With the busyness of college life, especially as the semester dwindles to a close, students can find themselves lacking a place of reprieve on campus. Although places like the library and Learning Resource Center can provide a quiet place, some students may find that they need a place of solitude in order to get some relief.

Fortunately, American River College has just that place.

Nestled inside the Center for Leadership and Development lies ARC’s Meditation Room, which provides a private area for students.

Rem Thanoon, student ambassador at the CLD, says the room offers students a quiet environment that they can use to meditate, pray or de-stress for a 15-minute period. Thanoon said the CLD tries to keep the room as clean as possible.

“We don’t want any food or any spillage, because it is a place where people want to have a safe and empty space,” Thanoon said. “We do have a rug on the floor, so we ask students to take off their shoes because other students do put their head on it and pray on it.”

Thanoon said that as a Muslim student, the space is an important one for her.

“I use it often. I pray every day, more than once,” Thanoon said. “Not only do I attend ARC, I also attend Cosumnes River College and they do not have a meditation room. So, I’m like ‘oh my god where am I going to pray.’”

Without somewhere such as the Meditation Room, Thanoon said it can be difficult to find a space where she feels comfortable.

“I might have to [make a] request [to] a professor and ask if I can use their area quietly,” Thanoon said. “Most of the time I’m not even focused on my prayers, because I’m like, what if somebody walks in and it’s just awkward.”

The Meditation Room opened in 2019, according to Brett Sawyer, student life supervisor at ARC. With the onset of COVID-19, it closed with the rest of the campus.

When the campus was reopened in the summer of 2021, a temporary space was established in the LRC due to the Student Center being closed. After about a year, the Student Center was reopened and with it, the Meditation Room.

Sawyer said that having student ambassadors who were Muslim helped improve the room to be open to more students.

“[They] knew about the cultural practices and made it more inviting,” Sawyer said.

Sawyer said that other school’s meditation rooms, such as Sacramento State, Stanford and UC Davis, were referenced in the development of ARC’s.

“Sac[ramento] City [College] opened one in the fall,” Sawyer said. “They called us [asking] ‘hey how did y’all do this, how did y’all do that?’ It’s cool to see it grow, we get a lot of traffic in here, it’s been great.”

Though the space may be new to some, it is apparent that the Meditation Room is a place that members of the ARC community frequent.

According to data collected by the CLD check-in system, the Meditation Room had 650 visits from Feb. 27, 2023, to March 7, 2024.