Meet Transition Labyrinth | Labyrinth wranglers and artists

We had the good fortune of connecting with Transition Labyrinth and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Transition, how does your business help the community?
Navigating the modern world through the death throes of End Stage Capitalism can add an incredible amount of stress to anyone’s life. There are a wide variety of technologies and techniques to help deal with this stress, but many (especially religious ones) require strict adherence to dogmas and/or limiting belief systems. These requirements can sometimes be counter-productive, possibly adding yet more stress.
The labyrinth is an ancient technology (or medicine), that serves as a metaphor for our journey through life. As you encounter the labyrinth, it meets you wherever you are on your path and brings you whatever you need for your journey.
Unlike a maze, which is a puzzle for your intellect, full of dead ends and wrong turns, and which you must use your left brain’s analytical prowess to solve, a labyrinth (in the modern American English usage of the word) is a single path that meanders throughout the always visible pattern that leads from the entrance at the outside edge of the pattern all the way through the entire pattern to finally arrive at the middle. There are no tricks, traps, and no way to “do it wrong”, so once your left brain figures this out it gets a chance to just quiet down and relax for the duration of the walk.
This is a form of walking meditation or prayer that is found in many spiritual and religious traditions around the world. In fact, the labyrinth is also found all over the world and is at least 4500 years old that we can be sure of. It appears all over Europe from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia, and from India to the New World, so it really represents something that all of humanity shares — a part of our human DNA, so to speak. Since the labyrinth is found everywhere and does not originate with any one limiting belief system, anyone can use it in any way that helps them to quiet the chatter of the “Monkey Mind” (as the Buddhists call it), or get closer to God in whatever form works best for the individual. In that refreshing silence when the analytic mind is quieted one is now able to hear that “still, small voice” of our intuition, guidance, or even divine intervention/communion. People report having deep and novel insights, answers to vexing questions, communications with others not present (or even no longer alive), and all manner of experiences similar to deep meditation or prayer, but that are not normally possible in today’s frenetically paced world.
“World Peace begins with Inner Peace” and both are sorely lacking to today’s world. The beauty of walking a labyrinth, especially in a social or ritual setting, is that, while each of us are walking our own paths, we are also walking them together. While many cultures and religions seek to divide us into separate groups, “us vs. them”, the labyrinth joins everyone together equally in a shared experience of the human journey, a sort of pilgrimage, even.
If humanity is going to survive long term, we will only be able to IF we do it together. The labyrinth provides that unique medicine for inner, personal growth and deep exploration of the self, as well as communal celebration and opportunities for healing the fabric of our communities and by extension, the world.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
Transition Labyrinth creates sacred space in the public (or private) space. We offer our services “in the gift”, that is we do not try to dictate the value of the gift in monetary terms to the receiver. We are open to receiving any gifts “in kind” from anyone who requests our services, but there is no “pay wall”. We see this as providing a much needed medicine to a troubled world, and in Native American tradition, one would never think of charging money for a healing ceremony. Scarcity and competition based dog-eat-dog monetary system thinking is rooted in the outdated colonialist, imperialist “power, force, control” paradigm and it is a dead end evolutionarily. We are retired living on a modest, fixed income that provides for our basic daily needs, so we are blessed to be able to volunteer for groups and causes which align with our mission (like former NASA physicist and consciousness researcher Tom Campbell’s “My Big TOE [Theory of Everything]”). The more we give away and are of service to “other” (love-based thinking) rather than focusing on “self” (fear-based thinking), the more help and gifts we receive in return, which then inspires and encourages us to do even more.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Well, in San Diego, the many lovely beaches (to draw labyrinths, of course!), Balboa Park, take a walk on the beach or the bay in Coronado, catch the Happy Hour deals at Miguel’s Cocina inside the El Cordova Hotel across from the Hotel del Coronado. Have lunch at Las Cuatro Milpas in Barrio Logan for a nostalgic taste of your abuelita’s home-style cooking. It’s been there since the 1930’s and they still make REAL tortillas using LARD! 🙂
San Diego has so much beautiful scenery to enjoy from the beaches to the mountains to the desert, and the weather’s perfect year round. Drinking and dining out, or even taking in entertainment is getting more prohibitively expensive every year, so we take full advantage of the natural beauty San Diego County has to offer: take a hike on any of the hundreds of trails, boat or kayak on Mission and/or San Diego Bay, the ferry across San Diego Bay used to be a nice way to visit the Port of San Diego/wharf area and Seaport Village (park for free in Coronado, but they’ve doubled the ferry prices in the last few years and even that’s gotten out of reach other than for the tourists), stroll through Old Town, go birding on the Tijuana Slough, check out the views from Mt. Soledad (and try to ignore the obvious religious symbol atop it, even though the courts have ruled that it is in fact NOT a religious symbol), drive along the beach from Cabrillo National Monument to North County.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
When I first got into labyrinths and experienced their powerful medicine first hand, I went online to learn all I could about them. I quickly found The Labyrinth Society and Veriditas, which offered up a training on everything you ever wanted to know about the history of, designing, and constructing labyrinths, as well as how to facilitate group walks. We were fortunate to attend Master labyrinth builder Robert Ferré’s last week long “Labyrinth Summer School” course with his incredibly talented mentee, Lars Howlett in the summer of 2015. Since then, we designed our own unique labyrinth pattern (called the Transition Labyrinth pattern) and continued to learn from many other wonderful artists locally as well as internationally, for example:
Kirk “Kirkos” VanAllyn, who has done a New Years Day community labyrinth draw on the beach in Encinitas, CA for the last 20 years. New Years Day 2014 there were over 100 people on the beach walking and helping to decorate this huge Chartres Cathedral replica labyrinth. It was a magical experience with a mix of ages, cultures, genders, and everyone was celebrating the day in this wonderful setting together. There was a group doing yoga over here and a drum circle group over there, kids were running everywhere and everyone was sharing the communal spirit of joy and togetherness. This experience gave me a true experience of Charles Eisenstein’s “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible” and I was hooked.
I also had the pleasure of drawing beach labyrinths with Denny Dyke of “The Sandy Path” up in Bandon, Oregon, whose early work he posted online first got me into drawing beach labyrinths, which led me to find Kirkos.
I’ve also been able to assist Master labyrinth builder Lars Howlett (who lives in the Bay Area) with a few of his installations down here in So Cal.
I also have learned a ton from people who generously share their knowledge on Facebook on both the Labyrinth Society Global Group as well as the Labyrinth Makers Forum.

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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TransitionLabyrinth/

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Other: https://www.my-big-toe.com

Image Credits
Transition Labyrinth