So the following is an excerpt from one of my live workshops on visioning.
We've done about over 15 hours of workshops on this topic and these are slowly being turned into courses that will be published on Insight Timer.
So my voice is lively and animated because I'm engaging with an audience here but I hope you enjoy and feel free to take notes and see if this perspective helps you with thinking of visioning a little bit differently than you might have otherwise been exposed to.
Enjoy.
So visioning is a process of aligning your imagination with your deepest core needs,
Values,
And gifts.
So to make that concrete,
What it means is that let's say one of your core needs is contribution and purpose.
You really want to live a life of purpose.
And I'll use a few different examples so you can see there's different flavors of this.
Your life might look different than someone whose core need is more centered around love or community.
Or maybe that would look even more different than someone whose core needs are around self-expression and authenticity.
So core needs are kind of like those needs that you feel really define you as a human and really run your life in many ways that you always are trying to get those needs met no matter what you're doing.
You're expressing those things.
Core values are like a layer on top of your needs.
So needs are shared universally by all humans.
Need for love,
Need for care,
For consideration,
For authenticity.
We all share those things.
But values are like a layer above that and they're a little bit more specific to you.
They're more related to something unique about you.
For example,
One of my core values is intellectual rigor.
Now intellectual rigor is not something that is shared by most people,
I would say.
It's very unique to me and scientists and philosophers and other intellectuals.
But if you are a scientist or an intellectual or philosopher,
You probably value intellectual rigor.
I also have a very strong value of connection to truth and honesty and integrity.
Because for me,
That's a way of becoming intimate with reality,
With what is.
So those are core values for me,
But they're not shared by others.
Other people might have a core value of exuding kindness and love wherever they go or creating beauty wherever they go.
That's also,
I kind of have that a little bit,
But maybe I'm not as good at it or I don't know,
But it doesn't feel as core.
It feels more aspirational,
Whereas intellectual rigor for me feels like it's embedded into the core of my being.
Beauty is something that I appreciate,
Something that I love to create,
But I would have to think a little bit more about what my relationship with it is.
So core gifts are another layer kind of on top of that.
And core gifts are your core values mixed with your talents and skills and things that you are deeply passionate about.
So I happen to have played music when I was very young.
I started playing the guitar when I was like 12 or 13 and I played piano earlier than that.
Music has always been a very deep part of my life.
And so compared to some other people that have tried to pick up instruments,
I've noticed that it is easier for me to do that.
Even when I was younger,
It was easier for me.
There must have been some innate talent for it.
Conversely,
There are 12 year olds that are better at math than I am,
Even though I love math and I wish I was talented at it.
I wish I was gifted at it.
I can get better at it.
I don't think that there's a limit to how strong I can get at math if I really put my mind to it.
But I'm never going to get as far as some of those people that have gone really far with it and have a talent for it and have a gift for that and had proper mentoring when they were really young.
So I just have to accept that about myself.
My core gifts lie in the way my mind was shaped at a very young age from early influences and early passions.
That's music.
That's philosophy.
That's science.
That's the conceptual side of mathematics.
Not really mathematics,
But the concepts of it.
So those are my core gifts.
Now,
Visioning is a process of aligning your imagination with your core gifts,
Core values,
And core needs.
So what you're trying to do is you're basically trying to use your imagination to live into a future,
For example,
A sense of possibility,
A sense of potential,
Something that's adjacent to your current reality.
Not so far out into the future that you can't possibly imagine it happening,
But it's part of the adjacent possible.
It's right,
It's close to where you are.
Like in the next year,
You might be able to see it happening or three years or five years.
It's a process of leaning into the fuller expression of your gifts,
The fuller expression of your values,
The fuller expression of your needs,
As if these were all seeds.
And what would they look like if they were more fully expressed,
If they were in a nurturing environment,
A nurturing soil?
How might they continue to express themselves or expand in your life as if they could be expressed at every level of your life?
How would your relationships look?
How would your sense of purpose or career or contribution look?
How would all these things look if they were more highly expressed in your being?
And then we can go a little step further as well,
Which is totally unhinged visioning,
Where we just go into forget reality completely for a moment,
And you're just going to make a connection with the fullest and highest expression of all these things that you can possibly imagine.
Not with any idea about whether it's going to become real or not,
We're just temporarily suspending judgment about its realism,
And we're just engaging in a process of getting to know,
At the imaginal level and at a more intuitive level,
What does the fullest expression of these needs,
Values,
And gifts feel like in my system?
And then we just spend time there.
We spend time resting in that fullness and that beauty,
And that is the process of visioning,
As I understand it.
So thanks for listening to this little teaser into the visioning process as aligned imagination.
And as of 2025,
I have started to publish visioning subcourses that go through every single set of human needs,
From security,
Stability,
Love,
Partnership,
Contribution,
Autonomy,
Awareness.
We're going through the full gamut of human needs,
And by shining a light on each set of human needs,
We can really renew our relationship with them.
So if you like this kind of work,
And you'd like to learn more about it,
Please feel free to give me a follow and check out some of the other meditations and courses I have,
Specifically in the visioning series,
Which you might like if you're wanting to learn more about that.
So blessings to you,
Friend.
Thank you for joining me on this journey.
I hope that the year ahead fills you with a sense of all you're wanting and much more.
