My first experience with mental training came in the second grade.  I was at recess playing my first game of rugby.  We were uncertain of the rules and it took me only 10 minutes to find a way to break my collar bone.  Clavicle fractures are common and pretty painful.  Where the x-rayed clavicle once held smooth margins it was formed into the shape of a jagged X.  I wore a butterfly brace and initially a sling too.  After a couple of weeks, the orthopedist called my parents to schedule a time for me to come into the office and begin moving the arm again.  My parents were delighted to tell him that I wasn’t available because I was on the mound pitching for my little league baseball team.

My parents love that story.  They take full credit for my rapid healing due to the fact that they had me practice a healing visualization each night as I went to sleep.  As I remember it I pictured a video game similar to Centipede where I blasted bits of material into the cracked bone.


An example of an effective visualization for manifesting butterflies.

The world is full of successful people who have built empires or defeated diseases who will tell you that positive visualization was pivotal to their success.  If you think the guy in the picture above got where he is today without some solid mental practice think again.  Bill Starr recently published an article detailing the techniques he successfully implemented in competitive olympic lifting for decades.  Now that he has retired he continues to use these same visualization techniques every night to prepare for for running errands the next morning.  That may appear a little OCD for most people who would rather being doing instead of visualizing but does it really work, and if it does why? 

The overwhelming majority of research on the topic of mental imagery/ mental practice is supportive and is statistically relevant.  From healing times in stroke victims,(1,2,3) burn victims, (4) depressives (5) to performance based outcome measures,(6,7,8) mental practice has been well studied and its utility validated.

Based on these studies and many others we could say that Mental Practice “works,” but research is never very good at explaining why something works.  For that, you have to turn away from the measurables of research labs and into the touchy feely world of metaphysics and philosophy.

Visualization is a skill that improves with practice.  There are many different approaches and step by step models to follow that all basically revolve around visualizing yourself accomplishing a task with as much detail as is possible without getting distracted during the process.  Techniques involve engaging as many of your senses as possible to effectively create the scenario and engage your nervous system. 
 
It was proposed by Geshe Michael Roache in The Diamond Cutter and in popular New Age films such as What the Bleep Do We Know, and The Secret that any technique can work but only if it effectively convinces some part of your conscious or subconscious mind that the event visualized actually occurred.  This establishes a pathway and a neurological precedent that the body can use and replicate.  Proponents of this theory would tell me that the reason why my Centipede visualization sped my clavicle recovery was because during those visualizations I effectively tricked myself and “felt” as though I was healing faster giving my body no alternative but to go ahead and heal faster.
 
Also at work here is an idea that the physical world or objective reality is the construct of our internal subjective experience.  Have you ever noticed that some people have it easy because things always turn out well for them?  This idea proposes that it’s the other way around.

The take home here is not the old “Fake it til you make it.” The intent of which statement is to mislead others about your success until you eventually embody that success.  Instead, the goal is to “Fake it in a way that some part of you believes it.”  The point is to manipulate and mislead yourself so that you will get out of your own way.  Still lost?  Try this out.  To manifest a successful visualization you simply skip the struggle and go straight to the celebration.  Here is an example:

Only suckers wait for objective reality.  Fire your kids’ soccer instructor.  The four step process of scoring a game winning goal in the 2014 World Cup is simple: 
1)  Remove Your Shirt.
2)  Throw Said Shirt Into the Stands.
3)  Run In Circles As If Engulfed In Flames.
4)  Wait for objective reality to conform to this otherwise irrational behavior.

1-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21073100
2-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20022993
3-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19608100
4-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2502071/?tool=pmcentrez
5-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672052/
6-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16368636
7-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20508474
8-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2525972/