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Lauren Artress: Worldwide Leader for the Labyrinth Movement

The Reverend Dr. Lauren Artess’ courageous act led to the international rediscovery of the labyrinth. In 1991 she experienced the labyrinth for the first time as she walked an informal tapped labyrinth as a part of her work with Jean Houston. After a few months the idea of the labyrinth had gestated a bit, and Dr. Artress was compelled to visit one of the few remaining and most famous of labyrinths in Chartres, France, at the Chartres Cathedral. Once there, she moved the chairs that covered the ancient sacred labyrinth, essentially rendering it useless, and walked that ancient labyrinth. From this act began her long and sacred life effort to bring the profound path of the labyrinth to the world. By December of that same year, she had replicated on canvas the Medieval Eleven Circuit Labyrinth found at Chartres, and her canvas was placed in her home church, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. Walking the labyrinth became so in demand, Lauren commissioned a wool carpet named the Tapestry Labyrinth in 1994. This labyrinth was recently replaced with a limestone and marble labyrinth indoors at Grace Cathedral. It is open during cathedral hours (7 AM to 5:30 PM weekdays). In 1995 the outdoor terrazzo stone labyrinth was placed in the Melvin E. Swig Meditation Garden and is open 24 hours a day.

Artress served as Canon Pastor of the Episcopal Church, Grace Cathedral, from 1986 to 1992, then as Canon for Special Ministries until August of 2004, and has now received the lifetime title of Honorary Canon due to her worldwide service. In 1995, she founded the non-profit organization Veriditas with the original intent of “peppering the planet with labyrinths.” As Creative Director of Veriditas, her commitment to the mission means that she travels worldwide launching
labyrinths, and offering workshops and lecturing on the labyrinth and the mystical life. She leads a large group experience called Walking a Sacred Path, held twice a year at Chartres Cathedral.

Dr. Artress has become the single, most visible leader in the international labyrinth movement. She is the author of Walking a Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Tool, The Sand Labyrinth Kit, and The Sacred Path Companion: A Guide to Walking the Labyrinth to Heal and Transform. Both Walking the Sacred Path and The Sacred Path Companion are used in the Exploring the Labyrinth course at AIHT.

Dr. Artess allowed Vibrations to interview her, and here is what she had to say:

Vibrations: I’ve been so impressed with the amazing worldwide impact you’ve had in such a short time, since the early nineties when you first walked a labyrinth.

Artress: Yes, it is amazing isn’t it? Well, that just shows how much hunger there is for it. Certainly everywhere in our country people are needing to quiet the mind. I mean, I’m not even sure that the young people in our country know what a quiet mind is. Hopefully they do.

Vibrations: How did you get interested in the labyrinth in the first place?

Artress: Well, I worked with Jean Houston in ‘85 and she wasn’t working with the labyrinth at that time. But I had one month off in ‘91, and I went back to Jean Houston’s Mystery School, and that’s when they just taped an Eleven-Circuit labyrinth on the floor. Nothing fancy, no lunations no special things. But it was enough, walking it that evening, for me to say to myself, “Well, I need to go over to Chartres and see what the real thing is like.” Although now I know that any labyrinth made by sacred geometry is the real thing. But it was through Jean Houston that I was initially introduced, and that initial experience was enough to send me over to Chartres. I knew that there were chairs on the labyrinth there, and we had written for permission to move them, but that didn’t happen. So, it was like, well, they just had to be moved.

Vibrations: And that energy just carried you there then.

Artress: That was an interesting feeling, because it was really birthing something and the wind was at my back and the next steps were just right there. After I walked the labyrinth with Jean Houston and her network, I knew I had a significant experience, but I didn’t know what it was. And I had a dream that signaled a great deal of change and then finally, literally I’m walking around in my living room and thinking and then finally saying out loud, “What is it?” And then in came the idea, “Put the labyrinth in the Cathedral.” And then after that, there was a kind of organizing principle that gave me all kinds of energy, and now I must admit, courage to follow it, you know, follow what presents itself. You know you are just trying to meet the needs of the community and in the process you uncover many more benefits as well.

Vibrations: And one of the benefits is its metaphorical component. Can you explain what that means?

Artress: It’s a metaphor because the path is the path. This is why we think it was originally in Chartres, to serve as a metaphor for the journey to God. And back then that would have been in very specific Christian terms. But in the human mind, the path becomes the metaphor for the way, the journey we are all on—the journey from birth to death. So the labyrinth, when you walk it, helps you to frame that. And then you could ask, what season of your life are you in? Are you in the beginning of the journey, or the middle or near the end?

…I knew I had a significant experience, but I didn’t know what it was. And I had a dream that signaled a great deal of change…

Vibrations: In the book, Walking the Sacred Path, you mention the three-fold mystical path. Can you explain that?

Artress: The three-fold mystical path actually comes from Teresa of Ávila. In her writings (I think it was in her Interior Castle) she names the phases of the journey to God. There were three: purgation, illumination and union. And purgation, you know, everybody thinks, “Oh my gosh, purgatory,” and all that. But it is based on the word to purge, or to cleanse, to release, to let go, and then in our modern day thinking, to open, to quiet, to empty. And we are wanting to do that, we are wanting to let go of everyday things, and cares and things that bother us, and what time to pick the cat up and that kind of stuff.

