Heather Conn Blogs

                                                                                       — photos by Lois Brassart

How does spiritual travel differ from regular travel? It can involve a pilgrimage or group meditation, a quest to find one’s inner self in a new environment, or a shared encounter of nature or beauty in a foreign country that opens a deeper gateway to your Soul.

 

Sometimes, a regular trip can open into a spiritual one through a simple question or casual discussion. A retiree friend of mine, Lois Brassart, was amazed at how one question inspired a whole new connection and relationship with a fellow traveller. Lois was recently in Turkey for “a few weeks of adventure” with a group of strangers as part of an amateur photography trip. On the last day, she was chatting with one of the other trip participants, Cheryl from Australia. Here’s how Lois explains what happened:

 

“My story starts with Cheryl’s prompt, ‘Talk to me about your spiritual life’ and ends 12 hours later with ‘Do you and Bruce have rituals?’ We [Cheryl and I] learnt more about each other in that one day than we did in the whole two weeks together. Cheryl has lived an amazing life. She has met Mother Teresa. She intentionally built a home with a labyrinth in her backyard and she meditates. She really knows how to connect with people. She walks the talk and believes that we are all amazing people.”

Cheryl’s one comment created a deep, new link to Lois, who shared her own spiritual yearnings and beliefs with her new friend. Without that mutual enquiry, they might never have discovered each other’s inner essence. In Lois’ words: “Cheryl is a woman of rituals, a woman with deep understanding of us humans. I’m a human learning my way, a human who recently joined the ritual, spiritual world after a long stint in corporate life. Meeting Cheryl has made me braver and more willing to take baby steps toward risk.”

 

After meeting this kindred spirit, Lois says that she and Cheryl opened their hearts to themselves and others, which broke through any language barrier with locals. Previously, their group had emphasized snapping the perfect photo, rather than getting to know each other or the Turkish people.

 

Cheryl acknowledges the openness that Lois shared in off-the-beaten-track Turkish villages, where their group was invited to share many cups of chai with the locals. She says: “Lois is REAL – what a gift to the world.  Turkish people recognized this fact and so did I.  We  learnt so much about these people with such generous hearts.  Lois would, without exception, touch them with her interest in their garden or their family and of course, she would make them laugh.

 

“One day, we sat in a bakery, a little cave where women made the most wonderful bread for the community. We simply hung out with three generations of women and girls, used sign language, and laughed.”

Lois says of her new friendship with Cheryl: “I wondered if this was a fleeting connection. No! We are on email at least three times a week. We share photos, including hers of bees sitting on lavender and of oh-so-cute baby ducks. We share her stories of summer at Christmas and battling 43-degree [Celsius] temperatures and me explaining that I don’t want to go out in the cold and take photos. But I do go out and send along photos of raindrops and reflections in puddles.”

 

Cheryl, in turn, says that Lois’s love of learning enables their conversations to go in many different directions. Like Lois, she wondered if their new friendship would survive the distance and demands of life, yet has discovered that their conversation has grown even richer.

 

Lois has shared many  resources with Cheryl, from the values and approach taken by local farmers’ markets, and a meditation for Thanksgiving, to  stories about group preparations prior to travel to South Africa, and, of course, photographs.

 

Cheryl says: “I get so excited when I see a message from Lois because I know I will be nurtured, stimulated, and learn something new.  I feel blessed to have found a kindred spirit and know that our connection will continue and our paths will cross again.”

 

The Internet allows Lois and Cheryl to deepen their connection despite the distance that separates them on different continents. Lois says: “We continue our relationship by keeping our hearts open to each other and sharing the beauty of our lives through photos taken miles and miles away, and through words of wonder.”

 

I experienced a similar connection with a New Delhi man, initially a stranger, while travelling in India for seven months. His one comment to me (an explanation about a photographic exhibition I was viewing) resulted in three hours of non-stop dialogue on a myriad of heartfelt topics. He was the first man, other than my spiritual mentor, with whom I shared my spiritual self.

