Slowing Down

TLS 365 Experience #118
June 26, 2017

The labyrinth is where I learn all about how to slow down and appreciate. I keep finding myself hurried and busy and it seems to really be increasing as there is so much busy and hurry in the activity around me.  It often feels like a feeding frenzy of unnecessary activity.

I am happy to have a place to go that lets me take the slow meander and relax as I move. On the labyrinth I walk intentionally slower, though am seeming to move so fast; until my mind catches up with the pace my body is moving. Instead of my mind telling my body how to react, I reverse the process and now just taking a walk has a whole new meaning.

Today’s Experience submitted by:
G. Andrew, Labyrinth Enthusiast
Colorado

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Day in the Life of a Labyrinth

In the art of walking differently, how many trace their daily steps?

A Day in the Life Labyrinthically

On this day of curiosity, I did. I found I did a tremendous amount of walking and while you can count your steps with a pedometer, it is not often that you track where you go and how you get there.

Without tracing the little necessities in my steps, I kept a noted tab on the directions I found myself walking today and soon I was tracking as I found myself in a labyrinthic journey.

 

I noted when I walked down the hall to grab something from another room, which direction I headed when organizing, going to work, going back and forth with clients, heading out to share a program, lunch, running errands, meeting a friend for coffee, stopping to make phone calls, and a general track of my day.

It is interesting to note the larger patterns and when we are wearing the tread of a particular problem or the groove of routine too thin. I do recall one day I would have liked to have tracked my day as I bet it would have ended up in a big question mark.

Go where there is no path and pave one… discover a different way to walk and a way you walk that isn’t so different and mesh the two for a wonderful new awareness of you on your daily life path.

It only looks like I have all the fun… stay curious my friends,

Lynda

 

The Meandering Heart of Snake and the Chinese New Year

Today is the beginning of the Chinese New Year begun on the 41st day of our Gregorian calendar. The Chinese New Year divides itself into 12 segments honoring 12 animals to symbolize the characteristics relative to the year’s cycle.

The Meandering Heart

This is the year of the Snake.
The physical characteristics of the snake lend itself to the labyrinth in the very nature of its meandering style of movement.

While I am not particularly crazy about snakes, they are a natural part of this world and the study of animals in habit, characteristic and pattern can teach us many things.

I had opportunity to draw this as a totem animal on retreat and it brought back the memory of my maternal lineage and a heartfelt message. It changed my mind from recoiling to meandering in the message. Along the way I began to look at it more significantly and found the snake a symbol of transformation, indeed it was the work I have chosen in this world.

The snake symbol is powerful medicine in many aboriginal and native tribes and we have to look no further than the rod of Asclepius that represents the heart of our medical community or the well known caduceus that also symbolizes our own seat of commerce.

Consider as well the traits of the snake:
It moves quiet and unassumingly in the world and shows up when it chooses.
When it is in search of a target it remains patient and clear focused to obtain it. It uses its natural abilities to outmaneuver prey.
It can fit in anywhere with its ability to camouflage.
It sheds, releases or purges with regularity.
It surely doesn’t get tied up in knots
and… it may meander through its life, though it does it with style and purpose

Snaking a path to the labyrinth

Today as I have meandered on the labyrinth, it was good to note the aspects of the natural world and celebrate the snake as a part of it.

I may have seemed aimless, though my direction was a simple path to the heart. In appreciation of our natural world there is heart.

 

May we all move with the ease and ability of the snake and take in a few of those serpentine characteristics that might benefit us while on a path to our hearts desire.

In ease and movement,

Lynda