Exploring the Labyrinth_ A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth - Melissa Gayle West [56]
As you walk, feel whatever hurt is underneath your anger. Moving to that level can allow for a softening of the heart and a healing that is not possible when the heart is hardened in anger and judgment.
My first response to feeling hurt by someone else is to harden in anger as a self-defense mechanism. I have learned to walk the labyrinth or use the finger labyrinth to center and soften before I talk with the other person about what triggered my anger. One morning, for instance, I felt let down by a colleague’s treatment of me in a stressful teaching situation. My knee-jerk reaction was both anger and an old response of feeling victimized. I knew that if I went to her directly, I would act harshly and judgmentally.
I walked my backyard labyrinth first instead. As my breathing slowed and my heart softened, I allowed myself to walk the labyrinth metaphorically in her shoes. I let go of feeling victimized and could see the situation from her viewpoint. I could acknowledge, begrudgingly at first and more easily as I walked, that she was doing the best she could, and I could understand how she could also feel angry and misunderstood. After the walk I was able to talk with her from my heart rather than from an angry place of judgment.
Neal Harris teaches people in corporate settings to use a laminated paper finger labyrinth to deal with anger and frustration at work. He advises people to pull out their laminated labyrinth from their desk and trace it unobtrusively after dealing with an angry boss or a difficult client on the phone. “They can use it as a focusing tool. If the last caller was rude or frustrating, they might feel all over the place in their anger. Normally it might take them a while to get over the anger and get back to a center place where they can be more productive again.
“The finger labyrinth turns their attention both inward and toward the present moment, centering and relaxing them. They’re much more capable of continuing their day without a lot of hoopla, instead of carrying their anger forward where they either have to keep talking about the last experience or taking it out on others around them.”
The labyrinth, no matter what its size, provides a strong and safe container for the ups and downs of our emotional lives. When we walk through the sacred space of the labyrinth, we are reminded that all the twists and turns, the highs and lows, of our lives are sacred as well.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Healing and Illness
Even if you or someone you love is not sick or in chronic pain, read this chapter. The great gift of physical illness is that it can be a powerful wake-up call to life. When I was seriously ill I was spurred on to ask the big questions: Why am I here? What, and whom, do I most value? What is my right relationship to Spirit? What is unlived in me—talents, gifts, experiences—that is asking to be birthed? How may I best live out the time remaining to me?
When you’re facing serious illness, what is nonessential falls away. What surprises many of us, once we fall ill and take a thoughtful look at our lives, is how much time and energy we have expended on the things that are unimportant to the big picture. Serious illness and pain invite us to release false selves carefully crafted over a lifetime to please others and get ahead in the world. Facing our own mortality is a wake-up call to living from our authentic core.
Working in the Harmony Hill Cancer Retreat Program and in my private psychotherapy practice with people who are ill reminds me of how powerful a teacher pain and illness can be. It also helps me remember to keep learning the same lessons that I did when facing the possible end of my own life: not to take others, and life itself, for granted; to ask the big questions and be willing to wait and listen for the answers;