Exploring the Labyrinth_ A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth - Melissa Gayle West [2]
Whoever you are, walking the labyrinth has something to offer you. If a creative or work project is challenging you, walking can get your creative juices flowing. When you are struggling with grief or anger or a physical challenge or illness, walking the labyrinth can point the way to healing and wholeness. If you’re wanting a way to meditate or pray that engages your body as well as your soul, the labyrinth can be such a way. When you just want reflective time away from a busy life, the labyrinth can offer you time out. The labyrinth, as you will learn, holds up a mirror, reflecting back to us not only the light of our finest selves but also whatever restrains us from shining forth.
WHAT IS A LABYRINTH?
A labyrinth is different from a maze, though the two are often confused. The labyrinth is one of the oldest contemplative and transformational tools known to humankind, used for centuries for prayer, ritual, initiation, and personal and spiritual growth. This ancient and powerful tool is unicursal, offering only one route to the center and back out again: no blind alleys, dead ends, or tricks, as in a maze. No matter where you are in the labyrinth’s coherent circuits you can always see the center. Once you set your foot upon its path, the labyrinth gently and faultlessly leads you to the center of both the labyrinth and yourself, no matter how many twists and turns you negotiate in the process.
Since the destination is assured, there are no obstacles to overcome, no muddles to figure out, no dead ends to retrace. What remains for the labyrinth walker is simply the deeply meditative and symbolic discipline of setting one foot in front of the other, of honoring the journey itself and what it has to teach. The mind can be stilled and attention paid to the body, the wisdom of the heart, and the graces of being rather than doing.
Remember the mazes on paper from childhood, tracing and retracing your pencil through a frustrating tangle of lines to get to the center? Mazes are puzzles: To figure one out, whether the maze is negotiated by foot or by pencil, the mind must be acutely focused in an active quest to find the right way out while avoiding getting hopelessly lost. Walking mazes, such as the formal boxwood hedge mazes in England, have walls or high hedges to obscure vision and confound the walker. They require acute attention to choices at intersecting paths and a high degree of critical awareness to remember detours and dead ends. Mazes do not grace those who enter; they taunt, tease, and challenge.
Two radically different scenes come to my mind when I think about the difference between a maze and a labyrinth: the Halloween maze at the Herb Farm near Seattle where I go to annually for an autumn outing with my family and a labyrinth walk I recently led for Winter Solstice.
Negotiating the Herb Farm’s maze, set out in a field and constructed with eight-foot-high walls of hay bales, is challenging, confusing, and fun. Kids and grown-ups alike run through its twists and turns and dead ends, doubling back and bumping into one another while searching for the way out. Silliness and confusion reign amid much gleeful shouting when searchers finally escape the maze’s challenging paths.
At the Winter Solstice labyrinth walk, deep and contemplative silence is the norm. Walkers slowly place one foot in front of the other on their journey to center, turned inward in meditation, healing work, or simple awareness of breath and step.
The labyrinth’s ancient power derives from the fact that it is an archetypal map of the healing journey. The walk itself is a potent physical metaphor for the journeys of healing, spiritual and emotional growth, and transformation. In walking the labyrinth, we start at the perimeter. The path of the labyrinth, like any journey,