'Labyrinths can vary from large-scale walkable ones to those that can be traced with a fingertip.'
Eye - 31 March 2023
Wending your way
‘A spiritual tool that… reduces stress, quiets the mind and opens the heart. It is a walking meditation, a path of prayer, and a blueprint where psyche meets Spirit.’ This description of labyrinths from Lauren Artress, founder of the organisation Veriditas, spoke to Eye.
Labyrinths can vary from large-scale walkable ones to those that can be traced with a fingertip.
They are not mazes to be puzzled out, but a single winding path that allows you to quieten and focus internally. Drawing them can be pretty therapeutic too. Eye first encountered them during a Yearly Meeting special interest group, where Barbara Childs, of Okehampton Meeting, showed Friends how to get started.
Barbara told Eye she has been drawing labyrinths for over twenty years. ‘I can’t explain why I find drawing, and then tracing around, labyrinths so relaxing… The best is when I can draw a simple one on a beach and then leave it to see if other people walk around it. My son bought me a handheld pottery one for a present, and one year I drew one as a design for all the Christmas cards I sent.’ If you would like to pen your own, Barbara has pointed the way to a worksheet to get you started: https://bit.ly/Guide2Labyrinths.
Another Friend passionate about these meditative paths is Jan Sellers, a labyrinth facilitator. You can hear her speak with John McCarthy in an episode of Something Understood on BBC Sounds: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b043w5t5. Available until 11 April, it features readings and music inspired by labyrinths.
Jan told Eye that she was first prompted to explore these tools for ‘quietness, stillness and time for deep reflection’ while working in the higher education sector and becoming ‘concerned about rising stress… for both students and staff’.
She was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship and encountered the labyrinth at the University of Edinburgh by Di Williams. ‘She described this as an opportunity for meditation and quiet reflection, for students and staff of all faiths and none. These were inspiring words.’ The Kent Labyrinth Project was born! ‘Four of us from the University of Kent trained with Veriditas in the summer of 2008.’
‘Wherever I go, I tend to find labyrinths, often unexpectedly. I visited Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in east London to try to track down a family grave, and found a wonderful wildflower and chalk labyrinth there, first created as a celebration for Diwali.
‘At Wanstead Quaker Meeting, we held a candle-lit labyrinth walk: the children came early by arrangement to be first on the labyrinth, then adults joined them, but it was children again who were the last to walk, and to settle in quiet friendship and stillness in the centre… I’ve watched a nun skip the labyrinth, and an eight-year-old walk it backwards because, he said, he wanted to watch his journey.
‘The labyrinth is a wonderful metaphor for journey: our path to the present, our paths forward (alone and in community), our spiritual journeys, the pathways of our lives.’
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