 

We vowed that we would always remain in each other’s lives, and have maintained contact for 23 years between India and Canada. I’m writing about this relationship, and my path of personal discovery while travelling in India in my memoir No Letter in Your Pocket – Twenty Years Healing a Family Secret.

If you have a similar travel tale, please share it.

 Click here to see Lois’ photo gallery of her Turkey trip.

 

– iPhone photos by Heather Conn

The candle glow in circles fell, arcing row upon row, in lines of light, stillness in the dark.

This week,  I walked the indoor labyrinth, created temporarily to mark the winter solstice, at the Creekside Community Centre in Vancouver, BC. It was one of five such labyrinths installed at community centres across the city by the Secret Lantern Society.

I was the first one to walk the labyrinth, after sitting in the dark room for a half-hour, listening to a recorded chant of Om that filled the room. (I had sneaked in early, watching a photography class set up their tripod shots.) I walked in my stocking feet to gain a greater sense of connectedness to the floor and earth. Several young children behind me, clutching handmade paper lanterns with candles inside, whispered in the darkness. I beckoned them to pass me along the circular route.

A man in a wheelchair moved parallel to me in a different row. Some people walked slowly, as if contemplating every step.

A woman sat on the floor, eliciting melodic tones from large white crystal bowls by running her hand repeatedly around their top surface. These higher sounds joined the low drones of the recorded Om, which continued to waft throughout the room.

It was wonderful to join in such a meditative flow within an urban place, surrounded by dozens of others. We all respected each other’s space and distance, each managing to find solo walking time within a group event. One of the organizers ensured that only a small number of people entered the labyrinth at a time, to prevent crowding.

As I walked, I focused on what I wanted to draw to me within the coming year, feeling open and centred, ready to let go of the darkness of the year and make way for light. What a great way to celebrate the shortest day of the year, the ebb and flow of light and life.

Drawn to mandalas and spirals as ancient symbols, I seek out labyrinths wherever I go and walk them in gratitude. I was married in an outdoor labyrinth and have co-facilitated workshops on labyrinths and SoulCollage. For more information, see my website Sunshine Coast SoulCollage.

 

When many people think of the word “spirituality,” they assume that it must be something related to God or religion, perhaps a force that produced tension or disbelief for them as kids. Maybe that view persists even now as adults.

 

Today, people use that term in a myriad of ways that move far beyond a deist interpretation. I like the definition I heard this week while attending a monthly luncheon in downtown Vancouver at the Adler School of Professional Psychology.

 

“Spirituality is a state or experience that can provide individuals with direction or meaning, or provide feelings of understanding, support, inner wholeness, or connectedness,” said Andrew Mackey and Shae Hadden, during their presentation Aging, Retirement, and Spirituality at Work, offered by the Workplace Centre for Spiritual and Ethical Development. (Full disclosure: I’m on the board of the Workplace Centre.) Both are founders of the organization O2E Older to Elder.

 

They were citing the definition created by the International Faith and Spirit at Work Awards. This one identifies two components of spirituality: vertical and horizontal. The vertical represents a desire to transcend the individual ego or self while the horizontal is a desire to be of service to other humans and the planet.

 

How many of us truly embody both aspects in a balanced way? How does one influence the other? Our capitalist society encourages success within a competitive framework; we’re supposed to strive, as individuals or organizations, to outdo our self-defined opponents and carve our own way ahead, even if it’s at the expense of others. Sharing, cooperation, and honouring all of ourselves and others, or sacrificing for the sake of another, are not something most of us have traditionally learned or experienced on the job.

 

Thankfully, things are changing. More employers are adopting values-based thinking, identifying their core values and objectives and seeing their employees as more than just cogs in the productivity machine. Mackey said that we need to connect our own horizontal aspect of spirituality with the primary values and goals of the organization(s) we’re working for. Hadden pointed out that life calls us to ponder these key questions:

 

• Who am I?
• What am I meant to do?
• What am I trying to do with my life?

