How does visualising work for meditation and yoga?

[lmfao]

What I am confused about is these visualisations involving your body. Okay so for example, there's spinal breathing in kriya yoga. You visualise cold prana rising up your spine from muladhara to third eye when inhaling, visualise warm prana going down spine from third eye to muladhara during exhalation. What I'm confused about it the difference between entering my own mental landscape of images versus feeling into my body. 

It's always been a general principle in enlightenment work that you don't make any images/idols of god. You know, the whole thing about paying attention to your experience without abstractions. I'm not saying this to disregard visualisations or anything of that sort at all. I'm merely sharing with you the sentiments that express how the confusion I'm experiencing could arise. 

So I'm paying attention to the different locations in my body, the spine for example...it appears as though I am indeed able to project an image into the space there and move that projection up and down. 

There's another type of visualisation meditation exercise I came across in regards to emotional healing. It involves recalling a person or negative experience that's caused grief in the past. You then visualise a white light emanating from your heart chakra....Again, I pay attention to that space in my body and project that impression/image of compassionate/loving/forgiving white light. I suppose what trips me up slightly is about whether, I am supposed to project some sort of image into the space surrounding my body. When I concentrate and try , this feels like it's happening but it doesn't make sense why/how or what's going on, too much brain fog. 

What's also tripping me up in general with that is, what to do with my attention and my mind. Am I supposed to put all my attention into building some mental image, where the mental image is me looking at myself in third person and seeing white light coming out. Or am I supposed to just pay attention to my body and just work the projection from there...

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This is now a tangential point. I just wonder about the effectiveness of yoga in general. You're projecting all sorts of mental images into the domain of your body, seems ripe for entering into fantasy. Because there are states of consciousness you can experience in which you see the body as fictional to begin with, yet there's so much emphasis and treating it as a real thing with this chakra system. Concentrating on your third eye, visualising prana, etc. Hell, if you take it far enough just the concept alone of paying attention to your breath is a construct...And so when I try and concentrate on just the now, I can start to feel immersed in something profound but not before getting lost in thought again. So that leads to using the body and the breath as tools for concentration even though, they don't really exist. What a mind fuck. 

Edited April 21, 2020 by lmfao

[Leo Gura]

Try just sitting for an hour and visualize the color white. That's it. See how long you can keep focused on it.

What you visualize is not as important as your ability to hold it steady in the mind.

[lmfao]

Thank you for the reply! Thankfully you posted this just as I checked this website again. I will certainly try that. 

Edited April 21, 2020 by lmfao