Safe spaces

It’s hard to be well or to focus on wellness when you don’t have a safe and secure base upon which to build.

Thankfully, there are four areas in which you can achieve a sense of grounding and safety. Let’s look briefly at each of them in turn.

i. Your physical world. This includes anywhere you are at any moment in time: the street you walk down, the chair you sit in, the bed you lie in, a room, a home, a place you work in. Is there an environment you can go to where you don’t have to worry about where you are?

ii. Your cultural world. Is there any aspect of your cultural identity that helps you feel held, contained and connected? Such as, values and beliefs, spirituality, material possessions, symbols, icons, clothing, music, food, language – the very way you express yourself.

iii. Your interpersonal world. Is there a person or people you can be with who won’t judge or belittle you?

iv. Your intrapersonal world. This is a fancy way of describing everything that takes place inside you: your mind: your thoughts, your feelings, your actions and reactions and how these interact with each other. Is this a kindly place to inhabit, or it is troubled with, say, low self-worth and high, unobtainable standards?

Each of these spaces can, moment by moment, be either nurturing or hostile.

Your task could be to map out each of these spaces and be constantly attuned to them, so that at any moment in time you can lean towards the ones that are safe and lurch away from the ones that are unsafe.