 

These are no small issues. Many of us spend decades, if not a lifetime, trying to identify and live our own answers to one or all of these questions. Look at how many life and job coaches, counselors, and facilitators in the developed world offer sessions on how to deal with such topics. People are hungry to bring meaning and satisfaction to their lives, far beyond the money-equals-success equation.  

 

When many people retire, they discover that they can no longer identify themselves through their job, so what’s left? The two speakers suggested these inspirational prompts to our group of roughly 25:

 

• Who do I want to be, now that I’m grown up?
• What’s my purpose?
• What am I living for?

 

They defined purpose as what guides our choices and actions, and meaning as what we care about most. Overall, we had a lively group discussion regarding how employers can honour people’s spirituality on the job, and how people can continue to feel spiritually nurtured during and after retirement. The overall sentiment was that one’s spirituality operates on a continuum; it doesn’t disappear whether we are employed or retired. It simply shifts into a new form of expression.

 

What has been your experience? How has your spirituality shifted? I’d like to hear your answers.

 

“First they ignore you

Then they laugh at you

Then they fight you

Then you win” – Gandhi

(on a sign at Occupy Vancouver)

 

“In times of universal deceit,

Telling the truth is a revolutionary act”

– George Orwell

(on a sign at Occupy Vancouver)

 

Under the menacing glare of gargoyles perched high on the corners of Hotel Vancouver, across from looming RBC and HSBC buildings, we gathered downtown, 3,000+ strong on Oct. 15. This Occupy Vancouver movement, spawned by weeks of Occupy Wall Street activism in New York City, had set up a sprawling camp of tents, plus tents for food, first aid, public education, and a children’s area, in front of the art gallery.

 

                                                                                                               — photos by Heather Conn

A handful of friends and I from British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast sat on the edge of the mosaic fountain in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery, surrounded by people of every age, ethnicity, and background: infants, white-haired grandmothers, laid-off workers, disgruntled professionals, business people in suits, women in high heels and fashionable dress, bohemians in masks and costumes . . .They were all a highly visible part of the 99 per cent of western society seeking to be heard and counted as banks, corporations, and governments have gained hugely skewed levels of power, making decisions with little accountability over issues that affect the earth, the public good, and livelihoods. As activist Naomi Klein said a week earlier as part of Occupy Wall Street: “Our system is crashing economically and ecologically.” As one of the dozens and dozens of homemade signs in Vancouver, held high among the throng, said on this day: “Another world is possible.”

 

I was heartened to see more than a thousand people gathered by 10 a.m., after premier Christy Clark and others had dismissively predicted that few would appear at the event. More and more people kept arriving, until at least 3,000 (some reports claimed 5,000) marched peacefully in a square along four downtown blocks, starting northward at Georgia and Howe. No one smashed windows, threw food at cops, or yelled verbal abuse at passersby. Cars honked in support of the moving crowd. A police officer wore an orange flower in his lapel. The sea of signs gave heart and meaning to what was a living, growing statement (not “a protest”) shared with others who were organizing publicly on the same day in 1,000 cities across the globe:

 

“One World, One Humanity, Share the World’s Resources”

“Serve the people”

“Close the gap”

“Vancouver wakes up”

“A fair taxation system is overdue”

“We’re the #1 Highest Child Poverty Rate in Canada – Way to go B.C.”

In the first general assembly that morning, various speakers, as part of a moderating team, stood on the art gallery steps and explained the proposed working model for consensus. As defined in the handout provided to the crowd: “A consensus is a decision-making process that attempts to be inclusive and accommodating of the desires and needs of an entire group.” Workers in Venezuela and other Latin American countries have used such models for decision-making in factories and collectives. As one of the moderators pointed out: “It’s not pretty.” It was slow, tedious, and the process bumbling. We were all new at this; our capitalist system had not created models for such forms of decision-making. People would holler out occasionally: “This is what democracy looks like.”

