Exploring the Labyrinth_ A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth - Melissa Gayle West [17]
Tibetans create elaborate mandalas on scrolls for meditators to reflect upon, evoking spiritual transformation; the sacred center of their world, Mount Meru, is itself a mandala. Navajo medicine men create sand mandalas to bring a sick person back in balance with spirit, thereby effecting healing. In workshops and therapy studios across the country today, people are drawing mandalas for emotional healing and spiritual growth.
To walk the labyrinth as a mandala is to embody that journey to our own sacred centers in a way that involves all of our being, body, soul, and spirit. The first time I ever made the connection between mandalas and labyrinths was during a workshop I led where participants drew mandalas as a meditation on wholeness and the spiritual journey. Later we walked the labyrinth. A participant told me that evening about her experience of walking the labyrinth as entering a mandala.
“It was as if I had walked into my own mandala,” she recalled as we ate dinner. “The circle of the labyrinth became the perimeter of my drawing. With each step I moved closer to the center of my mandala. When I reached the center of the labyrinth it seemed, in my own body, like I had stepped into the center of my own drawing. I became the center of my drawing [a tree]. I spread my arms and became that tree and all it meant for me. My body got it, not just my mind like when I drew the mandala. I walked out with that tree growing in every cell of my body.”
SACRED GEOMETRY
Circles, centers, spirals: All embody an ancient discipline called sacred geometry, from which derives a great deal of the labyrinth’s proportion and power. In ancient times “geometry” meant the contemplation of forms, “a way by which the essential creative mystery is rendered visible,” writes Robert Lawlor in Sacred Geometry. “The passage from the unmanifest, pure, formal ideas to the ‘here-below,’ the world that spins out from that original divine stroke, can be mapped out by geometry.” Two important components of sacred geometry have a direct bearing upon the labyrinth: transcendental numbers and the Golden Mean.
Transcendental numbers—such as pi (the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, or 3.1415 …) and the square roots of two, three, and five—form the basis not only of sacred geometry but of sacred space and architecture throughout the world, including the labyrinth. The Golden Mean, called by many mathematicians the most essential pattern of wholeness found in creation, is an expression of relationship: a pattern whereby a smaller part of the pattern is in the same relationship to a larger part of the pattern as the larger part is to the whole. The Golden Mean and transcendental numbers determine the structure for all sacred architecture, from the Great Pyramid of Egypt to the Greek Parthenon to Borobudur, the world’s largest Buddhist stupa, to the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe.
The Golden Mean also is the matrix for organic spirals in nature, determining the distribution of seeds in a sunflower, the proportions in the spiraling of a snail shell, the growth of a ram’s horn, and the uncurling of fetuses in humans and animals. It represents both the magnificent unfolding of life itself and the invisible Sacred Pattern guiding this transformative process. This Golden Mean, invisibly spiraling in the labyrinth, invites us—even if we don’t consciously know it—to participate in the unfolding of the world every time we walk its curves, birthing creation itself as we spiral to the center.
A canvas Chartres labyrinth by Robert Ferré.
Labyrinth maker Robert Ferré was so awestruck when he discovered sacred geometry’s power in the labyrinth that he worked for weeks learning to draw a labyrinth with nothing but a pencil and a straightedge. After years of study and labyrinth construction, he is still amazed by the power of these unseen formulas. “The incredible thing about the