A labyrinth is a single winding path to a center and back out again. No dead ends, nothing to solve. Churches, hospitals, retreat centers and schools have used them for centuries as a way to let people be quiet together without anyone having to talk.
I have been teaching mindfulness for more than ten years. Mindfulness can be done anywhere, at any time, doing anything — that is the whole of it. It needs no cushion, no silent room, and none of the forty minutes you do not have.
A labyrinth gives the practice a shape: a path to follow, so the feet have a job and the attention has somewhere to rest. Nothing to decide, nothing to get right, and a clear beginning, middle and end. People who have never managed to sit still for a meditation often find they can do this one.
So what I am facilitating is mindfulness. The labyrinth is what I use to do it.
A mindfulness facilitator guides individuals and groups through meditation and awareness practices to reduce stress, build emotional resilience and improve overall well-being. On a walk, that is four things.
Creating a safe, welcoming and quiet environment, for one person or for a group.
Helping people choose a focus word, a phrase or an intention before they step onto the path — or choose nothing, which is also fine.
Pacing and timing the walk so nobody is crowded and everyone can move at their own speed.
Silent reflection, journaling, or small-group sharing for those who want it. Offered, never required.
Setting intentions is the part I bring beyond the mindfulness itself, and it is where a walk stops being generic. I can build a theme and a small ritual around whatever your group is actually meeting for — a season, a loss, a beginning, a question the group is sitting with. Or you can use one I have already written.
Metta meditation, carried on the path. The phrases arrive as you walk rather than being something you sit and recite — which for a lot of people is the difference between a practice they can enter and one they cannot. It is the walk I am best known for, and the one I am still building on.
A personalized digital finger labyrinth in your colors, with your logo and your words along the path. $25.
“The labyrinth is a spiritual tool that has many applications in various settings. It reduces stress, quiets the mind and opens the heart. It is a walking meditation, a path of prayer, and a blue-print where psyche meets Spirit.”
Secular labyrinth walking is a mindfulness practice — a single winding path used for meditation, stress relief and personal reflection, with no religious dogma attached. There is one path and nothing to decide, so the part of your mind that is always solving something finds it has nothing to solve, and gradually stands down. The body usually follows.
Nothing is asked of you — no belief, no words, nothing to share afterwards — which is why it sits as easily in a hospital garden, a school field or a staff training day as it does in a cathedral.
Labyrinths were set into the floors of European churches through the Middle Ages — nearly a quarter of cathedrals had one. The best known is at Chartres, laid around 1200 and still walked today. They are often described as a pilgrimage in miniature, a journey made by those who could not travel to Jerusalem, though historians differ on how they were really used.
Most were later lifted or lost. The practice was brought back in the 1990s by the Reverend Dr. Lauren Artress at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, and it is that lineage Veriditas carries forward. Walked this way, a labyrinth is a path of prayer, or a ritual marking for a season, a loss, a beginning.
Both uses are welcome, and a group can have either. You choose which one this is — I will follow your lead, and I will tell you beforehand what a walk will and will not include.
It is not a maze. A maze is built to confound you — dead ends, wrong turns, the possibility of getting lost. A labyrinth has one path. However winding it looks, it carries you to the center and back out again without a single decision to make.
There is a small but real research literature, and I have gathered it — with what it does and does not show — on the science page.
Veriditas is a non-profit organization founded in 1995 by the Reverend Dr. Lauren Artress at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, to introduce people to the healing and meditative powers of the labyrinth. It carries the Chartres tradition, and if you have walked a labyrinth anywhere in the Western world in the last thirty years, her work is most likely the reason it was there.
I trained through Veriditas, and I am a member of the Veriditas International Association of Professionally Trained Labyrinth Facilitators (VIA).
Twelve Veriditas-Trained Labyrinth Facilitators are listed in Washington State. Eleven of them are west of the Cascades. I am the only one listed on this side of the mountains — which is a fact about the map, not about me, and the reason I would like more people here to know what a labyrinth is for.
“A Labyrinth Facilitator introduces others to the labyrinth in an articulate, professional and effective way… The Veriditas Facilitator Training — which began in 1997 — remains the most rigorous and comprehensive training offered.”Veriditas