 

Eager for action and group-based agreements, I grew impatient as different speakers read through the consensus document, word for word, using the mike and then having people within the crowd repeat each phrase in a “human mike” format. Requests went out for translators in a host of languages, from Farsi to Spanish. Hand gestures were given as symbols for how each participant could indicate whether he or she agreed with a proposal, had reservations, would stand aside (“I cannot support this proposal and will not help implement it but do not want to stop the group or block the proposal”) or would block it (“I have a fundamental disagreement with the proposal that must be addressed and has not been resolved”). This repetitive process took an hour and a half.

 

I was soon growing bored and frustrated. I had to examine my own impatience and desire for a quick outcome, over the inclusion of all questions and requests for something to be repeated. Rather than feeling energized, hopeful, and excited, this process left me feeling deflated and in limbo. But the non-stop stream of informal speakers from the crowd, who took turns at the microphone, helped to draw me back to the power of a group assembly. (The maximum time allotment for each speaker, decided by the group as a whole, was five minutes.) A speaker asked: “Do you trust the system?”

“No,” the crowd roared back. If the group thought that someone was going on too long or the remarks were too self-serving, they hooted or called “Wrap it up” or made the accompanying hand signal. Here is a selection of those who spoke, besides David Eby of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association and Seth Klein (Naomi’s brother) of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives:

 

• Bob, a unionized meter reader for BC Hydro, who will be replaced by a smart meter within a year, after receiving only a 1% pay increase in a decade: “Gordo (former premier Gordon Campbell) exempted smart meters from due process”;

 

• an artist from Montreal: “We’re losing our neighbourhoods”;

 

• Paul Grignon, creator of animated films such as Money as Debt;

 

• a representative from Zeitgeist Vancouver, part of the Zeitgeist world movement: “What are the root problems?”

 

• Activist and grandmother Betty Krawczyk: “Our environment is going, our wild salmon are going. We won’t tolerate it. Their (government/corporate) power comes with our permission, from our acquiescence. True power is in our hands. The power belongs to us, always and forever.” That brought on loud cheers.

 

• The Raging Grannies: “Your right is to be heard.”

 

Later that day, after meeting a client and some of his medical colleagues for lunch at upscale Shaughnessy Restaurant, I was heartened (again) to hear that one of them, a successful doctor, had wanted to join the Occupy Vancouver events himself. He said that he had felt like going down there and throwing something. I was surprised to hear such a remark in that context from such a professional; you never know where you’ll find someone of like mind.

The day’s events did not topple any existing structures or result in resounding changes. However, the simple act of people coming together in peace in a public space to voice discontent and seek more compassionate and inclusive alternatives was a powerful reminder that the power of the people lies innately with the people and in democratic process. We are the power of the majority and we control how much of that we choose to keep or give up.

After returning home just before the seven p.m. general assembly, my husband and I stopped to watch an astounding natural sight: thousands upon thousands of crows were flying, seemingly without end, through the sky. They kept coming and coming, a sprawling black flap of wings across blue, heading east above the Commercial Drive SkyTrain station. They appeared to be coming from downtown. I thought to myself: “Maybe they had their own gathering.” I had never seen such a massive group of crows in my life. I took it as a sign.

 

Click here for a Buddhist perspective on Occupy Wall Street, by Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist Michael Stone, author of Awake in the World: Teachings From Yoga and Buddhism for Living an Engaged Life.

 

From reconciliation to quantum physics to suicide, suffering, and death, the topics recently covered by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh always returned to four things: mindfulness, love, understanding, and meditation practice. I was one of the lucky people who attended his sold-out talk “Open Mind Open Heart” on Aug. 14, which the inspirational Buddhist offered at Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre. I’ve long admired this insightful Vietnamese monk for his books of wisdom, his commitment to nonviolence, and his role in urging Martin Luther King Jr. to speak out against the Vietnam war. Hanh is one who truly walks the talk, literally and figuratively, when it comes to bringing full presence and loving speech to life.

