Labyrinths are complex curving patterns with one route that eventually–after much twisting and turning–takes us into a center and then back out again. (In this way, labyrinths are unlike mazes, where you have many path choices and in which you can get very lost.)

People have walked or drawn labyrinths in nearly every culture throughout every era of history. Now they are being rediscovered as a potent tool for self-transformation.

Find out more about what labyrinths offer, and why they are so important for us today:

One thing the labyrinth gives us that other symbols may not is a physical presence with which we can engage. We can walk it, thus involving our whole bodies; we can trace it on a finger labyrinth; we can create ritual in it; and we can be alone or in community as we connect with it. All of these deepen its meaning for us.

The twists and turns constituting its body are the pathways of the Soul, of the Feminine. They mirror for us the flow of psychic energy as Jung described it. There is a continuous movement forward (progression), which is always followed by a movement backward (regression), which is always followed by a movement forward, and so on. This is the movement of life. It is the flow between any two opposites, whether between darkness and light, introversion and extroversion, or joy and sorrow.

This message is important to explore in our world of today where we have lost touch with what it means to live in the mystery of existence. Most of us get caught up in the ebb and flow of daily life, following paths laid out for us by social structures we have come to accept as the norm. We forget that life is not lived in a straight line. We forget that death is always sitting on our left shoulder. We forget that disintegration and decay are the truth for all life forms on this planet.

How often do we rail at God because of the losses we have had to experience, the illnesses that have plagued us, the pain we have suffered? If we do not blame God or some mysterious unknown universal force, we blame ourselves. It is my fault, I am a terrible human being. I am guilty of so much, this must be my punishment or my karma. Maybe. Maybe some of those things are true to some degree. But, the more universal truth is that life is like that. That is the way of the Feminine. Life follows the rhythm of progression and regression, forward and backward movement, birth and death, creation and destruction. That is one of the profound messages being communicated to us by the labyrinth. Our ancestors knew this truth and we are being given the opportunity to learn it too.

To walk the labyrinth with our physical bodies allows us to learn this message in a way that bypasses the mind and penetrates the nervous system. Our bodies begin to learn this forward and backward rhythm and we begin to accept it on a level of body and nervous system–a level of knowing that gets imbued in our cells and not just our intellect.