Exploring the Labyrinth_ A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth - Melissa Gayle West [61]
When consciously enacted, rituals bring all the power of Spirit to bear on life transitions great and small. Ritual, like sacred space, opens the threshold between matter and spirit, between inner and outer worlds. Tremendous healing and transformative energies are present during transition times in our own lives, in the seasons, in our relationships. Rituals focus and magnify those energies, not just for the one being celebrated but for all those present. Transitions, thresholds between the old and the new, become that much more powerful when marked with ritual.
Everyone has a different definition of ritual, but this is the working one I’ve devised from fifteen years of experience in creating rituals and rites of passage: A ritual is a series of symbolic actions carried out in sacred space and time for the purpose of transformation and healing.
The labyrinth, as sacred space, is a powerful container for ritual. For thousands of years the labyrinth has been used in rituals: funerals, fertility rites, initiations, blessings for voyages. Did you ever, as a child, use a magnifying glass on a sunny day to focus the sun’s rays to burn a hole in a leaf? The labyrinth acts like a magnifying glass to further collect and focus the numinous and transformative energies of ritual.
Men and women around the country now are using the labyrinth’s sacred space to:
Celebrate weddings, birthdays, baptisms, and ordinations
Conduct church services and healing rites
Mark the passage from childhood to adolescence
Mourn losses: loved ones, a stage of life such as parenthood, or an internal set of beliefs
Welcome in a new stage of life, a new job, a new relationship or community
Celebrate the passage of the seasons at solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarters
“Since the labyrinth is sacred space, the power of ritual is enhanced there,” says Sig Lonegren, who frequently conducts rituals in the labyrinth and celebrated his own relationship commitment ceremony there. “The function of sacred space, and the labyrinth, and ritual, is connection. Ritual in the labyrinth helps you make connection to whatever it is you’re going for, whether that’s healing or fertility or getting messages from Spirit.”
THE STRUCTURE OF RITUAL
Once you understand the structure and function of ritual, you’ll be able to create ritual in your labyrinth to mark transitions, from the mundane such as the daily transition between work and home, to the start or finish of a new project, to major life passages like the beginning and ending of relationships.
Ritual, just like any occurrence in life, has three stages: beginning, middle, and end. The beginning, or first stage, sets the scene: Participants are welcomed, the intention for the ritual is made clear, sacred space and time are delineated, Spirit is invoked. Just as in walking the labyrinth, a clear intention is absolutely necessary. I have attended far too many rituals that don’t work simply because the participants have never clearly focused the purpose of the ritual. It was like aimlessly driving around in a car for several hours without a destination or a purpose, finally arriving back home. That is not ritual.
The second part, where one or a series of symbolic actions is carried out, is the heart of the ritual. These symbolic actions can be any number of things: burning, speaking, tearing. (See the list of symbolic actions at the end of this chapter.) These actions enact and embody transformation.
The third and final part is the closing: Spirit is thanked, the ending of sacred time and space is marked, the gathering is thanked and dismissed.
The next section includes guidelines to help you create a ritual to mark any life passage. If you haven’t created ritual before, don’t be intimidated. Most of us grow up with the idea of ritual as being something complex that someone else, an expert, “does.” Let go of that notion. You have the power to create rituals that will greatly enhance any transition