He sat onstage, legs folded on a simple cushion, in his floor-length brown gown and characteristic shaved head. About a dozen male monks stood to his left and about 20 Buddhist nuns to his right, all in the same brown gowns, visiting from his Plum Village retreat in France. Hanh spent one-and-a-half hours sharing Buddhism’s “noble truths”, simple stories, and ways to exercise mindful breathing to help handle challenging conflict. He spoke calmly and fluidly, with no notes, and left room for humour despite his serious subject. He laughed after saying: “If you’re suffering when you’re sitting, breathing, and walking, your [meditation] practice is wrong.”

Any summary provided here will barely do justice to the value of his words, which prompted me to begin reading his book on anger, and wanting to meditate more regularly. One reason why I like Hanh’s approach is that he practices “engaged Buddhism,” which  transforms meditation practice into activism.

Manifesto 2000: Six steps to peace

As Hanh pointed out, it’s a lot easier to talk about deep listening, loving speech, and compassionate behavior than to live it. He mentioned Buddha’s Five Precepts embedded in the Manifesto 2000, written by Nobel Peace Prize laureates, which UNESCO circulated and the United Nations accepted. The pledge, aimed to make individuals feel responsible for creating peace at the personal level, includes these responsibilities, in brief:

1.  Respect all life.

2.  Reject violence.

3.  Share with others.

4.  Listen to understand.

5.  Preserve the planet.

6.  Rediscover solidarity.

Sounds simple, right? Obviously, the world at large is not reflecting that. Yet each of us can begin with making our own behaviour, every day, more peaceful and mindful. Hanh outlined regular exercises in mindful breathing, such as recognizing a painful emotion, scanning one’s body for tension, then smiling and releasing the tension. He said that within three months, this practice would generate a feeling of happiness and joy.

“A cloud can never die”

He spoke of suicide, chosen by so many young people who cannot bear painful feelings. Yet, an emotion can last for only a half-hour if we bring our attention down to the level of the abdomen, feel it in our bodies, and release it. This takes ongoing practice. Hanh spoke of common dilemmas in life: “Many of us sacrifice the present for the future” and “Many Buddhists think they will only be happy when they are reborn.” Yet, he reinforced that joy and happiness are available right here, right now by being in deep contact with others and all around us. To love someone, he said, you have to understand your own suffering and theirs, which gives rise to compassion. This requires deep listening and loving speech, and can lead to reconciliation, even between parents and children who have had no contact in many years. He gave several examples of this from people who have attended his retreats.

Hanh reinforced that the concept of something moving into nothing, such as the common societal view of death, is not true. “A cloud can never die,” he said; it simply becomes rain or hail.

The event began with music, song, and interactive exercises, performed by the monk “choir”. It ended with a beautiful, plaintive song, performed in French and English by an elderly nun with a gentle, lined face, which invited listeners not to fear death. Overall, the afternoon was a wonderful communal experience, one for which I feel tremendous gratitude.

We’re all conditioned to find answers to life’s challenges, but sometimes, we might not be asking questions that are “right” for us. This week, while going through an old file, I came across some provocative questions I’d written down in 1990, taken from the July/August issue of Common Boundary magazine.

The questions spoke to me then, and they still grab me now, even though I haven’t produced answers for any of them. Here are two that I wrote under the magazine’s heading The Psychological Dimensions of Compassionate Living:

• What is appropriate self-love and healthy narcissism? By contrast, what is self-indulgence?
• What is the shadow side of compassion?

Under the heading The Spiritual Dimensions of Compassionate Living, I wrote these questions:

• When does spiritual practice encourage narcissistic preoccupation or striving?
• How do the meditative arts and the expressive therapies foster psychological and spiritual development?

Here’s what I wrote from Common Boundary under their heading Models of Compassion in Action:

• Much social action seems to be driven by moral obligation and/or guilt. How would social action based on a contemplative ethic be different?
• How can we distinguish compassion from guilt-based giving, self-righteousness, “do-goodism”, and codependency?
• How can groups reach consensus when people have differing inner truths?
• Where does meaningfully endured sacrifice end and violence to Self begin?

