AHN News Archive: September, 2003

September 2003 News

This month's AHN News is dedicated to the meditative and healing power of the LABYRINTH. We feature an interview with Lauren Artress, a new book called Grace from the Garden, and a featured link to the Labyrinth Society.

The Healing Power of the Labyrinth: An Interview with Lauren Artress

Lauren Artress is the founder of Veriditas, a world-wide labyrinth project, and the Canon for Special Ministries at Grace Cathedral which features two labyrinths. She is also an author, publishing books such as Walking the Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Tool, and she has become one of most visible and sought-after leaders of the labyrinth movement around the world. The Arts and Healing Network interviewed her this August.

AHN: How did you first become involved with the labyrinth?

Artress: Though I always knew vaguely about the concept of the labyrinth, I first walked it in 1991 through Jean Houston's Mystery School Network. It was my good fortune to be there when they outlined an eleven-circuit labyrinth with tape on the floor and used it in a transformative ritual. Though I use it entirely differently than Jean, this was when I got "bit" by the labyrinth. This sent me off to Chartres Cathedral in France in August of 1991 and led to a small group of us moving the 256 chairs that hid the labyrinth, if not from peoples' view, certainly from them using it as a spiritual tool.

AHN: Can you explain how the labyrinth facilitates healing and inner peace?

Artress: When you enter the labyrinth, you move into a non-linear, imagic place that those in the linear, cognitive world stand outside of. This intuitive world is present to us for several reasons. The first is because the labyrinth has only one path. You do not have to be concerned about where you are going, so the part of our mind that worries or gets ahead of itself can take a rest.

Chartres Cathedral Labyrinth, photo © Jeff Saward/Labyrinthos

The act of simple walking, so familiar to most of us, is also key. Walking naturally quiets the mind. The important thing is to find and honor your own natural pace. Some places you may want to move fast, others almost in slow-motion. Honoring the pace your body wants to go is important. It also means you may move around other walkers, or let them move around you.

A third element is the design itself. It is a highly structured path. It has the exact cosmic rhythms embedded within it. I sense that this design was created by great masters of Spirit, who knew the pathway to integrating mind, body and spirit. It is designed by a lost spiritual art called Sacred Geometry. This geometry comes from Pythoragus and is sacred because it is based on nature. For instance the labyrinth is based upon the circle, which is a universal symbol found in every culture. The circle speaks without words of unity and wholeness. It also incorporates the complex spiral, also mirrored in nature. As you walk the labyrinth it takes you to center, but the path doubles back on itself as you move. This makes the eleven-circuit labyrinth quite complex. If confounds the mind into being quiet.

AHN: Why do you feel this ancient meditative tool has been revived and embraced at such a high level at this particular time in history?

Artress: The labyrinth "speaks" to us in metaphor. It is a watering hole for the spirit; a reflective mirror of the soul. It is a place where we can 'wind down' to quiet the mind and when we do this, the door to our intuitive world opens to us. We need labyrinths "peppered" all over our planet because they offer to us something that we desperately need now: a quiet mind, a sense of peace, a place to reflect. I was shy at first to use the term "the labyrinth movement", but the New York Times named it well when they first used the term in 1998. There is a movement going on because of the deep hunger we have for reflection, to be present to ourselves and grounded in our bodies. Labyrinths order chaos and that is what we need to do at this time: order our chaos world-wide.

AHN: Tell me about Veriditas. How did it begin and what is its mission?

Grace Cathedral Labyrinth

Artress: Veriditas is a non-profit organization housed at Grace Cathedral, but serving a larger vision that goes out beyond the two beautiful labyrinths we have placed there for people to walk any hour day or night. Our original vision was to "pepper the planet with labyrinths and teach its use as a spiritual tool." However, we have the privilege of claiming a job well done in terms of "peppering the planet with labyrinths". Labyrinth construction in public spaces is happening way beyond our wildest dreams.

The vision of Veriditas is to activate and facilitate the transformation of the Human Spirit. Our mission centers around the Labyrinth Experience as a personal practice for healing and growth, a tool for community building, an agent for global peace and for the blossoming of the Spirit in our lives. Our focus is on events, teaching opportunities, training people to facilitate the labyrinth and networking those people. It's quite amazing, creative work and definitely meets a huge need in the Western world.

