Exploring the Labyrinth_ A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth - Melissa Gayle West [45]
I knew I had a choice at that point: to return to my original intention of thinking about the after-dinner program or to allow the grief to move through me. I chose the latter, and grieved deeply over leaving a garden that I had created and maintained for more than a decade, a garden that in many ways had been a spiritual path for me. The grief finally crested and subsided. I thanked the redwood for its quiet, caring presence and walked out feeling cleansed, renewed, and deeply at peace.
That evening with the participants was a special one for me. After my experience in the labyrinth, I felt deeply at ease with the process of the group and newly compassionate to the losses that many of the retreatants were dealing with that weekend.
Walking “open-minded” also means releasing expectations for how a walk will be. Not all walks will be life-changing, particularly if you settle into an ongoing relationship with a labyrinth.
Remember my own story? I kept expecting fireworks and kept getting disappointed. I have seen this happen over and over again with others as well. We expect some profound and life-changing insight, and “nothing” happens. We assume we’ve done something wrong, so the next time we try harder: focus even more on our breath, our mantra, our walk.
The problem isn’t that nothing happens during the walk. The problem is that we’re clutching a particular expectation for how the walk “should” be. Some of your walks will be prosaic, chances simply to be in the present moment. Just as with any other endeavor in life, while walking the labyrinth there is an X factor composed of such details as the weather, the amount of sleep we had last night, our own physical and emotional health, and, finally, just a good wallop of pure Mystery.
This X factor guarantees we have no ultimate control over the outcome of our walk, just as we have no ultimate control over the outcome of anything in our lives. Hindu thought recognizes this and celebrates the path of Karma yoga, of staying present with what needs to be done while giving up the results to God.
“Get rid of your preconceived notions,” advises Jean Lutz of the Labyrinth Letter. “Take the labyrinth walk for what it is for you. Don’t bring expectations into it. Get out of your own way! I see so many people coming to the labyrinth with a certain set of expectations: ‘This is the way I’m supposed to walk it, this is what I’m supposed to get out of it.’ It’s so sad, because a whole lot of those people are disappointed.”
As you develop a “walking relationship” with your labyrinth, you will find that you have amazing experiences. You also will find that sometimes you have walks that are prosaic or even boring. Dry walks, and even a dry series of walks, are like dry times in a relationship or dry times in your creative or spiritual life.
If you find yourself in a fallow walk or in a fallow walking time, keep going. Remember St. Francis’s advice that, even if you simply return to your breath the whole time in meditation, it is time well spent. It could be that your intention or prayer is working subsoil, so to speak, and that powerful growth will emerge later as a result. It could be that what you are learning, as in the classic dark night of the soul in spirituality, is trust: trust that Spirit is there and at work in your heart and soul, even if you can discern no visible signs. Walking through fallowness, just as praying through a desert experience, can be a very powerful growth time in retrospect.
Paradoxically, it is only by learning to let go of expectations and outcome in the labyrinth that the most powerful work can happen. When we are trying to have an important insight or heal a relationship, it is our small selves doing the work. If we can let our small selves step aside, letting Spirit take care of the outcome, we are allowing much more powerful forces to gather, forces for