Exploring the Labyrinth_ A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth - Melissa Gayle West [13]
What started out as a mildly uncomfortable situation for me (and, I know, for them) turned into a powerful experience. As we traveled the labyrinth together, walk after walk, I moved through my initial discomfort and came to understand with my heart and soul how we were all fellow travelers on the same healing journey. The labels of “therapist” and “client” fell away in the labyrinth’s turns. Sharing the center with them, I could know each one not as “my client” but in the full glory of his or her humanness and sacredness; I myself could share wounds and glories not as “therapist” but as woman and human being.
Those walks deeply affected me personally as well as vocationally as a psychotherapist. That weekend still reminds me that we are not whatever labels happen to be sticking to us at any given time: client, therapist, parent, teacher, artist, attorney. That weekend the labyrinth taught me, at a level far deeper than my conscious mind, that we are all pilgrims walking our own singular walks on the same sacred path.
CHAPTER THREE
The Power of the Labyrinth
To understand the labyrinth’s gifts, it helps to be aware of what labyrinths have meant in the centuries before our own and how the labyrinth itself embodies sacred space.
Imagine Sardinia, 3,500 years ago. You are a mourner in a funeral procession, winding deep into the stone cavern of a burial chamber. Torches flicker in the tomb, throwing into high relief a petroglyph of a labyrinth. As the burial ceremony begins you study the labyrinth for comfort in your grief, knowing it offers a map for death and rebirth for your deceased friend. This labyrinth shows you the circuitous route that your friend will follow into the tomb of Mother Earth. Your eyes rest for a moment at the center, knowing that this center will transform from tomb to womb, birthing your friend into her new life in the spirit realms back via the same winding route.
Imagine Arizona, 1,000 years ago. You are an Anasazi Indian, living high in the cliff dwelling of Casa Grande. It is a cold afternoon in January, too cold to venture from the mesa, and you idly scratch a crude labyrinth into the adobe walls of your pueblo. As you carve out the labyrinth from the soft pink earth, you remember how this labyrinth represents your people’s emergence into this world from the previous world in which they dwelt. Your spirit swells with pride as your fingers trace your people’s birth from the center of this labyrinth.
Walking the Chartres labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral, France.
Imagine France, 800 years ago. You are in Chartres Cathedral near Paris. In this great vaulting cathedral you pause at the entrance to the stone labyrinth, recently inlaid so carefully into the floor of the nave. Looking up at the jewel-colored light streaming through the rose window high in front of you, you ask God to bless your journey into the center of the labyrinth. You have prepared for this journey for months with prayer. This walk represents the dream of a lifetime: Instead of making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, too far and too dangerous, you walk this labyrinth now. You are on holy ground.
The labyrinth, with its circumambulation of and eventual arrival at the center through a single path, seems to have evolved from an archetypal symbol known in virtually every culture throughout time: the spiral, the universal symbol of growth and transformation.
FIGURE 3.1 SPIRAL
THE MAGIC OF SPIRALS
Stop for a moment and place the index finger from your nondominant hand at the entrance to the spiral shown in Figure 3.1. Take a deep breath, and slowly trace the spiral inward toward the center. Imagine that you are moving from the rim of creation to its very center. Let your finger rest a moment in the center. Take another deep breath and trace the