Alternatives to Visualization
Images are fun and they can convey so much information. A picture is worth a thousand words right?
"To make an energy shield visualize it as a bright light surrounding you"
But hey, maybe you're like me and that just doesn't cut it.
Maybe you have aphantasia. Maybe visualization alone just feels kind of sterile because you have a really active imagination already so there's no "spark" when you just visualize things. Maybe you have some non-neurotypical thing where you get visual OCD like intrusive thoughts and using visualization alone can kind of trigger you.
I got you friend!
We have other senses too and I think when people talk about energy manipulation and activating magic and creating things with our "minds eye" we tend to only talk about images.
--> physical: you might have heard of people say to do "body scans" where you feel your body and try to find where you feel energy pooling or coming in and out. Or maybe you have heard people say that moving energy can feel like the tingling when you rub your hands together really fast. If you're going with the shield example maybe your "visualization" is you feeling your muscles flex and tighten, or you breath out and air around you feels heavier and more dense. You can "imagine" or "visualize" a lot of bodily sensations that can correspond to what you're doing. What does drawing down moonlight physically feel like to you if you don't want to imagine in your minds eye pulling down the chords of energy from the moon? Maybe it feels kind of cold and like the surface of a mirror. Maybe it feels watery or like silk and when you're pulling the energy from the moon down into your moon water jar you get the sensation in your hands of that silky coldness. Sometimes it also helps to do the actions even if it feels silly. (I think this is called psychodrama? but not totally sure!)
-->sound: Sometimes certain energy can sound a certain way right? Like the low hum of the refrigerator sounds different to the crackle of a flame. If you're creating a shield maybe what you're "visualizing" isn't the bright light but the cessation of sound or dampening of it. If you're creating a bubble around you then maybe the sounds of the outside world have a tougher time coming in. Maybe people's voices have less edge to them. Maybe when you're trying to connect to that tree or ground yourself you don't visualize the roots, you hear the rustling of the leaves in the wind. Maybe to ground yourself you hear the deep movement of a river in a cave. In my own experiences you can even call certain spirits with just certain sounds alone, or travel to certain places through imagining the sound of the space you want to go.
For me, these two other senses have done a lot of heavy lifting with connecting to energy and spirit work. Sometimes my brain is too overloaded to really deal with images and I will even just get emotional impressions. That could be a way you visualize too! Maybe a shield feels like the way you do when you're emboldened by defending yourself or a friend from injustice, so when you're creating and activating your shield you take that feeling and "push it out" of you through the place in your body that you feel it.
There's so many great posts out there that go over ways you can visualize energy and visualize activating energy or manipulating energy, but if you're like me and that just never clicked like you wanted it too I hope this helps some. I feel like the greatest thing about magic is that if you really want to you can find ways to make it work for you.
My most favorite workings weren't ones where I visualized anything, they were ones where I felt the magic in my chest and my hands and I could hear the sound getting dampened as I funneled it into what I was doing. It was when I realized that grounding wasn't visualizing putting roots into the ground but it was listening to a river in a deep cave and then feeling mud on my skin and a kind heaviness in my body. It was learning to blow out a burn on my skin by making myself feel all the heat at once and then hearing and feeling a void where the burn once was.
