Imagery

Whenever I am able to do any meditation, or when I am feeling hopeless and need to imagine a place that I can retreat to within my mind, I have always gravitated to one particular image.
It is a small log cabin deep within the forest, on a mountain. Secluded. Calming. It has an extensive library and this nook with floor-to-ceiling windows. In my meditations, I am sitting there with a blanket, a book, and a cup of tea or hot chocolate. Sometimes the wood-burning fireplace is roaring, sometimes it's not.
I am not terribly imaginative, so if I am doing this meditation in the wintertime, with snow on the ground, then that is the weather at my imagined cabin.
Most times I am alone - spending an hour in my mind-cabin regrouping. Other times I am joined by my puppy and my husband.
Each time it is the same though. The same cabin, the same window, the same landscape.
It is the imagery I have always clung to.
And yet, I wrote a blog post a long time ago that introduced another piece of imagery. This one included a different context - one in which I feel hopeless. It was a lighthouse.
Now since writing that post, that is a second image that I gravitate towards. How odd that writing about a lighthouse can suddenly evolve into loving lighthouses. It all-of-a-sudden means something significant to me.

Lighthouses and cabins.
Those are images that give me a sense of utter calm.

It's important to find imagery that does this for you, especially if you can often feel stuck or trapped within your own body; a body that doesn't work properly.