ethereal romances! There are many reasons for this, but here we’ll discuss one of the skills required to change and manifest – imagination.
How do we develop the phenomenal power of imagination? Read on.


Don’t kill it, cultivate it!
All kids have an acute and natural power of imagination. The world is certainly not what it seems to small feet and big hearts. But it’s slowly sucked off, forced, and receded into the ground. We teach a child to be ‘sensible’. But if you want to transform life, stay a child! Let the inherent power of imagination burn softly inside you in your adult years. You will learn to light many candles from that one flame.
Hang around children, watch them role-play or pretend-play, and play along with them if possible. And, don’t, DON’T give them instructions! Thinking like a child transforms adult life, all that you want to put in neat corners spills in a beautiful way. It is a mind-flexing exercise. It trains the mind to be able to move in different directions when needed. The confining railway track approach gets left behind and you find the sky is yours. Fly!


Feed your mind with imaginative content
There was a time when content came from grandma’s stories, religious practices, and books. That time has dissolved, and now content is bombarded from all sides and from all platforms. Almost everyone has an agenda as to why they want a slice of your mind. You must deliberate as to what you allow in.
If you want to develop the power of imagination, then the content that will help will be fantasy novels, science fiction, video games (choose well!), cartoons, and certain kinds of artwork. It acts as a catalyst and helps the mind to expand and flex.

Travel – gain exposure
Imagination means crossing the boundaries of the mind. Begin by crossing the boundaries of your world. Travel – wide and far. Learn – different and varied skills and languages. Make friends – with people from all walks of life, and with other creatures. These lifestyle changes help to expose the mind to the wider canvas of the world. More and varied raw data gets stored in the mind that can be used to build upon and expand into much that is different. Living in a box or cage is not going to make you imaginative!

I experimented with throwing leftover coffee and color on paper. After a few spills, I started to see some very interesting forms emerging. I repeated this with watercolor and found that some wonderful creatures emerged from the splashes of color. This became an imagination workout for me.

Exercises to develop imagination

Just as a good diet and good habits support good health, so do the above-given guidelines. However, if you want to develop a particular muscle of the body you must do specific exercises, a bicep-building exercise won’t build your calves or hamstrings. Similarly, there are exercises specific to developing imagination. What is designed to develop imagination will not have the same impact on fine-tuning critical thinking or logic.
I’m sharing here some wonderful exercises and methods I’ve been using for years in workshops on creativity I’ve been taking over years. Even if you practice one of them repeatedly there will be a marked difference you can observe after some time. Faculties of the mind are like muscles, the more you use them and develop them through exercise the more they will grow stronger. Here’s the ‘Imagination Workout’!


A shape a day
Choose a shape a day – circle, square, rectangle, triangle, etc. Now, take a wide sheet or a notebook and draw whatever you can (except emojis!) with only that shape. Don’t mix squares and rectangles. It may seem odd if you’ve not done it before, but try it for a few days and see what it does to you.
If this is done for a child, you can take a sheet of paper and draw a shape, for example, a series of different-sized circles, and tell the child to make different things with it. You’ll be surprised!


Create funny nonsensical poems
This is a super-fun game I play with friends and children all the time! It’s hilarious and mind-expanding, and sometimes you even come up with a masterpiece! Ask your friends (or pick a chit from a pile if you are doing this solo) to give you unrelated words, like – stone and computer or sofa and rocket, now create a rhyme out of these as quickly as you can. There should be a timer! You are invited to awaken your silly side in this and don’t take an eternity for this because it’s the pressure of the timer that forces you to create crazy images!


What if…
This is a simple and extremely powerful exercise. Sit down with a pen and paper or your computer or recorder. Give yourself a time limit, just two to five minutes a day will do. Without letting your adult, sensible, railway-track mind interfere, write a list of what-ifs… Everything is acceptable. You don’t even have to show it to anyone, or even read it again yourself, but the process is important as it helps to loosen rusted nuts and bolts.


Dream diary
Dreams are uncensored imagination! Mine your dreams for ideas by keeping a dream diary. There are no barriers there and it’s all coming out of your subconscious mind. You don’t have to have a purpose behind this, but it can be a useful idea bank if you want to create an image, story, song, or who knows what!


Practice visualization
Among the various methods for bringing about a transformation like affirmations, meditation, pranayama, and the like, there is visualization. Visualization involves heightened imagination while trying to awaken the senses as much as possible so that the visualization is intense and vivid. If you want to manifest something the first step is to visualize it as realistically as you can. The act of engaging the mind’s energy through visualization kicks off a series of reactions in the body and mind that serve to change the flow of life by changing the individual’s energy.


Picture mixes
Take hard copies of two separate and different pictures, you can cut them from magazines or newspapers. Cut them up in half and attach pieces from two different pictures together. Now, gaze, gaze long enough till you are ready to create a third different image out of it. ADVICE – don’t try to be sensible, be like a child who won’t think twice about drawing a lion with a peacock tale, or a whale that’s swallowed a ship.


Prop dance
This is adapted from theatre exercises where you pick up an object and pretend it’s something else, yes, children do it all the time! An ordinary spoon can become a mobile phone, pen, missile, clip, mouth organ, or whatever else. Training the mind into this habit is training the mind to be flexible and inventive.


Never-ending story
We’ve all played this at some point but perhaps never used it regularly enough to realize how it could revolutionize the mind to think of fresh ideas. This is done in a group (a class situation is ideal) with one person coordinating. Call upon one person to start a story and then stop abruptly and ask another person to continue, then stop that person and ask a third to continue. Apart from being great fun, it taxes the mind to be alert and alive and to come up with fresh ideas.


Art
Expose yourself to explore different types of art. You don’t have to become a full-blown professional artist, but allowing the magic of color and form in your life can revolutionize the mind. Exposing yourself to different art forms of different cultures shapes and stretches the mind. Van Gogh, Dali, Cave paintings, abstract art, miniature paintings, sculptures… the list could go on. Exposure is a great catalyst. Living in times where there is such easy access to digital data, one needs to begin melting in color, so the canvas of our minds can throw up its treasures.


Cloud-perspective – Imagination experiment
This is a technique I developed while playing with left-over coffee and color. I’m sharing it here because it has been of immense value to me. It started when I diluted a little leftover coffee and threw it on paper just for the heck of it to see what would happen. I had no intention of doing a coffee painting or portrait. It was a pure experiment. Then after a few spills, I gazed and could see some very interesting forms emerging. I repeated this with watercolor and found that some quite wonderful creatures emerged from the splashes of color. It is not in the scope of this article to go into detail about what can be done with this. But go ahead and experiment with this and see how it speaks to you. A couple of pictures before the outlining and after are given here.
Know that imagination is one of the most natural and inherent powers a human being is born with. Cultivating it is not only easy but almost unnecessary if you have grown up without it being stifled (then you are very lucky!).
Go ahead, imagine, who needs reality?!
Lead visual credit: Grigoriou Panagiotis’ Surreal Photo Manipulation

For Part I of this story go to
Imagine your way to healthy, happiness, and brilliance!

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