A safe place
In your mind you build a place where it is safe, and make it detailed enough to return to.
The safe place is an image of a space in which you are calm — a shoreline, your grandmother’s room, a mountain path, an invented house. You build it through the senses: what you see, what you hear, what you smell, the temperature, what is under your feet. Once the image is vivid enough, you link it to a gesture, for example pressing thumb and forefinger together. That gesture later works as a shortcut. If someone who brings tension creeps into the place, change it — the place must be yours and empty. It is worth repeating the exercise several times while you are calm, so it is available when you are not.
When to use it
As preparation before difficult work, and as help with overwhelm. The place may be real or imagined; what matters is that no one in it stirs up tension.
How it goes
- Choose a place and picture it through all your senses: what you see, hear, smell, feel underfoot.
- Find one detail that is especially vivid.
- Link it to a gesture — pressing thumb and index finger together, for instance.
- Practise in calm moments, so the gesture works when things are not calm.
Why it works
Repetition creates a shortcut: in time the gesture calls up the state without the whole image.