I think that each of these questions is wonderfully rich. It could take months to answer them, but I would like to address each one in upcoming weeks. For me, the easiest question is the first one. With healthy self-love, a person accepts and honors his or herself — strengths and shortcomings — and extends this love to others. Such “narcissism” means that someone is aware enough to recognize flaws and takes responsibility for them.

Self-indulgence occurs when someone is so focused on “fixing” him or herself, he forgets those around him and does not take time to extend love to others. Too often, cynics in western society dismiss meditation and other contemplative practices as “navel-gazing” yet they are so much more than that.

Looking inward and learning greater self-awareness, which, in turn, can result in more compassion and understanding towards oneself and others, is much different than reinforcing an ego identity and growing pompous and vain. The first deals with a far vaster, inner sense of Self, ultimately beyond self, whereas the latter is limited to the external self and what keeps it propped up (job, money, status, possessions, etc).

Which of these questions would you like to ponder? I’d love to hear your answers.

                                   Louise Mangan

In my view, sacred and spiritual talk relies too often on abstract concepts, which seem far-removed from the daily realities of work and life. That’s why I like the phrase: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” Since few of us retreat from life to live in a cave, we seek and need a practical sense of spirituality that fits modern challenges.

That’s exactly what a group of us got at a recent luncheon talk by Louise Mangan in Vancouver, hosted by the Workplace Centre for Spiritual and Ethical Development. (Mangan is the spiritual director of Pacific Pathways InterSpiritual Care, and chair of the InterSpiritual Centre of Vancouver Society.* ) She gave her talk, Fear in the Workplace: How Do We Cultivate Trust? in a conference room at the downtown Terasen Gas Building at Georgia and Thurlow.

Drawing from Taoist thought, Mangan reinforced that we can use our fears as an invitation to learn and grow. Rather than judging, blaming, and lashing out at ourselves and others when we’re in a situation that evokes fear, we can befriend fear as an ally. This starts with simple steps. When we’re afraid, we can bring awareness to our first response by asking: What am I feeling? (Mangan focuses on five key emotions: mad, sad, glad, afraid, ashamed.) We can each “be” in our body, centred and aware of its sensations, rather than ignore or try to suppress physical reactions. 

In Mangan’s view, fear invites us to examine our responses, and to practice a sense of powerful presence, regardless of what conflict or chaos is swirling around us. Otherwise, fear usually freezes action, disengaging us and launching our egos into battle mode, either on the offensive or defensive. Do you embrace or shrink from fear? What lessons do you think it can offer you, both at work and at home?

Mangan suggested some valuable and simple ways to enrich and heal our relationship with fear, drawing on love in our interactions:

•                Use a sacred word to centre yourself in prayer or meditation. It can be anything from “Patience” to “Forgiveness.” 

•                Each night, think of ways in which love came to you during the day. In the rush of life, it’s easy to overlook or take for granted a gift of love, large or small.  This could range from a child’s smile to a compliment from a colleague.

•                In reviewing your day, identify times when your love was incomplete or fractured. Consider how you might have responded differently.

•                Return to your first experienced fear and replay it, reframing it from a loving, eternal place. This promotes forgiveness and healing.

•               Do a Gestalt-style exercise with three chairs. Sit in one chair and remember a situation in which you feel regret or shame. Breathe deeply. Sit in the second chair, which represents Divine Source, and feel the love and acceptance of the divine connection within you. Then sit in the third chair and think of someone who has hurt you. How was that person trying to take care of him or herself? This process can help to strengthen our sense of compassion.

Lastly, Mangan reminded us to trust life to guide us. We only know the next step and that’s enough.

* Louise is a retired pastoral minister for the United Church of Canada. She received her Master of Divinity degree from Emmanuel College at the University of Toronto. She is a former member of the ethics commitee at B.C. Women’s Hospital and Health Centre, and a former chaplain for the International Congress of Midwives. She was the founding chair of the Interdisciplinary Midwifery Task Force of B.C.