AIHT President Michael Parker and Senior Admissions Advisor Beverly Love had the pleasure to walk the labyrinths at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco while attending the New Living Expo in April.

Vibrations: So, it’s a bit like a clearing.

Artress: Yeah, clearing. I like to use the word shedding. Just shedding all that we’re burdened with. For that phase I also use the word releasing. I use the Three R’s in talking about these three phases, if I’m in a secular setting—releasing, receiving, returning. So purgation would be the releasing stage. But when you reach the center, hopefully your mind is quiet and you are open to guidance, or illumination, or a sense of peace, or whatever happens. It’s always unique to each person. And people can sit or stand and stay in the labyrinth as long as they want in the center or wherever. And then they follow the same path out. And you see that would be the union, communion, reunion. There’s this kind of strange sense of, well, coming together, being empowered, being stronger. It’s also a reflection period, so that which you receive you take back out into the world. There’s just a deeper sense of integration between mind, body and spirit. Think of it from a holistic point of view.

Vibrations: Can you describe the “walking meditation” aspect of the labyrinth as compared to “sitting meditation.”

Artress: I think it’s important to know that there’s no polarization between walking meditation and sitting meditation. I really think it’s wonderful that people can sit and meditate deeply and that it’s deeply refreshing to them. For me, over a sustained period of years, I’ve never been able to do that. So I needed to find another way for myself, not realizing that most people have the same problem. But the process of the walk itself is the meditation. Let me ask you, is your group of holistic theologians, are you in a metaphysical model, are you in a Christian theology model, what model are you using?

Vibrations: We call it holistic theology because it is a picture of the whole God, which doesn’t mean any one particular religion or one way of looking at the Divine, it sort of encompasses the whole picture.

Artress: Are you able to talk about God changing or is God frozen in your view?

Vibrations: That’s completely open. That would be about how we view God, and how God views us, and as you’ve said, there is no dogma to it. That vision would be different for different people.

Artress: Okay, so you know, with walking meditation, there’s that whole tension between the idea that the path is a prayer and the idea that the path is a walking meditation. Sometimes I think that prayer is you talking to God, and meditation is you listening. So, in light of listening, as you begin, the real physical key is to find your natural pace. And it will change throughout those phases, however you understand that, whether its purgation, illumination and union or releasing, receiving and returning, probably your pace will change. I don’t know how it will change—whether it will speed up or slow down, I have no idea. But the issue is listening to your body. So, it’s an embodied meditation. This brings us to a big discussion in the labyrinth world: What makes the labyrinth work? There are some labyrinths that are going in that are high-end and contemporary, and they don’t do anything for anybody. So what’s the “anything?” The anything is the fact that your mind quiets very peacefully in a labyrinth that works. And often your intuitive level opens, so that you can be associative. For example, you can reflect on a dream, and you can follow it down corridors with your intuition. The world of metaphor and symbol opens to you, so that the world is not one dimension, it’s three or four dimensions. Aristotle said that metaphoric thinking is the highest functioning of the human brain and I think that’s very true. And so I think my job has become helping people learn how to swim in that deep, wonderful, metaphorical world. A lot of people are afraid of it. And a lot of people don’t know what to do with it. You know, they have a dream, or an image or a symbol or an experience and it is important to help people move to a place where they are able to reflect on these things.

…we the people who are walking the labyrinth are the frozen music and then we find our notes, we thaw out and become alive…

Vibrations: And that would be how it works to help people to transform the human shadow?

Artress: That’s right. Shadow work can be a big part of labyrinth walking. If you are stuck in your life, you are probably up against shadow. If something is not working and you are totally confused and you don’t understand why, you know, you are probably up against shadow. And, of course, by definition shadow is all of the unknown parts of ourselves, the unconscious parts of ourselves that we all have.

Vibrations: I want to go back a minute to the sacred geometry you mentioned earlier.

Artress: You know the Chartres labyrinth is made from sacred geometry and it is truly my heart’s song. The classical Seven-Circuit labyrinth is not. The one in Chartres is made by an invisible pattern that has to do with proportion. Everything in it is in proportion to everything else. It’s not symmetrical, but it is in proportion. It came from many different traditions, but the Islamic tradition is the only one that has really kept sacred geometry as a living language. And the people who created it were really masters of spirit. They knew something we don’t know, even to this day. I’m not someone who teaches sacred geometry. But I describe sacred geometry metaphorically as “an envelope of pulsation.” I think that’s Richard Lawlor’s term. Sacred geometry creates a vortex. I like the word temenos, a Greek word, which means a vibratory sacred space, or an alive sacred space. The poet Goethe refers to sacred geometry as frozen music. And I like that because in a way it’s like, we the people who are walking the labyrinth are the frozen music and then we find our notes, we thaw out and become alive. We become conscious to ourselves.

Dr. Artress works with those who feel spiritually lost, are in the dark night of the soul, are searching for what beliefs and practices make sense, or with those who have been, what she refers to as, “church-hurt.” You can set up an individual session with Dr. Artress or arrange to visit Chartres Cathedral with her at Lauren@laurenartress.com. If you would like to find a labyrinth to walk you can find a Worldwide Labyrinth Locator on the Veriditas website at wwll.veriditas.labyrinthsociety.org/ .