Envisioning the Future Visualization Exercise for Content Search

This visualization below, written by Karen Keifer-Boyd, was used in the facilitator training week. It should be read slowly with pauses to allow time for the mind to wander and then go into one experience or issue in-depth to make personal connections.

Relax, comfortable position, close your eyes if comfortable doing so as you begin to explore the past, present and future. Nothing you see in your mind needs to be shared with anyone else.

1. FOCUS ON SPECIFIC EVENT:
Focus on a specific disempowering event in the past few years that you have personally experienced. Search back in your mind to locate a vivid experience that you have had that was very negative. Was there a loss, a displacement, an absence, or did someone or something appear that changed the situation in a way that you did not want changed. Keep searching through the years starting from today and travel back in your mind until one experience stands out to you as particularly disempowering.

2. SPECFIC QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CONCRETE NATURE OF THE EXPERIENCE:
Where are you in this situation? Look around you in your mind at the place?
How old are you?
What is going on around you?
Who else is there?
What are they or you wearing?
Is it noisy or quiet—what do you hear?
Is there talking? What is being said?
Are you doing something with your hands? What is it?
Are you sitting, standing, on the floor, or are you moving?
How are you feeling?
Are others sharing your feelings, or are you alone with them?
What are you feeling in this very specific disempowering experience?

3. TRANSITION TO MAKING CHANGE
Now re-envision that experience changing everything that made it uncomfortable, belittling, sad, or awful into comfort, strength, a sharing amongst others, even if not in the particular setting, who are benefiting from your vision. See the disempowering experience and transform every inch of its negative reach to an empowered space, an empowered situation.
If I were to ask you to make an artwork that would show the transformed event, what would you do? How could you make the art an experience for others that would empower them as well?

4. PREPARING TO CREATE:
When you start your work where will you begin? Will you begin by searching for some images or information? Will you talk to others? Will you draw what you saw, or your thoughts, or feelings? Everyone now move to a space that suits your needs to reflect and visualize your reflections in some way, whether text, drawing, images, or gathering things.