A creative activity to reflect about personal needs and feelings and to reflect about how to take care of them + to create an object that can be “pocket size” and that can contain a positive/power affirmation (such as “you are enough”) a gentle reminder (such as “be gentle with yourself, you are doing your best”) or a reminder of a good practice (for ex “NVC”, “Do a reality check”…) to help the person to feel empowered and or safe.

1. reflect about the present feelings and needs of the individiduals→ can be done writing, sharing or even with dixit cards to be picked.

2. reflect about how each of us can take care of these feelings and needs → what attitude, mind set, behavior or situation could we put into place so that we can feel we are improving our well being, feeling empowered and safe? Also this reflection can be done in different ways as the ones mentioned above.

3. choose an object that you can costumised with drawing, painting, writing (…) a positive/power affirmation/ a gentle reminder to the self. this object (that for example could be a seashell, a stone, a little tile…) becomes a “grounding object” for the person to take with themselves and, if they want, keep it on their self next to the bed, on their personal altar, in their backpack… so that can be a reminder for when needed.

It’s important that the facilitator is familiar with what a positive/power affirmation is and also of the meaning of grounding objects (for ex. see the book L. Guzman, “Essential Art Therapy exercises”) so that it can be clear to the participants to the activity and also they can try to use them in a “constructive” way.

4. share together if people want. You can also collect what people have come out with: sometimes you discover you actually create together a list of good practices/power affirmations that can be exposed somewhere as a co-created tool box to come back to when in need of inspiration or help.