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.

I drove to northern New Jersey on Wednesday with the intention of walking several labyrinths I’d not walked before. I always have a question in mind when I enter a labyrinth, and something about the labyrinth helps me to find an answer to the question, or at least some helpful reflections upon it. I knew that the questions I’d be asking today would be related to “feeding my mind,” and how I could improve my well-being by being more mindful about the information and media I consumed, just as I’d recently started to improve my well-being through mindfulness about the food I consumed.

I arrived at my first stop: the Wyckoff Public Library. The labyrinth was just outside the library, tucked away behind the parking lot. The area it was in felt like a nurturing garden of sorts. There were some very interesting mosaics on the wall next to it, showing images of people exploring and creating. I found them very affirming of my current plan.

The labyrinth itself was labeled “The Thinking Path.” It’s a 7-circuit medieval design, with a crushed stone path and inlaid brick walls. The question I entered with was: How can I feed my mind better?

As I walked, I felt immersed in the place of thinking nurtured by the library, and it reminded me that my mind is there for thinking, not for something else. Just as I’ve recently practiced putting food in my body for nourishment, instead of for emotional catharsis…so I can focus on consuming things for my mind that help me think, not that lead to emotional things. It’s not that emotions are bad or wrong, but rather that my mind is made for something else, and maybe I can focus on nourishing that. (I want to clarify that by mind I don’t exactly mean my brain. I understand the brain to be a physical organ that is connected to thoughts and emotions and so much more. The mind, on the other hand, is more of a concept that describes our conscious experience and thoughts. The mind is possibly a component of the brain, or a process that the brain produces, I don’t know. But here I’m referring to the part of me that thinks.)  

And I know that I learn best when I process things afterwards. For instance, I never feel a labyrinth walk is complete until I’ve written about it in my journal. Just the same, I could probably benefit from journaling every night about what I thought about that day. I just need to do it, the way I just started to diet a few weeks ago. And maybe, just as I had a few immediate side effects from my diet, so might this have some immediate side effects. I just wish there was some metric I could see every day, analogous to reading my weight on the scale. But what would that be? Pages read?

I was feeling good about this trip so far. Onto the next labyrinth.