In art therapy during college, I loved to play in the sand tray. I don’t recall details of my trays, but I remember guided visualizations and the first time that I created a mental image of a safe place. Nature is a safe place for me. So I created a vision with looming mountains, a flowered meadow and a sunny rock in the foreground. This is my place to meet with different parts of myself: the wounded child, the strong protector, and the wise woman.
Over the years I incorporated images from peaceful spots that I often visit – a babbling brook, a tranquil pond and playful otters. I return to this place again and again in times of distress or simply to sooth my nerves. Thus, it invokes the phrase from my childhood memory of the bubble bath commercial – Calgon, Take Me Away!
How to create and use a Safe Place
Visualizing a safe or calm place is an effective way to stabilize the nervous system. It creates a mental resource to use in mindfulness practice or as a coping tool for regulating strong emotions or difficult memories. A calm place can include a special location (real or imagined, indoor or outdoor), person, object, or animal. It could also be the memory of a nurturing event or situation. With practice this place can be strengthened with sensations. Sight, sound, touch and even smell might be invoked. Giving your safe place a name helps to recall it quickly in a moment of need.
Sometimes a negative association will arise with a safe place. Perhaps your calm memory or location includes a special person who has now passed from your life. If the feeling shifts into a sadness, fear or longing, then this is a mixed emotion place for you. You might be able to shift attention back to the nurturing sensations or you might decide to shift to a different calm place to use as your safe place practice.
Transporting ourselves mentally away from current stressors to a place of relaxation and nourishment puts us in touch with inner calm and clear mind. This quality is ever-present, but often obscured. Our innate clarity becomes clouded by judging, fearful, clinging and avoiding mind. This doesn’t mean we are escaping reality. Our circumstances will remain. But, with a nurturing moment envisioning our safe place, we can return to them with renewed energy and wisdom. Once the mind is settled, the nervous system can regain its balance.
