Exploring the Labyrinth_ A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth - Melissa Gayle West [44]
I realized that each one of those stones was right in my path, and yet I hadn’t seen any of them. Thinking about my own lack of trust in myself, I understood how sometimes I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see what was right in front of me, noticing an issue only when it caused me to stumble. Those stones taught me how important it was, in order to trust myself, to walk clear-eyed and awake on my path, so that I could see obstacles coming and have choices about what to do with them rather than stumble, insisting to myself and others I never saw the obstacles coming.
One man at a workshop, walking through the pain of a divorce that was still eating away at his heart and soul after three years, noticed a hawk circling above him as he walked. In his imagination Paul asked the hawk for wisdom about his question of how to heal his bitterness.
“Hawk told me I needed to pull way back from being right inside of my bitterness, stop walking it right into the ground over and over. He invited me to look at all this from his perspective to get a much bigger picture and be able to circle around it from way far off. Part of my bitterness,” Paul told me, “was my refusing to see anything but my own hurt and anger. When I got to the center, that hawk was still soaring above me, so I sat down and closed my eyes and let him take me flying. Way up there I could see how tiny the labyrinth looked, how it was just part of a larger picture of fields and houses and trees.
“ ‘Look,’ Hawk told me, ‘see that little labyrinth down there? See how it’s only a piece of a much bigger pattern? The story you tell yourself about your divorce is really that small too, but you keep hanging on to it like it’s the whole picture. It isn’t—there’s your ex-wife’s story about the divorce, there’s God’s story about the divorce, there’s the story you’ll tell about the divorce on your deathbed when you’re a whole lot older and wiser than you are right now.’
“Man, I really listened to what this bird was telling me, because he was right. I was holding on to that bitterness like it was the last thing I had. Seeing everything from this hawk’s perspective helped me let go of some of that pain—it just wasn’t so important anymore and was keeping me stuck in a very little place. I walked out of that labyrinth a whole lot freer man than the one who walked it, and it was because I paid attention to that bird.”
WALKING OPEN-MINDED
It’s important to allow every walk to be an open-minded one. Labyrinth space is not only sacred space; it is magical space as well, where anything can and does happen. “I really think that labyrinths are churners,” says Sig Lonegren. Lonegren likens the labyrinth to the cauldron of Celtic goddess Cerridwen, representing the cauldron of death and rebirth, of transformation, of wisdom.
“I see the pattern of the labyrinth as the pattern of Cerridwen stirring her cauldron. When we walk this pattern, it’s as if we’re both stirring the cauldron and the self is getting stirred at the same time. You know what stirring does—it brings up all the stuff that’s settled to the bottom.”
When we walk this cauldron-path, “stuff” may get stirred up that we had no idea was there. When that happens, it can be important to go with the stirring, letting go of our original intention.
The first time I walked the redwood labyrinth at Harmony Hill, I was leading a workshop at the retreat house next door. I took the retreatants to Harmony Hill to walk the labyrinths. I waited until everyone had finished walking the redwood labyrinth and decided to walk a “quickie” before dinner by myself, with the intention of opening to guidance about the evening’s activities with the group.
Everything went fine until I reached the center and touched the soft fissures in the bark of the redwood. My heart broke wide open in grief over leaving the garden of the house I had just sold. I had grieved about leaving that garden for almost