For at least twenty years, I have enjoyed walking labyrinths. Labyrinths are maze-like structures that have been used as spiritual tools for centuries. For the past seven years, I’ve been walking labyrinths throughout the northeastern United States, and blogging about them. To learn more about labyrinths, check out this page at the Labyrinth Society. To find labyrinths near you, try the Worldwide Labyrinth Locator.

“Doylestown Community Labyrinth” is a beautiful, well-maintained labyrinth in the heart of the lovely borough of Doylestown. It’s a 7-circuit classical labyrinth, with crushed stone path and inlaid stone walls. As I walked, I felt like there was a gentle slope to the path, as though it was going up and down like a boat on the sea. Looking at it now, I’m not sure if that was really the case — it may have been in my mind.

I always enter a labyrinth with a question on my heart, and listen for a response while I am walking. The question I had for this labyrinth was What do I really want freedom from? I’d been on vacation from work for almost a week at this point, and yet I felt very constricted. There were several days during the week that I’d wanted to go out and do some traveling, perhaps spend a night away somewhere — but every time I thought I’d figured out how it would work, something stopped me, usually a forgotten commitment to watch one of my kids or take one of them somewhere. I just wanted to be free, and I didn’t feel free at all.

I was finally able to make it work on Monday, and had a plan to walk many labyrinths in Bucks and Montgomery Counties. This was the first, and I felt I had to start by dealing with this constricted feeling. I didn’t think it was really all about needing to get out of the house, or get away from my family — it was something else. So as I entered the labyrinth, I asked What do I really want freedom from?

As I walked, I wondered about all that, and also whether I wanted freedom from depression, or even freedom from myself. A word came to me quickly: STUCK. That’s how I’ve been feeling, and it’s been more than just this past week. I want freedom from feeling stuck. I want freedom from feeling stuck at home, stuck on my computer, stuck with nothing to write, stuck with my writer’s block, stuck in my life.

It felt odd even being here in Doylestown, of all places. This was a town I loved when I lived about twelve miles away for a while in my 20s. And I had just been back here a month ago. I had brought my kids to the Mercer Museum, just a few blocks from this labyrinth. I felt kind of stuck just being here, as though I couldn’t escape my own past. That was something of an insight, because I often drive back to old places and old haunting grounds, and it usually yields insight and memory, rather than this stuck feeling. So this feeling must be something deeper.

And just moments before I walked out of the labyrinth, another word came to me: STAGNATION. Yes — that’s it. I want freedom from stagnation. From feeling like nothing is new, nothing is changing. That’s how it feels sometimes, and that’s what I want to get away from. And I think it’s not a matter of doing something in particular. It’s more a matter of the attitude I do things with, the angle at which I approach them.

I knew that I’d only wrestled with half of the question here. I knew there was another half, that I’d wrestle with at the next labyrinth. And I had a thought — is walking a labyrinth something like “wrestling”? I’ve often wondered if part of the magic of a labyrinth was that the twists and turns you walk somehow mirror the folds and turns of our brain tissue. As I walked today, I felt as though something tight were unwinding in my mind with each step. Might “wrestling with our mind” be an image to describe this process?

I was reminded of the story of Jacob’s dream by the ford of the Jabbok, in Genesis 32. In his dream, Jacob wrestles an angel all night long, and in the end receives a blessing and a new name that changes his life. Could labyrinths be a way to wrestle with our own angels, not in an attempt to prevail or win, but to find within that wrestling a blessing?

What do you think? Where have you wrestled with yourself, or with an “angel” (however you might interpret that word)? What was the result? I’d love to read about it in the comments.