Safe Place

Safe Place

What is it?

Safe place is a form of guided imagery that dates back to ancient Greek times and has been used in Chinese medicine and American Indian traditions. It’s a mind-body practice involving a student and a teacher, however, once you are aware of how to deliver the practice you can facilitate it yourself.  Safe place involves visualising a place and recreating sensations; sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. The practice can be used as a daily coping mechanism technique, for example, you can use it to eliminate stress. It’s been proven to reduce stress, anxiety, decrease pain, improve sleep and reduce symptoms of depression.

What are the benefits?

Safe place meditation has helped to reduce anxiety and stress. A systematic review was conducted, showing generalised anxiety disorder symptoms decreased across participants. A separate study revealed cognitive and emotional stress can be reduced from safe place meditation along with lowering heart rate, that is heightened from stress.

Safe place meditation has shown to increase healthy behaviours, including increasing physical activity, conscious food consumption and reducing unhealthy food cravings. Increasing physical activity can decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease and a variety or other diseases, including “diabetes mellitus, cancer (colon and breast), obesity, hypertension, bone and joint diseases (osteoporosis and osteoarthritis)”. It can increase serotonin levels, a neurotransmitter that is often referred to as increasing happiness and reducing symptoms of depression.

Another positive benefit of safe place meditation includes improving cognitive processes, including problem solving, speech, motor function and memory.

Safe place meditation has also helped with improving quality of sleep, with a study revealing the intervention relieved insomnia, participants recorded an overall improvement in their sleep patterns.

Another beneficial outcome of safe place meditation includes decreasing pain. While it won’t remove the pain, it will reduce the perception of pain, hence improving the ability to cope with the pain. A study conducted revealed safe place meditation helped to diminish pain for cancer patients, reducing the intensity and distress associated with the pain.  

How does it work?

Safe place meditation works by imagining a safe, peaceful location or scenario and connecting those images in your mind to calm your sympathetic nervous system. Other senses can also be applied to safe place meditation, such as smell, touch, taste and sound. From recalling on previous memories or creating new scenarios our bodies will react by actually experiencing the moments and not just imaging them, triggering various benefits, as listed above.

How to do it?

Step 1: Choose a comfortable place to lay down
Step 2: Close your eyes
Step 3: Inhale and exhale from the lungs, taking deep breaths
Step 4: Picture a safe, peaceful location. It can be a calm setting, such as a river, a lake, a garden, any place that is relaxing for you
Step 5: Imagine details of the place, it can be the sounds of the birds, the taste of the sea salt of the ocean breeze, the refreshing gush of wind sweeping across your face

Step 6: Stay within this moment for a few minutes, creating a sense of relaxation. You may continue to stay in the moment until you are ready to open your eyes
Step 7: When ready, open your eyes and take a big stretch to come back to the present moment, moving each body part to awake it