When my son was a very little boy, maybe four years old, and he would get a headache, I would have him lie down, and put a cool cloth on his head, and tell him to close his eyes. Then we would play our "river game" to make the headache go away, and he would "think himself well".

I would tell him to take long, slow deep breaths, and let his toes relax, and let his legs relax, and breath in, and breath out, and let his whole body relax… one by one, moving up his body, we'd "tell" all his muscles to relax, and in a minute or so, he'd be as limp as a noodle.

Then, lying there quietly, I would tell him to imagine a cool stream of water, clean, and clear, and sparkling; icy cold, and running over little rocks, and under shady trees – and imagine it flowing though his body – through the center of his forehead, across and through his whole head, and down and out the back of his head – washing his pain away, washing his pain away, washing his pain away. I'd speak softly, gently, slowly…. Sometimes he lay with his head in my lap. Sometimes he'd get sleepy. But in just a minute or two he would always tell me that he felt better, that his head felt "cooler", and many times the pain was gone completely.

This is what psychologists call "visualization" – I just call it using your imagination, creativity, and the gifts God gave you – to help yourself relax and feel better. This was a very simple one – he could imagine the river because we lived near a river, and we'd walked by the river, and thrown stones in the river, and he'd gone fishing in the river, and he knew the river well. The idea of the cold, clear water washing his pain away was simple for him to imagine. And that's the way it works best. Put yourself in a setting you know well, and is comfortable for you, and then imagine yourself feeling better. You are essentially thinking yourself well!

We can use many different simple "visualizations" to help ourselves relax and feel better; here is another one, that author Madeleine L'Engle actually does when she's a bit stressed – but she writes about it so vividly and so beautifully, that I thought I'd share it, as a lovely example of using the the power of your creativity and your imagination to take a five minute "vacation" and mentally take yourself to your own safe, quiet place.

Your "circle of quiet" will probably be very different than Madeleine's, when you try this exercise yourself. With practice you can do this any time, any place, for a brief but relaxing moment all to yourself, but when you first start you may find it helpful to lie down on your bed, slow your breathing, close your eyes, and spend about 5 minutes in your own, special "circle of quiet".

Build it in your imagination, like the author does when she shares her special place with the reader. See the colors, the sky, and the plants. Hear the wind whispering. The birds chirping. Make it as real as you can, all the while breathing deeply and slowly – and soon you will find your whole body feels more relaxed and your mind feels less tense and anxious.

A CIRCLE OF QUIET

Every so often I need OUT; something will throw me into total disproportion, and I have to get away from everybody – away from all these people I love most in the world – in order to regain a sense of proportion.

I like hanging out the sheets on lines strung under the apple trees – the birds like it, too. I enjoy going out to the incinerator after dark, and watching all the flames; my bad feeling burn away with the trash. But the house is still visible, and I can hear the sounds from within; often I need to get away completely, if only for a few minutes. My special place is a small brook in a green glade, a circle of quiet from which there is no visible sign of human beings. There's a natural stone bridge over the brook, and I sit there, dangling my legs and looking through the foliage at the sky reflected in the water, and things slowly come back into perspective. If the insects are biting me – and they usually are; no place is perfect – I use the pliable branch of a willow tree as a fan. The brook wanders through a tunnel of foliage, and the birds sing more sweetly there than anywhere else; or perhaps it is just that when I am at the brook I have time to be aware of them, and I move slowly into a kind of peace that is marvelous, "annihilating all that's made to a green thought in a green shade." If I sit for a while, then my impatience, crossness, frustration, are indeed annihilated, and my sense of humor returns.

It's a full ten-minute walk to the brook. I cross the lawn and go through the willow tree which splashes its fountain of green down onto the grass so that it's almost impossible to mow around it. If it's raining and I really need the brook badly, I go in my grandfather's old leather hunting coat and a strange yellow knitted hat from Ireland (one of my children, seeing me set off, asked, "Who do you think you are, Mother? Mrs. Whatsit?"); it's amazing what passing the half-century mark does to free one to be eccentric. When my hair gets wet, I look like a drowned ostrich, and I much prefer resembling an amiable, myopic giraffe as I wade through the wet clover of the large pasture….

After the pasture is traversed, I walk through a smaller pasture, which has been let go to seed because of all the rocks, and is now filled with thistles. Then there is a stone wall to be climbed; the only poison ivy around here grows on and by the stones of this wall, and I'm trying to kill it by smothering it with wet Sunday Timeses; my children have made me very aware of the danger of using chemical sprays…. I think the poison ivy is less flourishing than it was; at any rate, The New York Times is not going to unbalance the ecology. I love the ology words; olog: the word about. Eco, man's dwelling place. The word about where man lives.

Once I'm over the stone wall, the terrain changes. I step into a large field full of rocks left over from glacial deposits; there are many ancient apple trees, which, this summer, are laden with fruit. From the stone wall to the brook… takes me across a high ridge where there are large outcroppings of glacial stone, including our special star-watching rock. Then the path becomes full of tussocks and hummocks; blackberry brambles and wild roses. Earlier this summer the laurel burst from the snow into fire, and a few weeks later we found a field of sweet wild strawberries. And then there are the blueberry bushes, not very many, but a few, taller than I am, and to me, infinitely beautiful.

The burning bush; somehow I visualize it as much like one of these blueberry bushes. The bush burned, was alive with flame, and was not consumed. Why? Isn't it because as a bush, it was perfect? It was exactly as a bush is meant to be. A bush certainly doesn't have the opportunity for prideful and selfish choices, for self-destruction, that we human beings do. It is. It is a pure example of ontology. Ontology is one of my favorite words this summer. Ontology: the word about the essence of things, the word about being.

I go to the brook because I get out of being, out of the essential. So, I'm not like the bush, I put all my prickliness, selfishness, inturnedness, onto my is-ness; we all tend to, and when we burn, this part of us is consumed. When I go past the tallest blueberry bush, I think that the part of us that has to be burned away is something like the deadwood on the bush; it has to go, to be burned in the terrible fire of reality, until there is nothing left but our ontological selves; what we are meant to be.

I go to the brook, and my tensions, and frustrations are lost as I spend a happy hour sitting right by the water, and trying to clear it of the clogging debris left by a fallen tree.

From: A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle,
Harper and Row Publishers, 1972 pp 4 – 6