Exploring the Labyrinth_ A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth - Melissa Gayle West [6]
INTIMACY AND COMMUNITY
Mary Ellen Johnson, a Unity lay minister certified by Veriditas at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco as a labyrinth facilitator, remembers when walking the labyrinth healed a strained friendship. Mary Ellen and Stephanie couldn’t see eye to eye on some painful personal issues, and their close relationship had become distant and conflicted. One evening they walked the labyrinth together, searching for a way to rebuild the intimacy that had meant so much to both.
“We couldn’t talk about the issues anymore—they were just too painful,” Mary Ellen recalls. “What happened while we were walking the labyrinth was that we both realized we couldn’t solve our difficulties with our minds—there were just too many pieces of the puzzle missing. We let go of trying to figure it out and understand it and fix it.
“Walking the labyrinth let us settle into our hearts; we both could just allow the difficulty to be. As we talked afterward, there was this sense that okay, there was this shared pain, but it was really time to let it heal and just get on with life and our relationship. The labyrinth reminded us to open our hearts, just continue to walk the path toward the center, so to speak, rather than getting stuck in one of the turns.”
After facilitating many group walks, Mary Ellen has found that people learn powerful lessons about relationships in the labyrinth. “When you walk through a labyrinth with people, you temporarily go off toward different quadrants, and then come in closer, like times when you’re walking in agreement and closeness, so to speak, with one another, but then hit conflict or distance. The beauty of the labyrinth is that everyone is on the same path, but we’re at different places on the path as we all move toward the center. We walk together, we move apart, but in the big picture we are all walking toward the center. Relationships that have depth and longevity do the very same thing, and the labyrinth is such a powerful concrete reminder of that.”
I learn a great deal when I lead retreats based on labyrinth walking at Harmony Hill, a center where I serve as program and cancer retreat coordinator. Walking the labyrinth is a core of all the workshops, no matter what the specific content: finding balance, menopause, life transitions, healing from cancer, seasonal celebrations.
I have been deeply moved by how the labyrinth has taught cancer patients about wholeness, church congregations and board members of nonprofits about community, mourners about the healing of the heart, long-estranged family members about reconciliation. When walking the labyrinth we all—no matter how different our lives may be—become pilgrims together on the path to wholeness.
Throughout this book you will read stories of men and women who have walked the labyrinth for spiritual, emotional, and physical healing, fostering of creativity, and intimacy with self and others. In addition, you will receive practical information on how to build several kinds of labyrinths and how to work with them in an astonishing variety of ways that will enhance your life and improve your well-being.
This book is in three parts:
PART ONE shows you why the labyrinth has such astonishing contemporary appeal. It introduces you to walking, and working with, the labyrinth, and gives you some of its history so that you may better understand its power.
PART TWO teaches you to construct temporary or permanent indoor and outdoor labyrinths from a wide variety of materials, explains how to prepare the labyrinth space for walking, tend the labyrinth as a meditative discipline, and create labyrinth