What If Your Body Could Rehearse Your Future?
Most of us set goals with our heads: we write them down, list actions & timelines, maybe build a spreadsheet… and then feel stuck, tired, or overwhelmed.
Slowly the plan moves to the bitbucket, a vast abyss where all the old files disappear into.
Somatic Goal Visualization flips that. Instead of just thinking about your goal, you let the body rehearse what it’s like to already be living it.
It’s a guided practice where you
Ground in your body
Imagine your goal at different points in time
Sense how your body feels at each stage
This is not fantasy or new-age “manifesting.” It’s a way of training your nervous system to know, trust, and move to the future you want.
Science actually backs up pieces of it
1. Your mind is not just in your head
Modern research in embodied cognition says that thinking isn’t just something your brain does in isolation. The way you move, breathe, sit, and feel physically actually shapes how you think and feel.
Studies show, that posture influences mood and thinking. Upright postures are linked to more positive mood and better performance, while collapsed postures tend to go with lower mood.
Somatic Goal Visualization uses this on purpose: we start by grounding the body, softening tension, and choosing a calm, supported posture so the “thinking about the future” happens in a regulated, resourced state.
Your body stores “markers” of past experience
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio proposed the somatic marker hypothesis: your body stores emotional “markers” from past experiences, and these body signals help guide future decisions.
In simple terms:
Your gut feeling is often your past experience, encoded in your body, giving advice.
When you repeatedly rehearse a positive, successful future in a grounded way, you’re essentially building new “somatic markers” associated with that future. So, when choices come up in real life, your body is already leaning toward the path that fits your goal.
Imagery training works in sports and performance
Elite athletes use mental imagery all the time. Recent research shows that imagery practice can improve agility, muscle strength, and performance in sports like tennis and soccer.
Other studies find that athletes with higher achievement tend to have stronger imagery skills, and that mental imagery can improve performance and reduce anxiety.
Somatic Goal Visualization borrows from this:
Athletes mentally rehearse a perfect serve or kick.
You mentally and physically rehearse being the person who has already reached the goal: how you breathe, walk, speak, decide, and recover from setbacks.
Guided imagery helps with stress, pain, and anxiety
In healthcare, guided imagery is used as a complementary treatment. Research has found that guided imagery can:
Reduce anxiety and muscle pain
Lower pre-surgery anxiety and post-surgery pain
If imagery plus simple relaxation can change something as concrete as pain, it’s reasonable to use it to change how we relate to our goals, our fears, and the effort needed to get there.
Somatic Goal Visualization calms you as it walks your body through the journey from “just starting” to “I did it.”
You’re not just “visualizing” success. You support your nervous system to practice being the version of you who can live it!
Have a goal you want to visualize?
Cover illustration by Dr. Evelet Sequeira