May 2007 | Tune In
Not All Who Wander Are Lost...
A modern-day amble into the ancient Labyrinth
By Jamie Friddle
Solvitur ambulando… “It is solved by walking,” Saint Augustine of Hippo said. “Man is ill because he is not still,” countered ornery Renaissance physician and alchemist Paracelsus.
But the real secret may lie in an ancient combination of the two. As practicing Buddhists have known for centuries, walking meditation is a profound prayer modality. Still, short of marathon mall walks or after-dinner thigh burners, most Westerners haven’t quite matriculated into the tradition of meditation in motion.
Rev. Lauren Artress would like to change that. A psychotherapist and an Episcopal canon at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, Artress is founder of Veriditas: The Voice of the Labyrinth Movement. In 1991, she recreated a medieval labyrinth at her church, a copy of a 13th-century terrazzo labyrinth that had languished unused at France’s Chartres Cathedral for some 250 years.
Some say labyrinths are living metaphors for life itself, a physical archetype of one’s relationship to the individuated Self of Carl G. Jung, or a symbol and reminder of one’s spiritual journey toward God, enlightenment and wholeness. Says Artress: “I think the labyrinth works by drawing attention to anything that’s in our way of connecting to the divine or higher power. It’s pre-Descartes. The design is anchored in a worldview before we divided it up into mind, body, spirit.”
A labyrinth, the origins of which are unknown, is not a maze. A maze is “multicursal,” entertaining and frustrating those who enter with tricky turns, dead-ends and multiple paths. A labyrinth is “unicursal,” with one path that leads inexorably to the pattern’s center, in spite of many circuits and switchbacks. One moment you are within spitting distance of the labyrinth’s “rose” (center), the next a 180-degree turn on the path whisks you away to its extremities, all while the labyrinth reels you imperceptibly to its center.
Walking in circles to find yourself
“When you’re walking into a labyrinth, you’re walking into patterns of creation itself,” says Melissa Gayle West, a life coach who leads labyrinth workshops for cancer patients at Washington state’s Harmony Hill retreat. As West, author of Exploring the Labyrinth: A Guide to Healing and Spiritual Growth, explains, a labyrinth’s geometry is sacred because it mimics the geometry of nature. “So often we try to turn life into a super highway,” West muses. “It’s not the way our psyches and our souls work. I think the labyrinth’s reconnecting us to the meanders of our own souls.”
While the first documented labyrinth was on the shores of the Mediterranean 4,000 years ago, the origins of labyrinths may be older. The pattern comes in many shapes and sizes, from mere inches in diameter (finger labyrinths) to walkable patterns of more than 100 feet. History’s most legendary labyrinth, that in which Theseus slayed the minotaur, is a good representation of the classical style that adorned coins from Knossos, Crete, about three centuries before Christ. According to Jeff Saward, a labyrinth scholar from the UK whose wife presides over the international Labyrinth Society, labyrinths also appear in three other styles — Roman, medieval, and contemporary — on multiple surfaces, from tablets to tiles to columns to floors to natural turf. Labyrinth sizes are often referred to in “circuits,” the number of visible circles around the center. The medieval Chartres labyrinth that Artress recreated in her San Francisco church has 11 circuits.
Since Artress’s 1991 experiment, almost 2,200 public walkable labyrinths have been registered on the International Labyrinth Society and Veriditas’s World-Wide Labyrinth Locator (wwll.veriditas.labyrinthsociety.org), 1,800 of them in the United States. And while Cartesian worldviews still abound in Western medicine, the growing number of labyrinths at hospitals and health care centers — more than 200, according to Robert Ferré, a leading maker of labyrinths in the United States — indicates a healthy interest in this ancient practice.
Evidence of labyrinth-walking’s healing properties is largely anecdotal, but M. Kay Sandor, PhD, an associate professor of nursing at University of Texas Medical Branch and chair of the Veriditas Research Interest Group, strongly believes. Sandor and her staff have documented cases in which walking a labyrinth reduces blood pressure, a common measure of stress. She is currently conducting a new study that will measure not only blood pressure, but the stress indicators of cortisol, interleukin 6, and C-reactive proteins.
“I have a hunch that it will duplicate the relaxation response [of Herbert Benson’s groundbreaking research into stress levels and healing],” says Sandor. “I always laugh and say, ‘Here I am, trying to quantify the spirit.’ I’m always open to the mystery of this research.”
Jamie Friddle encountered Lauren Artress’s labyrinth at Grace Cathedral in 1995. Since then, he has developed an allergy to straight lines. A small metal finger labyrinth is his constant companion in and out of Seattle, where he lives and writes.
![[Send]](http://seattle.consciouschoice.com/sendlink/send.gif){kind=small}
Recommend this page to a friend
Top Ten pages recommended to friends:
