Out In The Mountains : Health & Wellbeing

In a column in January, 1998, I shared the history of how I became a daily walker. Having been told that walking daily for the rest of my life would probably help me avoid back surgery, I became a convert on the spot. That was in December, 1995, and I’ve been walking regularly ever since. Walking has proven to be beneficial to me in ways that have far exceeded my chiropractor’s original assertion.

Not only has walking kept my back and leg pain to a minimum, but I am healthier in many other respects as well. For instance, needing to walk gave me the opportunity to have dogs again, which has greatly added to the quality of my life. Walking has also helped me to get into the best physical shape I have ever been in. This allows me to be physically active with a vigor I didn’t have when I was younger. For instance, I hadn’t water-skied in 30 years when I did at my family’s lake home in Maryland in the summer of 1999. My brother David was amazed that I got up the first time and stayed up for a good 15 minutes. He kept saying, “I don’t know many women almost 50 who can water ski!” I really enjoyed hearing that!

My love for walking was deepened and strengthened that same summer when Martha and I went to Ghost Ranch, a Presbyterian Conference Center in the high desert northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we had the opportunity to walk a labyrinth for the first time. It was a deeply meaningful and amazingly sacred experience that tuned my heart, body, mind, and soul to The Holy One in ways I had never experienced. Prior to walking the labyrinth in New Mexico, I had only read about the labyrinth revival going on in the world. I had even talked to people at UVM about putting a labyrinth on the UVM campus, but until I had actually walked a labyrinth, I had no idea what I had been missing.

“What is a labyrinth?” you might be asking. Based on information that Richard Feather Anderson has put together in A Little Book of Labyrinth Essentials, labyrinths are ancient meditation/prayer paths that date as far back as 3000 BCE. This means they have been around for at least 5000 years. The most ancient of the labyrinth patterns is the seven-circuit labyrinth that’s been found in many places around the world and appears across Northern Europe, India, Peru and many other countries. In fact, the seven-circuit labyrinth is also the symbol for the Earth Mother among the Hopi people of the North American southwest.

Anderson states, “All labyrinths lead the walker along a prescribed, meandering path to ‘the center’ – the center as metaphor as well as physical spot. Labyrinths are often confused with mazes. Mazes, unlike labyrinths, contain right and wrong turns and dead-ends. Labyrinths are a single path that inevitably lead the walker into the center.”

The labyrinth is much more than an image or symbol; it provides a pattern of movement which catalyzes transformation. The journey through the labyrinth offers a multidimensional, full-sensory way to explore who we are-individually and collectivel…labyrinths [can] restore wholeness and integrate body, mind and spirit, because they stimulate all three aspects of ourselves and reconnect us with who we truly are. Labyrinths open a portal beyond our normal waking consciousness, into an expanded awareness, in which new insights are revealed.”

Combining walking and meditating/praying on or off a labyrinth has made a significant difference in my spiritual health. For folks like me, who need to pray and meditate in a way that involves all of the senses, walking has made it possible for me to reflect on my life struggles and relationship with The Holy One in a manner that wasn’t possible until I began walking. Many forms of praying and meditating ask us to sit still and be quiet in ways that are distracting rather than focusing. For the more active types among us, walking affords us the opportunity to honor our whole beings in the process of going beyond “normal waking consciousness, into an expanded awareness, in which new insights are revealed.” Goodness knows there are not enough ways for people to honor their whole beings in world today.

Dr. Lauren Artress, author of Walking A Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Tool, also points out that “Walking the labyrinth clears the mind and gives insight into the spiritual journey. It urges actions…It helps [us] see [our] lives in the context of path, a pilgrimage. [We] realize that [we] are not human beings on a spiritual path by spiritual beings on a human path.” Being reminded that I am a “spiritual being on a human path” helps me to be more closely connected to the Loving Creator of my spirit and to have all the more reverence, respect and gratitude for the gift of being alive in a temporarily-abled body with spiritual, emotional, and mental intelligence on a planet that is just as alive as I am if not more so.

The first labyrinth in the Burlington, VT, area sits behind All Saints Episcopal Church at the corner of Dorset and Spear streets. It is available for anyone’s use day or night and is an 11-circut labyrinth modeled after the one found in the floor of the Chartres Cathedral in France. If walking matters to you and your spiritual journey matters to you, I highly recommend putting the two together by walking a labyrinth and a discovering for yourself the revelations awaiting you.

Rev. Christine Leslie, cofounder and director of Triangle Ministries, A Center for Lesbian & Gay Spiritual Development, is available for individual and couple counseling, weddings, and retreat/workshop leadership. She can be reached at 860-7106 or revcsl@aol.com .