Exploring the Labyrinth_ A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth - Melissa Gayle West [64]
As you walk toward the center, walk with the previous year. Think about the high points, the challenges. Ask your heart what important things you learned during the year, both through joy and through pain. As you walk you may have new insights, and feelings may come up. Breathe through them.
When you get to the center, sit and become quiet. Close your eyes, open your hands in your lap in a gesture of receiving, and ask Spirit for a birthday gift: a special word, image, phrase, or symbol to stay with you during the upcoming year. When you have received it, bring your hands up to your heart and place the gift there. Let your heart fully open to, and receive, the gift. Notice how it feels to be carrying this gift with you in your heart.
Walk out now, walking in your imagination into the next year of your life. Notice how carrying this gift in your heart and soul affects how you see the upcoming year. Back at the entrance to the labyrinth, see the light of your gift reflected in the light of the flame. Extinguish the candle, thanking Spirit for the gift.
Take the candle back with you to your bedroom, office, or altar or meditation space. Through the next year, when you are in particular need of your birthday gift, light the candle for a moment and feel its presence in your heart.
GRIEF AND LOSS
Ritual in the labyrinth can be a powerful way to bring healing and closure to the loss of a relationship or a life situation, such as a job. We have already looked at some ways to grieve in Chapter 11. Here is another way to mourn and let go. Allow at least one hour for this ritual.
To prepare, you will need paper (or your journal) and pencil, a clipboard on which to write, a Pyrex or other fireproof bowl, matches, and a glass of water (which will be for drinking and washing yourself clean, and also stand in an emergency for a fire extinguisher). Take all of those to the center of the labyrinth. The purpose of this ritual is to literally walk through the relationship in time (or the history of a job, or of living in a particular house), doing a walking retrospective of it from beginning to the present moment. When you reach the center, you will journal about what needs releasing in order to allow healing in. After writing, you will burn the paper in the center in a gesture of releasing. This will allow the paper, and what is being released, to transmute into new energy.
Stand at the entrance to the labyrinth. Ask for help in grieving, releasing, and healing the relationship or situation. When you are ready, remember the first time the two of you got together: a chance meeting, birth, blind date. Bring yourself fully back to that time: See it, hear it, smell it, touch it, feel it. When you are fully there, take your first step into the labyrinth.
With that first step, take a step forward in time from your first meeting. Begin walking very slowly through time into the relationship as you walk toward the center of the labyrinth. Allow everything to come up: memories, thoughts, feelings. When you hit an intense place in the walk through your relationship, stop. Cry, breathe, shake your fist at God or the other person. Open your heart to yourself and the unfolding of this relationship through time. Move through the good times, the bad times, the end of the relationship as you knew it. If you find yourself spacing out, stop, breathe, and ground. Send compassion to yourself. When you are ready, take up where you left off.
Allow as much time as you need to get to the center; do not arrive until you have reached the present moment of the relationship. Sit down and take a moment to meditate on the journey you just completed. If you have any fresh insights that you want to keep, write them down in your journal, to take out from the labyrinth with you.
Breathe, ground, and say another prayer if you wish for help with healing the relationship. Meditate on