The Importance of Safe Places: Healing & the New Earth

I breathe deep and place myself mentally in the office of Joan Reubens, the Bullying Prevention Specialist at Meadowlawn Middle School in Pinellas County, Florida.

It is a quiet office. I can feel her loving, empathic attention. I can feel her careful approach and attention to my safety and peace. I can speak. I can cry. I can heal.

I was in middle school when my first truly safe place was established. Twenty-some years later, when I go into self-hypnosis looking for somewhere to rest, that office is still one of the places my mind goes. I believe it's also a glimpse of where we're headed.

A Hallway of Rooms

At home, there was nowhere to set anything down. My only safe places were under the clouds, in trees, at school, at church, or hiding alone.

In seventh grade, I wrote a note to a girl who bullied me, asking if we could start over. I spoke so badly about myself in it that she never got to the end. She handed it to Mr. Wilson, who taught the Peer Mediation class. He wasn't angry. He was worried. He gave it to Joan, who started seeing me regularly in her office.

Joan made a safe, private space for me to vent. She did not rush any of it, and she did not report back to anyone who would use it against me. Eventually I opened up about my home life for the first time in my life. I said it in Joan's office, because Joan had built somewhere it could be said.

She wasn't the only one. As an extension of her office, Mrs. Amy was a safe place in the 8th grade office, where I could be myself freely. It was between those two rooms that I let my guard down. And there was the woman in the 7th grade office who dealt with my bullies head on, with serious no-tolerance and a thoughtful way of handling students.

Joan held space. Amy let me be myself. The 7th grade office protected me. Mr. Melvin tutored me in a quiet library at lunch. Principal Cardone greeted us every morning and made us feel we mattered. Each one had a different purpose, and together they made an office that often functioned like a community.

Nobody fixed my circumstances. My house stayed loud. My father stayed my father. What changed is that somebody built me a room where I could set things down. Give a person somewhere safe to exist and they get stronger in all the places you are not looking at.

Why We're All Stuck in Survival

In a session with Alicia, I asked a guide named Bartholomew about the lizard brain and fight-or-flight. He said:

"You will not find a lizard skipping joyfully through a meadow. They are set for one thing and one thing only: survival. And society in your time has done this intentionally. They have made it where people cannot survive easily. This pushes them back into that survival brain, where they can be controlled."

Humanity chose power and money over humanity, and almost all the land is owned. We are left with no choice but to work and fight for a home and basic food and water. Earth was meant for experience, not hustle.

That's what a safe room interrupts. For forty minutes in Joan's office, the part of me that scanned every room for danger could stand down. Now imagine a world built so that it stands down for everyone.

The Reality We're Building

As we move into the 5D, we will move into our shared senses of community and love. Safe places like the ones I recall from middle school will be commonplace. We will reset our nervous systems and experience perfect safety and peace. We will live in a world that invites us to let our guards down and embody all of who we are.

This isn't one savior building one sanctuary. Joan couldn't have done it alone, and she didn't. It took an office full of people each following their own purpose. That's what the 5D looks like to me: everyone doing their part, each person creating a different kind of safe place.

Some will hold space like Joan. Some will protect, like the woman in the 7th grade office. Some will teach in quiet libraries. Some will run dive shops that become sanctuaries, or open their homes, or sit with someone in hypnosis while they finally set down what they've been carrying. At Pass-A-Grille Beach UCC, a woman named Marsha, who'd been pushed out of Calvary Chapel herself, made a safe place for me just by existing peacefully in front of me.

In a past life, when I ran with my daughter, a woman with extra space took us in. I sewed. She had room. We helped each other. That's the model. I believe we're returning to it: bartering, trading gifts, meeting one another's needs directly. The tutor, the seamstress, the healer, the woman with a spare room, each giving what they have and receiving what they need. Not everything filtered through a paycheck and a landlord.

In my letter to Bartholomew, I wrote about how he walked through life with his needs met by those imparting gifts, and he gave wisdom in return. He lived one with nature, trusting Source to provide. That wasn't meant to be rare. That was the project.

When I asked Bartholomew what the masterpiece was, the one humanity has been piecing together through all this collapse, he said:

"Everybody working together. One puzzle is not complete until all puzzles are complete. Those puzzles then become pieces of a greater puzzle. And what they create together is the new Earth."

The Rooms I Build

I have the same job now that I was given at twelve. I am a practitioner of hypnosis, doing past-life regression to help people come home. The rules I follow in every session are the rules they taught a seventh-grader in a portable classroom in Pinellas County: don't take a side, don't put words in anyone's mouth, don't decide what it means for them, and stay in the room.

Every session I facilitate starts by building one:

For this while, no problems, no worries. Imagine a bright pyramid of light enclosing your body—your protection. You are safe. Now imagine the most beautiful place in the world. Can you find it?

And then:

Each new level of peace sets a new baseline; anything below that is rejected.

That's what I want for all of us. A new baseline. A world where safety isn't something you're lucky to stumble into one office at a time, but the ground we all stand on.

A memory can only hold you for so long. In one session, my higher consciousness told us I needed to "build new, living supports—real relationships and communities where she is seen now." That's the invitation for all of us. Not to visit safe places in our minds forever, but to build them here, with each other, now.

What Is Your Job?

This world has been intense and traumatizing so consistently, our whole history, that the call is to reset and change. Our minds, our bodies, down to our cells, need it.

What it also calls for is going within to discover from our highest selves, through the subconscious mind, what our purpose is.

Everyone needs a safe place to exist. If somebody once built one for you, remember what it was made of, because sooner or later you are going to need to build one for someone else.

What is your job?

What safe places are you meant to contribute to?

If this is your first time here: I write about growing up inside a controlling religious family, the years it took to build a life and a chosen family on the other side of it, and the hypnotherapy and past-life regression work that eventually connected all of it into one long pattern. This post pulls from the same material as A Place to Stay: The Long Way Home Through Trauma, Love, and Consciousness, my book that is out now on Amazon, including Kindle.