                                                                                                                     — Heather Conn photos

                                Sand mandala creator Les Blydo at Spanish Banks in Vancouver

Walking in someone else’s footsteps, literally, inside a sand labyrinth on a sunny, windy day, is a glorious meditation in nature. I loved it. Recently, I had the opportunity to try this out for the first time at low tide in Spanish Banks in Vancouver, BC.

With each step, my feet touched wavy ridges and ripples of sand, etched by the receding ocean. I walked over open, splayed clam shells, crunchy and purple, and bypassed a discarded crab shell. The footprints of previous walkers had left deep imprints and outlines in the sand and my own feet slid into these shallows. Wind sent my hair into a flurry as I gazed at the gorgeous sea of blue calm, the panoramic stretch of Coast Mountains, freighters, and the city skyline.

Vancouverite Les Blydo, trained in the art of labyrinths by Lauren Artress of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, likes to create 11-circuit sand labyrinths in an expanded version of the same pattern as the indoor one at Grace Cathedral and Chartres in France. He invites the public to walk inside his sand labyrinths for free at two-hour stretches as  an invitation to commune with one’s spirit and senses. Like the outdoor creations of artist Andy Goldworthy, of Rivers and Tides fame, his efforts disappear once the tide comes in.

To draw his circular lines, which form an image roughly 80 feet (24.4 metres) wide, Les uses the end of a hard, wide piece of hollow bamboo; it takes him about an hour and a half to create a sand labyrinth. To keep the width of each circuit fairly uniform (about two feet), he stretches out a piece of pre-measured string. He lines up the opening of the labyrinth with a landmark, such as the tower of the downtown Shangri La Hotel, or a tall buoy at sea.

Les, who works as a psychiatric nurse and maintains the blog Walking a Labyrinth, says he likes to think of a labyrinth as a place to explore ”liminal space: a ‘betwixt and between’ place.” I walked his labyrinth two days after co-hosting an indoor labyrinth and SoulCollage workshop with Diana Ng (“The Labyrinth Lady”) at St. Paul’s Church in Vancouver. (See my website Sunshine Coast SoulCollage for more details.) It was wonderful to combine both forms of labyrinth-walking in one weekend. I’ve been a lover of labyrinths for a long time and even got married in an outdoor, 11-circuit one.

Les will be hosting a sand labyrinth at Spanish Banks on May 7 to celebrate World Wide Labyrinth Day, organized by the Labyrinth Society. For more details, see his blog Walking a Labyrinth.

While missiles flew in Libya, and Japan continues to reel from its natural and man-made disasters, I attended a medicine wheel ceremony last Sunday. The event, held on a part of Musqueam land in Vancouver, BC now known as Van Dusen Gardens, was designed to honor the spring equinox and share healing words in a sacred community space.

This was my first visit to the medicine wheel. I walked past the garden’s white and purple crocuses and mini-daffodils towards the Canadian Heritage Garden, where people sat nearby in folding chairs or on the grass on the outer perimeter of the medicine wheel, a 30-foot circle. At around noon, about 35 people gathered in this open area, which has been in active use for First Nations and other traditions since the late 1990s. The wheel was initiated by a Cree elder,  Amy (we used only first names), who shared drumming and stories with us. Under a blanket and hood and long, padded coat, she readily offered a kind smile and provided a soft-voiced presence of grace and wisdom. 

Our host Phil, a middle-aged Cree with a native drum and long, plaited ponytail, began by honoring the four directions, which correspond to mind, body, emotion, and spirit. He reinforced the need to heal Mother Earth, to ask for more balance, and he said that all faiths are honored within the medicine wheel. While each of us received a smudge (a symbolic cleansing ritual, using the smoke from burning sage or other herbs), Phil drummed and sang, drawing on music from Lakota traditions. (He spends time with Lakota friends at annual Sun Dance events in the U.S.)

