Exploring the Labyrinth_ A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth - Melissa Gayle West [16]
SACRED SPACE
Throughout time, labyrinths have represented sacred journey. Part of the power of this sacred journey stems from the power of the labyrinth as sacred space.
“Sacred space”: What comes to mind? A church, synagogue, or mosque? An ancient sacred site, such as Stonehenge in southeastern England or a long-abandoned Anasazi kiva on a southwestern mesa? A shady spot beside your favorite stream or a mountaintop whose profound silence is broken only by the wind?
All of these are sacred spaces. In ancient Greek temenos, or “sacred precinct,” originally signified sacred groves or wells; only later did the word come to mean temples. Sacred spaces, temenae, whether mountain or labyrinth or temple, invite us to right relation with Spirit. These places are, as mythologist and scholar Joseph Campbell once said, “a microcosm of the macrocosm,” places where people can come to acknowledge and focus on who they really are, and in what, or whom, they place their ultimate trust.
The common elements of sacred space form the physical and energetic foundation for the labyrinth. You can walk the labyrinth without knowing anything about sacred space and still be transformed by the experience; it happened for me for many years that way. What I found, though, is that the experience of walking the labyrinth is immeasurably deepened by understanding the elements of sacred space. By being aware of how these elements are part of the labyrinth’s power, you can work with them consciously as you walk.
“A sacred place is a certain physical location which contains us by giving us a place to be safe, nurtured, and supported in our totality—body, emotions, mind, and spirit,” writes art therapist Roberta Beale, who works with the labyrinth as temenos, in Dialogues with the Living Earth. “Here we can explore anything and everything, into our deepest being and out into our farthest imaginings.… Being in a sacred place allows us to become resonant, again and again, with all that we … know to be sacred, and with all that we hold in the sacred spaces within us.”
SACRED CIRCLES AND CENTERS
The circle has always symbolized wholeness, God, the cosmos. Sacred structures are often circular: basilicas, medicine wheels, stupas, labyrinths.
“Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the world always works in circles, and everything tries to be round,” says Native American shaman Black Elk. Throughout human history we have sat in circles, danced in circles, drawn circles on everything from cave walls to contemporary canvases. Remember the pictures of suns—circles of light and Self—you made as a child. Know that whenever you step foot in the labyrinth, you are within that sacred circle.
“God makes himself known to the world; He fills up the whole circle of the universe, but makes his particular abode in the center,” wrote Christian theologian Lucian almost eighteen centuries ago. All circles, no matter how big or small, have centers, that place from which the circle itself is birthed.
Reaching center in the labyrinth is about reaching a focus of spiritual power and grace, the still point in the center of a chaotic world. After the twists and turns of the labyrinth’s circuits, this still point mirrors the calm center of gravity deep in our own soul unaffected by the movement of our lives.
Cultures throughout time have depicted sacred circles and centers as mandalas. A mandala, the Sanskrit world for “circle,” is a graphic representation of both cosmos and psyche, a circular diagram enclosing a divine center, a sacred state of consciousness. Mandalas function as maps inviting the viewer to remember the journey into wholeness and unity with the Sacred. Meditators traditionally