In creating your special place you will be making a refuge for relaxation and guidance. This place can be indoors or out. When structuring your place, follow these few guidelines:

• Allow a private entry into your place.
• Make it peaceful, comfortable, and safe.
• Fill your place with sensuous detail. Create a middle ground, foreground, and background.
• Allow room for an inner guide or other person to be there with you comfortably.

A special place might be at the end of a path that leads to a pond. Grass grows under your feet, the pond is about thirty yards away, and mountains are in the distance. You can feel the coolness of the air in this shady spot. The mockingbird is singing. The sun is bright on the pond. The honeysuckle’s pungent odor attracts the bee buzzing over the flowers with their sweet nectar.

Or your special place might be a sparkling clean kitchen, with cinnamon buns baking in the oven. Through the kitchen window you can see fields of yellow wheat. A window chime flutters in the breeze. At the table there’s a cup of tea for your guest.

Try recording this exercise and playing it, or have a friend read it aloud to you slowly:

To go to your safe place, lie down and be totally comfortable. Close your eyes. … Walk slowly to a quiet place in your mind. … Your place can be inside or outside. … It needs to be peaceful and safe. … Picture yourself unloading your anxieties, your worries. … Notice the view in the distance. … What do you smell? … What do you hear? … Notice what is before you. … Reach out and touch it. … How does it feel? … Smell it. … Hear it. … Make the temperature comfortable. … Be safe here. … Look around for a special spot, a private spot. …

Find the path to this place. … Feel the ground with your feet. … Look above you. … What do you see? …

Hear? … Smell? … Walk down this path until you can enter your own quiet, comfortable, safe place.

You have arrived at your special place. … What is under your feet? … How does it feel? … Take several steps. … What do you see above you? What do you hear? Do you hear something else? Reach and touch something. … What is its texture? Are there pens, paper, paints nearby, or is there sand to draw in, clay to work? Go to them, handle them, smell them. These are your special tools, or tools for your inner guide to reveal ideas or feelings to you. … Look as far as you can see. … What do you see? What do you hear?

Sit or lie in your special place. … Notice its smells, sounds, sights. … This is your place and nothing can harm you here. … If danger is here, expel it. … Spend three to five minutes realizing you are relaxed, safe, and comfortable.

Memorize this place’s smells, tastes, sights, sounds. … You can come back and relax here whenever you want. … Leave by the same path or entrance. … Notice the ground, touch things near you. … Look far away and appreciate the view. … Remind yourself that this special place you created can be entered whenever you wish.

Say an affirmation such as “I can relax here” or “This is my special place. I can come here whenever I wish.”

Now open your eyes and spend a few seconds appreciating your relaxation.

adapted from The Relaxation & Stress Reduction Workbook, 6^th ed.