Each of us was to have arrived with a stone offering for the wheel. A woman provided some small stones for those of us, like me, who came empty-handed. Phil invited us all, one by one, to address the group, saying in whose honor we were placing the stone in the circle. Clockwise, we began with those seated in the south, like me. I said that I was offering my smooth, rounded, grey stone in memory of my father, who died in October, and in honor of my mother, husband, and anyone who was trying to bring a voice to what lay hidden within them, asking that they be heard, including those in Libya willing to risk their lives for freedom. I placed my stone in the grass at the centre of the circle, putting a pinch of tobacco under it, as Phil directed us to.  

As we went around the circle in a three-hour ritual, each person stood and honored loved ones, dead and alive, or voiced concern and love for those suffering, including the Libyans and Japanese. Several people had close friends in Japan. One woman said that the Japanese men who were risking their lives to try and cool the overheated reactor at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima gave her great hope. She admired their courage and selflessness in an activity that served “the well-being of us all.”

At times, crows circled overhead in the sunny, blue sky and squawked periodically. A hawk perched in a nearby tree. Phil encouraged those who wanted to cry to invite such a cleansing. Several native elders spoke, drummed and sang. When the sun went in and it grew colder, Phil led us in an Algonquin stomp song; we moved clockwise around the circle and pounded the ground with our feet. He teased us for our lack of spirited stomping; it was more like timid tapping.

As a closing, Phil lit a ceremonial pipe and we passed it around the circle. Some wanted to draw smoke from it, others just tapped their right, then left shoulder with it. Overall, it was heartening to join with strangers in such a public ritual of combined vulnerability and strength. I liked that we moved beyond our individual pain or concerns to encompass the suffering of others around the planet. To me, this reinforced the view that we are all One.

In the spirit of this gathering, I share this poem by Judith Hill:

Wage Peace

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings
and flocks of redwing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children
and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen
and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening:
hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools:
flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.
Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.
learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing rasberries,
Imagine grief as the out breath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Don’t wait another minute.

Several writers around me recently complained of writer’s block. This frustrating state of non-word flow usually occurs when someone is determined to write specific content in a certain way, but his or her deeper self is saying: “No, let’s go this different way, because that’s what you truly want to say.” If the writer ignores this inner prompt, writer’s block will set in.

The solution? Let go and surrender to what wants to come out. This can be a scary about-face for those who never start writing without an outline first. It might even require switching genres. Whatever the change, the words that flow will ring rawer and truer than those you tried to constrain with a structure that didn’t fit.

I recommend Victoria Nelson’s book Writer’s Block and How to Use It. Natalie Goldberg’s free-writing exercises in Wild Mind and Writing Down the Bones also provide inspiration for loosening your mind’s hold on words. This process works — I’ve done it for years. Try it, and let me know how it worked for you.

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To use writing as a spiritual practice requires immersing yourself in the unknown. Rabbi Rami, who runs a creative writing program at Middle Tennessee State University, provides three rules for this kind of writing:

• Don’t write what you know
• You can’t write what you don’t know
• You must write.

Gee, and I thought that “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?” was enough of a mind-twist. His first rule — “Don’t write what you know” — jarred me because that contradicts the advice that every writer learns: “Write what you know.” Yet, I get it. We need to be humble enough to know that we don’t have all of the answers. We need to be okay with not knowing where we’re headed, and to trust that our words will get us there. As Rami says: “Authentic spiritual practice . . . is about living outside the system, any system.”

He recommends that you keep writing until you find something “deeply, disturbingly troubling,” until you’ve shattered all of your expectations, and then you marvel. I can attest to this. I’ve been working on a disturbing book intensively for almost four years; I started it about twenty years ago. It has been the most challenging and painful writing I have ever done, but also the most rewarding and freeing. As Rami says: “[T]here is a liberating wisdom in insecurity.”

Writing as spiritual practice is writing to be free, not necessarily publishable or even good. One of Goldberg”s rules of writing is “Give yourself permission to write the worst junk in the world.”  I like that. Now if only I could do that when I’m on deadline . . .