Fear puts a blanket over all that makes you feel safe and secure. The Safe Haven Meditation brings you back into a relationship with harmony and balance and gives you the courage to take the steps needed to heal.
The focus is one of the most effective tools for recovering balance and grounding. It will help connect you with a place or person that gives you stability and safety.
When you have security—through the love of another person or a place in your mind that soothes you—you have a valuable tool to move ahead and meet whatever challenges appear. Think of this practice as a hopeful starting point. The memory of a place or person’s energy will help you return to your sacred center when life becomes challenging and confusing.
Everything changed in my life after the loss of my parents. This estrangement invoked tremendous fear in me. I was left feeling unsafe. I was challenged to find something that offered security. When I came across this simple practice, it encouraged me to look more deeply into my sadness and fear through the lens of the safe haven.
Do you have a reference point for safety and security? If not, be patient; it will help you create a foundation for the work ahead. Pick up a magazine and flip through the pages. Notice how different pictures make you feel. When you find an image that makes you feel at home, happy, and peaceful, remember it and use it for this practice.
For me, it’s a wooded knoll on Cape Cod that overlooks the bay. Each time I do this meditation, my safe haven expands my connection to this place in my mind’s eye.
I visualize birds and other animal energy, the water’s color, the air’s temperature, and the particular green in the leaves. This energy holds me in challenging times as I focus there whenever life feels tentative and unstable.
Safe Haven Meditation
To do the practice:
- Find a quiet place in your home. Sit on a chair or a supported seat on the floor. (If you are on a chair, make sure your feet can touch the ground.)
- Lengthen your spine and take three deep breaths.
- Visualize your breath coming in from the ground below you.
- Feel yourself drink in the energy of the earth through your feet. (If you are on the ground, feel this same energy come through all parts of your body that touch the ground.)
- Now close your eyes and open your third eye by tapping your mid-forehead for a few seconds.
- Hold your attention there once you have established that connection. Visualize a place or person that instills beauty, joy, and safety in your life.
- Let your imagination grow your safe haven’s beauty and blanket yourself in it.
- With your eyes closed, pay attention to the details of your haven. Allow this experience to be all yours.
Notice:
- The color of the sky, the temperature of the air
- How do you feel physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually
- The vibrancy of the foliage around you. Are there trees, plants, and flowers? Do they have a fragrance? Are there birds and butterflies? What colors are they?
- Once you feel a sense of energetic expansion in the third eye, breathe into this space and rest there and breathe.
- Return here often. The more you visit this place or person, the more connection you will develop and trust.
This meditation can be used to release stress, worries and to cultivate a sense of trust in a safe space. The Safe Haven meditation effectively creates and connects you to a person, place, and experience that gives you peace, joy, and safety. By grounding and imagining details of this space in your mind you can establish a sense of presence that helps you return to this place whenever you feel the need for extra support.
Sarah Brassard is a writer, teacher, and coach living in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She’s the author of Inside – A Guide to the Resources Within.Â
