Cover More Ground
The journey is often tedious or difficult, but learning to inhabit it more fully makes us feel more alive.
I’ve been meditating daily for over twenty-two years, but I’m not Buddhist. I’m a freelance contemplative. I explore various exercises and strategies for relating to subjective experience more objectively, without turning the sources of the tools into an identity.
Some people who practice meditation identify as Buddhists because they focus solely on the contemplative side and believe Buddhism is more scientific than other religions or not a religion at all. This stems from ignoring its literal, superstitious, and ethical elements.
I intentionally avoid many of the overt spiritual practices that seem to attract many meditators. This tendency likely comes from my upbringing in a fundamentalist church, which I eventually outgrew.
However, just as taking a French class improved my understanding of English grammar, exploring different belief systems than the one I was raised with has revealed universal truths I overlooked back when I took the stories literally.1
I’m not interested in talismans, empty rituals, or magical solutions to life's complexities, but I am drawn to paradoxical truths, poetic wisdom, and practical insights.2 However, I often grow weary of attempts to prove their validity through scientific means.
Even though I don’t think labyrinths have innate intrinsic magical properties or that “walking the labyrinth [stimulates] the inner ear that can temporarily improve balance between the logical and artistic activities of the brain,” I have led a few mindful labyrinth walks over the years in a lovely urban green space hidden on the Ohio State University campus.3
A labyrinth isn’t a puzzle to solve or a maze to escape. It’s an appealing, contemplative design with a single winding path that begins at an opening along its circumference and ends at its center.
A labyrinth dares you to cover its entirety.
What could be easier, right?
We like to say the journey is more important than the destination, but this isn’t necessarily easy to put into practice. The journey is often tedious or difficult.
We yearn to be done.
We hunt for shortcuts.
We long to be doing anything other than what we’re doing.
Even with activities that are important to us, we distract ourselves in countless, habitual ways.
Walking a labyrinth can bring such habits to the surface, where we can observe them and learn to weaken their invisible power over our lives.
As you walk a labyrinth, even though the stakes couldn’t be lower, you might catch yourself:
Being afraid of making a mistake or straying off the path
Worrying that you might be moving too quickly or too slowly
Noticing the urge to help others or comparing yourself to them
Feeling self-conscious about leading or sheepish about following
Asking yourself why you decided to do this in the first place
It’s challenging to identify the subtle patterns that shape our thoughts and behaviors in daily life. We tend to be more aware of the external factors that make our lives difficult and less aware of the internal obstructions we unintentionally cultivate.
When we engage in contemplative exercises, we become better at recognizing when we’re overly focused on outcomes and pushing too hard to reach them.
When we notice that we’re rushing, evaluating ourselves, or desperate to escape, we can:
Pause
Take a deep breath
Feel what’s there to be felt in the body
Acknowledge what is pulling us away
Redirect our attention to taking the next step
I don’t walk a labyrinth regularly, but I’m very interested in sneaking mindful awareness into the variety of labyrinths I walk daily—anything that has an endpoint and a process for reaching it.
Making a bed, deciding what to wear, brewing coffee
Driving a car, participating in a meeting, writing an email
Having lunch with a friend, walking a dog, unloading a dishwasher
Working out, taking the stairs, reading a book
Watching the news, checking social media, getting ready for bed
Contemplative tools will reveal subtle yet significant insights about our shared humanity if we let them. They invite us to get curious about what makes us miserable and what brings relief. They can encourage us to face what we are reluctant to face and feel what we’d prefer not to feel.4
The nudges are difficult to notice, but when we learn to spot and accept some of them, we become more aware of the pull of distraction and feel a little less at its mercy.
In this way, we gradually work through our internal obstructions and feel we’re covering more of the ground we’ve been avoiding.
We start to replace rushing to reach the end with feeling more alive along the way.
“Perennial philosophy is a school of thought in philosophy and spirituality that posits that the recurrence of common themes across world religions illuminates universal truths about the nature of reality, humanity, ethics, and consciousness.”
Many more people agree they hate mindfulness than can agree what mindfulness is. I, too, dislike it, and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because mindfulness and the hatred of mindfulness are for me inextricable.
Attention Exercise: Emotional Meteorology You can learn to distinguish between physical and emotional body sensations and escalate the unpleasant ones less.