Spirituality and Visualization for Charisma

I am reading “The Charisma Myth” by Olivia Fox Cabane, and she spends the first few chapters (I am on chapter 5), describing how presence and body language are the basis of charisma. Hearing this makes perfect sense to me, considering my journey. I used to be pretty insecure and still deal with depression. There was nearly constant fatigue and self doubt which sometimes bordered on self hate. During this time, life felt pretty hard, and I looked for any way to ease the suffering. This is when meditation, mindfulness, yoga, spirituality, and conscious construction of my life became a central part of my life. Becoming conscious changed the ways I looked at life. Living was no longer composed of individual events vaguely connected to one another, instead I began to see a vast network of cause and effect complete with blurred boundaries of supposedly separate entities. The reality of an interconnected existence finally revealed itself.

Once this reality became clear to me, I applied it in the areas I was already most interested in; movement and exercise, social interactions and networking, self discovery and personal reflection. I began yoga and found an elevated form of awareness in all happenings of my body. I began researching and found new ways to interact with people plus began experimenting frequently. I began meditating often and began developing a honest relationship with myself. This lead to me being more present, having more social impact, social capital, social influence, and being more loving and compassionate to myself and others. Later, healing became an interest of mine because I want to be the person I needed when I was young. I work with my depression, neurotic tendencies, destructive defense mechanisms which are no longer useful, and balancing my physical body to avoid as many injuries as possible.

In “The Charisma Myth”, the author outlines the three defining factors of charisma and how to reach your full charismatic expression. The three defining factors are power, warmth, and presence. Are you perceived to have the ability to influence the world around you? Do you proceed from a place of good will for others? Are you in the present moment with one pointed focus while interacting with yourself and others? Delving into spirituality actually helped my develop all of the traits of a charismatic person. My body language became much more dignified, giving the impression of confidence. All spiritual teachers speak karma and of the importance of service and acting in the best interest of yourself and others. Karma is the principle of cause and effect, an educative force intended to reflect our actions back on ourselves so that we may find our way on the spiritual path. Why act to harm others if it will come back to hurt you? Why stop serving others if beauty continuously finds its way into our lives? Finally, the very essence of these spiritual practices is achieving access to the power of now. The present moment is all that exists. The past is a mental construct, the future is a mental construct. Even if someone created a time machine, they would go back in time to now, and forward in time to now. Accessing the power of now is learning to exist in the only place which actually exists, here-now.

Meditation will help you gain all of these characteristics. From my meditation journey, I learned how to control the images in my mind, thought patterns, and subtle expressions of my body. When you can control the images in your mind, you can control what you visualize. As I wrote about in an earlier post, visualization actually has a physical impact on your brain and body! You can visualize your way into happiness, tranquility, confidence, and pain.

Becoming a successful visualizer is really really simple and often happens relatively quickly. Below, I will outline the steps I saw in my development and will probably be present in yours.

1. You start out visualizing whatever your mind throws at you, indiscriminately. This leaves you a slave to what life brings your way.
2. Next, you begin to be aware of the thoughts that turn into images that turn into our narratives. These thoughts have the potential to hurt, but far less now that they have been recognized early.
3. Now you are able to Catch feelings. Feelings are subtle impulses in your body which both accompany and reaffirm your thoughts; like thinking about a test, then feeling a knot in your stomach, then knowing the thought is really real because you can feel its effects. Being aware of these subtle feelings before they become a destructive set of thoughts allows you to put them on a path to help you, constructing a positive narrative and changing your outlook.
4. Finally, your awareness and control rise to a level where you are rarely ever confronted by negativity, but can handle it when it comes your way. These negative thoughts will happen to every human, no matter how enlightened, but those who are further on the path are able to find solace in their circumstances much easier because they have gone through the difficult work of training their minds to work for them.

I’d highly recommend this book, it goes much deeper and gives far more details than I do in this post. Hope this can help :)

Please comment and share, your support is greatly appreciated. Ask any questions you want answered and I will do my best to help!!!