Labyrinth

A labyrinth is a metaphor for one’s own spiritual journey through life. It consists of a circular, meandering path to the center, and one walks the same path out again. There are no wrong choices or decisions to make, as are found in a maze. A labyrinth is designed to help you find your way - symbolically the journey helps us to integrate mind, body and spirit.

Spiraling Deeper

Spiritual Pilgrims

When discussing labyrinths, we use terms like path, journey, and pilgrimage. The Reverend Dr. Lauren Artress in her book, “Walking a Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Tool,” urges us to be pilgrims, not tourists in our lives. What is the difference? A tourist is an observer who comes into an area with an interested eye, takes pictures, and leaves. A pilgrim may take pictures and also participates, interacts, and comes with a searching heart.

What are we searching for as we walk the labyrinth? Perhaps, as Dr Artress suggests in her newest book, “The Sacred Path Companion: A Guide to Walking the Labyrinth to Heal and Transform,” we are seeking methods and teachings that will help Spirit permeate every moment of our lives. She continues, “If you are on a spiritual path – any path from the rich traditions of the world’s religions – to live a healed and transformed life, you want to:

• Deepen your compassion
• Lessen your judgments
• Increase your patience
• Find your purpose and share it with the world.”

Rev. Artress holds these four guidelines up as ideals – we may never develop all of them fully, but they point in the direction we want to go. This season of Lent and the spring Equinox is a good time to reflect upon our lives over the last year and begin to answer the questions associated with these spiritual guidelines:

• Have I deepened my compassion for my family, my friends, and the strangers who cross my path?
• Have I lessened my judgments about my loved ones and those I meet?
• Have I increased my patience with my loved ones and those I meet on the path?
• Have I found my purpose, and nurtured it, so I can be of service to the world?

“What stops these qualities from becoming a deeper part of your life?” is the next question posed. These questions offer us a way to reflect on our spiritual growth.

I offer two quotes from this section of the book for meditation:

If we attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening our own self-understanding, our own freedom, integrity and capacity to love, we will not have anything to give to others. We will communicate nothing but the contagion of our own obsessions, our aggressiveness, our own ego-centered ambitions. Thomas Merton

Feminine wisdom is rooted in experience, in compassion. She thinks with her heart and is more concerned with the processes than with the products of a life lived fully. She does not value the presence of power but the power of presence. Jill Mellick

May the compassion, love, and powerful presence of the Sacred bless your journeys!

Workshop

Robin Fuerst and Colleen Benelli will combine the Labyrinth, SoulCollage & Reiki for a workshop on Saturday June 19th, 2010 in Portland, OR from 9am to 7pm.  The cost of the workshop is $125.  More information coming in May.

Click here to sign up for classes.

Links

www.trinitypullman.org - click on "labyrinth project" for more information on the labyrinth.