One morning following my meditation I looked out at the garden and thought, “What this property needs is a labyrinth,” or laberinto in Spanish. Hum…I wondered if there were many in Costa Rica and how I might go about having one here. So of course I Googled “labyrinth, Costa Rica” and yes a lot of links came up. It would be possible. First let me back up a bit and share how my interest in labyrinths began.
While I knew about the difference between a labyrinth and a maze I can’t remember if I had ever walked one before 2012. Just a reminder, a maze, often made with hedges or walls, is a convoluted path that the walker needs to solve, leading to a goal. In contrast, a labyrinth doesn’t have a hedge or wall but rather a defined path on the ground that twists and turns and eventually leads the walker into the center. The following description is from the Labyrinth Society:
A labyrinth is a meandering path, often unicursal, with a singular path leading to a center. Labyrinths are an ancient archetype dating back 4,000 years or more, used symbolically, as a walking meditation, choreographed dance, or site of rituals and ceremony, among other things. Labyrinths are tools for personal, psychological and spiritual transformation. (https://labyrinthsociety.org/about-labyrinths) [1]
My real interest in how the labyrinth could be a tool for meditation and growth didn’t happen until I was volunteering in a meditation and movement program with Aine McCarthy in the Santa Fe County Women’s Detention Center beginning in 2012. Aine was in the chaplaincy program at Upaya Zen Center and we had met at a retreat. During a breakfast at the end of the retreat we learned that two dancers had stayed at her house when the Avodah Dance Ensemble had spent a week in residence at York Correctional Institution. (See blog https://wp.me/p9Mj5D-gM) [2] Aine was then a teenager… now over 10 years later here we were sitting across from each other at a breakfast table at Upaya. When Aine shared that she was in the chaplaincy program I asked what she wanted to do as a chaplain, and she said she wanted to work possibly as a chaplain in the correction field and was planning to do a project in the Santa Fe County Jail. She then asked, much to my surprise, if I might be interested in joining her and suggested we could develop a movement and meditation program for the women in the jail. I thought, “Why not!” And so we began working together.
We did the training program to become volunteers in the jail and developed a curriculum for guiding the women in an hour-and-a-half session once a week. Working in a jail is very different than the previous work I had done in a prison. First of all there is a much greater level of anxiety, as the women don’t know how long they will be there. Maybe they will soon be out on bail. When will they get a court date? What kind of sentence will they get? They may also be dealing with coming down from drugs or regular alcohol use. So the tension and stress level is very high.
We designed sessions integrating movement, meditation and writing. Soon we were leading sessions and each one was totally different and unique. Sometimes we just had 2 people and other times a crowded room of 7 or 8. Our space was small and so we began by moving the tables to the side and started with movement activities. Worksheets with quotes related to the session’s themes were shared and a writing or discussion prompt followed. Each session ended with the women meditating and then tracing by pencil a paper labyrinth. Here’s a link to where you can download and print out several to trace with a pencil. https://www.relax4life.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/papersimplechartres-.pdf [3]
The Santa Fe County Detention Center has a yard where the women can spend some time outside each day. Aine and I thought it would be quite wonderful if we could paint a labyrinth on the floor so the women might have an actual experience of walking it. Again there were lots of hoops to jump through but finally we were able to do that. Several women who had been regular participants were able to join us and it was an excellent event with Aine guiding us inmeasuring and then painting the lines.
When Aine and I began working with women in a domestic violence center we again used ideas from the curriculum we had developed for the jail program. And then when I made a film called Through the Door: Movement, Meditation and Healing, [4] we filmed a session of the women from the Esperanza Shelter walking the labyrinth at Upaya Zen Center. Aine had spearheaded the project to get that labyrinth built.
In the next blog I’ll share what I found out when I Googled “labyrinth in Costa Rica.”