Exploring the Labyrinth_ A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth - Melissa Gayle West [52]
Andrea explained that walking my backyard labyrinth every week had given her a bigger context for her own life. “Each time I walked the labyrinth, I remembered that all the setbacks in my life were just twists and turns in my path. Really hard twists and turns, but not dead ends. I was always heading to center, even if it sure didn’t look that way at the time. When I’d get to center, I’d remember a lot about those other twists and turns my life had taken—maybe not as challenging as divorce and unemployment, but still twists and turns. And in each of those, just like this last year, I felt like part of me and part of my life was dying. But in those other ones I kept on going, and, you know, new life came out of all of them, which was like reaching the center of the labyrinth.
“So I’d walk the labyrinth each week and remember all those other ‘deaths’ and the new life that came from them, and I’d realize that even out of all this mess could come new life. I just needed to keep putting one foot in front of the other and trusting that I’d reach that center.
“Remembering the bigger story of my life gave me courage and hope to keep on keeping on. I needed to walk each week, because I kept forgetting and would get really stuck in my feelings. Sometimes at the end of the day after putting my kids to bed I’d even close my eyes, when I was so tired and feeling so discouraged, and imagine walking the labyrinth.
“The labyrinth didn’t solve my problems, but it healed my life.”
Emotional pain can quickly bog us down in the overwhelming particulars of our story, making us contract around our pain in ways that preclude healing. Working with our suffering in the labyrinth invites us to open compassionately to our own pain, and allows that pain to be a threshold into new life. Many spiritual traditions view suffering—whether emotional, physical, spiritual—as an opening through which Spirit can pour its graces.
Walking the labyrinth is one of the most powerful yet simple ways to allow the light of healing to shine through, restoring our connection to Spirit, love, and life itself.
THE BIGGER STORY
The labyrinth is a great healer, a cosmological pathway that people have walked forever,” says Linda Sewright, a labyrinth facilitator. She attributes the healing energies of the labyrinth to the fact that it opens us up, as it did Andrea, to the larger stories of life, death, and rebirth that people have been walking the labyrinth for ever since it was first used thousands of years ago. “When you walk the labyrinth, your story is part of a much larger picture, one filled with mystery; the labyrinth opens you to the mystery of your life and the greater mystery in which all life is held. This is what heals.”
Seeing our life challenges as a journey into new life helps us walk into painful feelings as fires of transformation. These fires burn away the old and make room for new power and love and creativity, if we can allow the burning.
Toby Evans, the owner of the large Prairie Labyrinth made of native grasses, helps others walk the labyrinth as a way of opening more fully to their own story of life, death, and rebirth. She suggests making a paper copy of the labyrinth and fastening it to a piece of cardboard with glue or tape. Fasten a second piece of paper to the back side. Take this with you, along with a pencil or pen, as you walk. As insights occur to you about your own challenge as part of a larger life journey, note them directly on the paper labyrinth, at the same spot on the paper as you currently are on in the labyrinth.
When you reach the center, stop and meditate upon your journey. Turn the cardboard over and write a letter on the back from your larger, wiser Self to your smaller self about your life challenge and how it is a reflection of the Great Story. Ask your larger Self, “How is this walk like my own journey? What, or whom, in my life must I release? As I die to my old life, my old beliefs, my old self, what is asking to be birthed?” Let your larger Self give you a bigger perspective