Step One: Cut out pictures of things you love. Step Two: Paste them onto paper. Step Three: Realize your life's ambition? Well...sort of. Martha Beck on the right way to use a vision board.
Since childhood, I've had a vivid recurring dream in which I can move objects without touching them. When I awaken from the dream, I can't believe it isn't true. For hours I'll glare at objects—starting with cars or furniture, gradually lowering my sights to scraps of Kleenex—incredulous that I can't move stuff with my mind.

Except that now I can.

A friend just gave me a gizmo called Mindflex, a game that includes a magnificently dorky-looking headset, a console, and a little foam ball. The headset transmits your brain's electrical activity to a fan in the console that blows the ball into the air. By thinking different thoughts, you control the fan, and thus the altitude of the ball.

The fact that this works delights but doesn't surprise me. The discoveries of physicist Werner Heisenberg, not to mention my recurring dream, long ago convinced me that the mind influences physical matter. If Heisenberg's work is unfamiliar, let me translate the theory into Californian: "Consciousness can shape reality."

This oversimplification makes my brain wince...which moves the Mindflex ball, confirming for me that the New Age ideal of mental magic—the notion that thoughts can create reality—is kinda, sorta supported by evidence. My goal is to teach you how to use one aspect of that magic, something indubitably cheesy but surprisingly effective. I'm talking about a vision board.

All the Pretty Pictures

Next to the Mindflex on my desk is a photo box containing many images I've torn from magazines. I plan to glue them all to one large piece of butcher paper. The resulting collage will be a vision board; its purpose, to depict (and lead me to) my desired future. This whole process makes me roll my eyes—as I was trained to do over the course of my very rationalist education—but damn if it doesn't work.

Sometimes.

I've made several vision boards that bombed out, and some that were so successful that the hairs on the nape of my neck prickled for months. Years ago I glued up a headline that said MAKING AFRICA WELL. I thought it was a joke—oh, sure, like I could do that—never expecting that a few years later I'd be invited to speak in Africa and while there meet folks who are healing African ecosystems. Suddenly, I found myself volunteering to work with them.


The trick to making a vision board

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