Isn’t The Beach Everyone’s Happy Place?
How I learned where my true happy place was.
Being a public educator is stressful, even for those who love it.
This is not news. The evidence is there — new reports, books, blogs, lectures, FaceBook posts, Instagram accounts. We are often the recipients of gifts to relieve stress — including but not limited to, PTA care packages, free lunches, and actual stress balls. At the elementary level, the best stress relief comes in the form of hugs, crayon-drawn pictures, notes, and the occasional “I love you.”
Educators are always looking for ways to improve their mental well-being, so when my principal hired a therapist to teach us how to meditate, I signed up. I had tried meditation on my own to no avail. I was sure I needed help to experience true meditation.
Our Lesson
Six of us gathered with our instructor in a kindergarten classroom. We got comfortable and listened to the initial instructions to imagine being in our happy place.
This was going easy. I knew my happy place. So I imagined myself at the beach, listening to the surf, the sand between my toes. It was sunset. I was alone, and the breeze was cool on my skin. Ah,… my happy place.
But as I listened to the words our instructor used to guide us, I discovered I was wrong. I was not at the beach. The beach is not my happy place. I don’t remember the specific words that guided me to this discovery, but the therapist led me to a familiar place, but far from the beach.
This was a place filled with happy, calm, and safe memories.
I was standing in pea gravel—the pea gravel of my grandmother’s driveway. As children, my siblings and I would spend hours shuffling our bare feet through the gravel, looking for a perfectly formed pebble, making pea gravel angels (snow was scarce in the deep south), and pushing the gravel to build roadways and hills for our matchbox cars.
There were two rules: no throwing pebbles at each other and don’t put them in the grass where the lawn mower would run over them. Other than that, we were free to let our imaginations roam.
When I see pea gravel today, so many memories come to mind. Happy memories of simpler times. My grandmother’s driveway. This is my happy place.
Guidance Into My Subconscious
Guided meditation helped me discover my true happy place, the place that calms me. It was always inside of me. I just needed guidance to find it.
I have not continued to meditate. You need to make it a priority, and I haven’t. But I do revisit my happy place often. I know where it is now. What a gift that one session of guided meditation gave me.
I am happy when I go to the beach. But now when I feel stressed, I go to my grandmother’s driveway, my true happy place.
Thank you for reading. Do you have a happy place? Do you meditate? Leave me a comment and let me know.
