Exploring the Labyrinth_ A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth - Melissa Gayle West [10]
“When I realized the center was right there, my whole mood shifted. All that imaginary sludge I was walking through lost its power. I saw that I had the choice to get mired down in it or just walk through it knowing I was heading for the center. What a victory it was to get to the center! I felt like dancing on the way out. All that sludge in my life lost its power over me.
“In fact—I thought about this a lot the next week—I realized that a lot of what I had labeled sludge in my life really wasn’t sludge at all, it’s just that I was so conditioned to see everything as a struggle that I couldn’t see it any other way. Even when challenges came up that week—my kids in the classroom having a wild day or the starter going out on my car—I could remember it was just part of the journey, that I could walk through it with my head up, knowing that center was always there.”
As you work with the labyrinth you may find that it invites you, as it did me, to try new gaits, new movements, new dances with your own life. The more you can allow yourself to say yes to this invitation to dance in a new way within the labyrinth, the more you will find yourself hearing the same new music everywhere, inviting you to dance new and exciting steps in your relationships, your work, your creative life.
SOLO JOURNEY
Remember my story about being in such a hurry to “get there” that I was never in the present? How the labyrinth gently reminded me of my “hurry sickness” and invited me to try something else?
I was always the kid on the family vacation who wanted to know if we were there yet two blocks after pulling out of the driveway. I have spent a painfully large amount of time still in the backseat, fidgeting and squirming and knowing life didn’t really start until I got “there,” though “there” has appeared in thousands of guises in my journey: college, marriage, career, children, success, vacations …
The labyrinth, ever since that evening walk, has remained a loving teacher to me about the value of the journey itself, of honoring the process rather than straining for the goal. I walk when working on a writing project, to remind me to relax and take the writing one page (sometimes, one sentence!) at a time. I walk when I feel challenged by my adolescent daughter, the labyrinth reminding me to stop and embrace the many joys our relationship has to offer me right now, rather than worrying about how we’re ever going to get to the other side. The labyrinth keeps reminding me that if I stay fixated on that ever-changing “there” I miss out on the sweet and enduring graces of the present moment, of life unfolding around and within me.
The labyrinth can also reveal to us when we walk solo the buried glory of our best and truest selves. During one labyrinth workshop David, burned out by office politics in his public relations firm, discovered how much bigger he was than he gave himself credit for. “I was feeling angrier and angrier, tighter and tighter with the power struggles and jockeying happening every day with the downsizing. I looked around the firm at all the other guys acting like jerks and realized that I was doing exactly the same thing. Trouble was, I couldn’t see any way out of it. Do you know how awful it is every morning to wake up and discover you’re the same jerk that went to bed the night before? It was like being in a really bad dream I couldn’t wake up from.”
David came to the workshop feeling hopeless about finding any way out of his mess. He walked the labyrinth with the intention of being shown a different way to be with the office situation. “Nothing much happened at first,” he recalled later. “I was just walking and walking, determined to make something happen. All of a sudden some bird’s song brought me to. I realized I was completely caught up, again, in the whole office drama, and not seeing a damn thing around me. I stopped and looked