Spirit of the Labyrinth
Nearly twenty years ago I was introduced to my first labyrinth, or I should say it introduced itself to me as I began a process of opening and releasing myself to new ways of thinking and being. After driving 2.5 hours for my first silent retreat, I was exhausted, and yet, unable to settle into the silence, not to mention the beauty of the awesome surroundings. The nights were immensely dark and quiet and the days were like being in another dimension; brilliant with unusual natural sounds, sights, scents, and trails to explore.
Unable to settle into this mini universe, I remarked to one of the nuns hosting the retreat that I didn’t think I was going to make it — 36 hours of silence?! That’s when she suggested that I take a walk around the labyrinth. That was it! I took many walks that first weekend and engaged in subsequent silent retreats which led to a deepening relationship with this sacred tool of our ancestors.
I didn’t knowingly ask for this opportunity, nor did the development within myself occur all at once, but the combined movement without an agenda and the mind at rest provoked a transformative state. The simple progression through a winding path laid bare (eventually) much of the emotional weight of what I was carrying, the external baggage of life was slowly being burned away and woven into a tapestry of lived experiences. I felt a spaciousness that words could not define. I was within myself, but without for all purposes and a witness to changes that were subtle, but profound—and that would evolve again and again with multiple opportunities in walking the labyrinth.
Unlike a map, or even a GPS where you might not end up where you intended, requiring numerous detours and re-routing; the labyrinth is direct, even though winding. You will definitely end up where you intended, at the center and then you follow the route outward, somehow feeling different.
After a period of about five years I met the labyrinth again in a different way, as my church community was able to borrow a cloth labyrinth during Advent. The familiar pattern of the ancient tool of drawing nearer to God, experiential full body experience starting with an intention and my feet gently kissing the ground with every step was once again, an expansive encounter. The experience was regenerative, life-filling and meaningful—a beautiful dance of the imagination and divine feminine.
It was truly a pilgrimage into more mystery and I had to allow myself to just be! The gift I received this time was a revelation that I’d always held in heart and known that:
There are no others. —Ramana Maharshe
The way that modern society has carved and crafted our thinking into naming and dividing everything into groups, ethnicities, and races is a social construct, that too many have accepted as truth along with other types of divisions that make no sense.
As human beings we all bleed when we are cut, and cry at the loss of a loved one or some other tragedy that may not affect us directly, but we feel deep in our bones. We all ache for peace when we hear of war, especially as it affects children and women. Trauma does not just affect those in the midst of a cataclysmic situation, it affects all of us in ways we have yet to process; but the mere use of addictive substances and erratic inhumane behaviors bears out in the collective incoherence. Try as we might to ignore it, the Truth still reigns and plummets us into spaces of deep yearning, aching for more than change, but a total transformative immersion into love.
It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
—J. Krishnamurti
How do we heal, how do we become whole? We go inside in prayer and silence, the kind of deep solitude that I resisted many years ago. For me it was the labyrinth that became a doorway into myself, there are many other ways of reaching the depths of our being, each person needs to discover what it is that serves them.
God’s plan for the fullness of times, to sum up all things in Christ in heaven and on earth (Ephesians 1:10).
To stand in awe of the perpetual mystery that is alive within us and all around us — and is a profound gift of discovery and love.
According to Maria Popova:
We live in a state of perpetual dissociation from the almost unbearable wonder of being alive. Wonder is always an edge state, its edge so sharp it threatens to rupture the mundane and sever us from what we mistake for reality — the TV, the townhouse, the trauma narrative. If we fell asleep each night remembering “the singularity we once were” and awoke each morning with the bright awareness that every atom in our bodies can be traced to one of the first stars — a particular star in the infant universe that made this particular body to sinew this particular star across billions and billions of blind steps each of which could have gone otherwise — we would be too wonder-struck by the miraculousness of it to deal with the mundane. But the dishes have to be done and the emails have to be written, so we avert our eyes from the majesty and mystery of a universe that made them in order to look at itself from the majesty and mystery of what we are.
When we awaken from our illusory wanderings we grieve for the loss of time, energy and unpleasant dispositions wasted on what we were calling life. But perhaps that is part of the journey as well, to dive into the darkness in order to facilitate a re-birth and live from the fresh insights with more Wisdom and (W)holiness. As many spiritual teachers have reflected, we each are carrying a sacred text which can only be fulfilled through us.
The time in which we are living just might be the opportunity to take a deep dive into ourselves. The labyrinth is just one tool, a metaphor for that experience of inner reflection, a sometimes rugged, but fulfilling journey into darkness.
Wherever you are on your journey, may you greet this upcoming year, 2025 with wonder and awe.