Silverwolf Sanctuary

Despite the labyrinth’s long history as a spiritual tool, it is only in relatively recent history that its benefits are being recognized by modern medical science.   Dr. Herbert Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute, Harvard Medical School, has proven that focused walking meditations are highly efficient in reducing anxiety and eliciting what he calls the "relaxation response." This effect has significant long-term health benefits, including lowering blood pressure, slowing breathing rates, reducing incidents of chronic pain, as well as reducing insomnia. He clearly documents that meditation slows breathing, heart, and metabolic rates, and lowers elevated blood pressure more effectively than drugs.

 These authenticated health benefits have led many prominent health care facilities to install labyrinths on their grounds. Such meditative devices can be found at: Johns Hopkins Medical Center, Baltimore, MD.; Doylestown Hospital Health and Wellness Center, Warrington, PA.; Memorial Hospital, Salem County, N.J.; Whitman-Walker Clinic, Arlington, VA; Medical Center of Central Georgia, Macon, GA.; and Staten Island University Hospice, New York, N.Y., to name merely a few.

So often confused by it’s popular cousin, the maze, the labyrinth is truly something else again. Walking a maze is a left-mind problem, designed to befuddle you with its intersecting paths and dead ends and requires logical, sequential, analytical activity to find the correct avenues.  A labyrinth, on the other hand, is a single path that leads you to center in a folding and curving direction and the return trip is back along the same path. It combines the imagery of the circle and the spiral into a meandering but purposeful path. Traversing a labyrinth is a right-brain task that involves intuition, creativity, and imagery.  The oldest known documented labyrinth design is from Crete and dated to 3000 BCE, or about 5000 years old and innumerable cultures have utilized the design carved in rock, ceramics, clay tablets, mosaics, manuscripts, stone patterns, turf, hedges, and cathedral pavements, to name a few.

The labyrinth is an ancient symbol that relates to wholeness.  It represents a journey to our own center and back again out into the world. Labyrinths have long been used as a meditation and prayer tool in a wide variety of theologies from Christianity to Paganism. It is a meditative path of prayer that is designed to bring you into awareness of your relationship with the Divine, of your wholeness; body, mind and spirit.

·         The walk in, towards center, becomes the symbolic path of purgation, of releasing,  letting-go, quieting the mind and surrendering.

·         The center represents illumination, equilibrium, opening to the Divine

·         The return path is union or communion, strengthened from the journey and being granted the power to act within our community.

The labyrinth at Silverwolf Sanctuary is a 5 ring grass labyrinth.  Cut into the grass every spring it provides a unique opportunuity to walk a circuit that changes throughout the year.  In the spring, the lush green rings are barely taller than the path.  Soon they become taller and peppered yellow with dandilions.  As the summer moves onward, the grass often grows more than five feet high, allowing the traveller greater seclusion and serenity.  As fall draws upon us, the grasses brown and bend, reminding us that the winter is soon on its way. 

 The labyrinth is open by appointment.  (silverwolfsanctuary@gmail.com or 603.524.5410)