AHN: What advice do you have for those wishing to create a labyrinth in their community?

Artress: Creating a labyrinth is a wonderful way to build community, but someone or a small team of people need to be in charge. If you are doing the eleven-circuit labyrinth you may need guidance especially if you are going to put some serious money into it. But low-budget or high-budget, if you are going to create one outdoors, ask the land first. Dowsers can help you determine the positioning of it and the placement of the entrance, which is guided by the specific needs of the setting.

Realize that there is quite a learning curve with building a labyrinth. You want to determine why you are doing it, what population it will serve and how it will be used. People do not know this and take short cuts that are unhelpful. One of the biggest challenges to the labyrinth movement is that high budget labyrinths are going in and are poorly done. If you are interested in creating a labyrinth, it's wise to experience as many labyrinths as possible before you start making one.

A second challenge is to train people to facilitate the labyrinth walks. Labyrinth sites that do not have good leaders lack a vision of what the bigger picture can be. Secondly, certain parts of our culture are what I call "symbol-phobic" and a good solid introduction can help people understand what they are doing when walking the labyrinth.

AHN: How do people find a labyrinth near them?

Artress: By September 30 of this year, you can go to our website at www.Veriditas.net and find the World-Wide Labyrinth Locator. Click on that and it will provide prompts for you to locate labyrinths near you, or anywhere in the world.

AHN: What excites you most about your work with the labyrinth at this time?

Artress: My passion for the labyrinth has never let up! I think this is because I get so much from it. I also can teach everything I want to teach through the labyrinth: meditation, finding our soul assignments, unleashing our creativity, spiritual practice, psycho-spiritual healing; you name it! The labyrinth is a truly powerful spiritual tool. For some of us, tool may not seem like the right word, until you realize what kind of tool it is. The labyrinth is a blueprint for transformation and that is what my life is dedicated to.

For more information about the Labyrinth and Lauren Artress, please visit www.veriditas.net

Featured Book:

Grace from the Garden: Changing the World One Garden at a Time

by Debra Landwehr Engle

This lovely little hardback book has an irresistible cover that yields to page after page of heart opening stories of community-transforming gardens. As the author writes "Over the course of a spring and summer, I visited gardeners around the country, observing firsthand the ways in which they tend their plants and nurture the lives of those around them. I've organized their efforts into five categories: gardens that teach, nourish, unite, inspire, and heal.The gardeners on these pages are ordinary folks patting a seedling into the ground and stepping lightly around the new transplant. They are you and me, they are all of us and their energy illumines the world."

Grace from the Garden provides solid evidence of the power of gardens to build self-esteem in youth, offer direction to prison inmates, preserve memories of elders, sooth hospital patients, and more. Each story is richly described and very human. The book concludes with a detailed appendix with organizations and links. This is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in the healing power of gardening.

Book Excerpt

The author describes how a community garden project called Farm in the City incorporates a labyrinth into its St Paul, MN garden.

"Anna shows me the new labyrinth, planted just two months previously but thriving in a protected corner of campus. Near it is a sign cast from clay, bordered with painted imprints of ferns and leaves. LABYRINTH: AN AGE-OLD CEREMONIAL PATH OF RESTORATION, INSPIRATION, AND WISDOM, it reads. Labyrinths are known to be healing and meditative, as the walk to the center of the garden is symbolic of turning inward and becoming mindful of the messages from your own soul. In this labyrinth, based on three-thousand year old paintings from the Mediterranean island of Create, the path is formed with plantings of widely diverse perennials, from wild roses and gangly daisies to low-growing dianthus and geraniums.

In the center are cement stepping stones imbedded with broken shards of delft ceramics and mirror tiles, representative of everything from Minnesota's Dutch heritage to reflections of the soul. But also part of the labyrinth are special stones that came from an Indian tribal site in Minnesota, a spot considered sacred by the Native Americans. The site was cleared and paved for Highway 55, so Farm in the City moved the stones and gave them a place of honor in the labyrinth. Even here, in the silence of the meditative path, the disenfranchised have a voice." (page 116)

Grace from the Garden was published by Rodale in 2003. It has 240 pages and costs $19.95. You can order this book through Amazon by clicking here. You can learn more about the author at www.debralandwehrengle.com