Labyrinths

public in May. Yeah. This is designed by Kansas City native Robert Morris. Weighs more than four tons, made up of dozens of seven foot high, one interestant glass panels, and it's ultimately going to form a fifty by fifty by fifty ft glass triangle with a labyrinth in the middle. And it's a true labyrinth. By the way, there's one

way in, there's one way out. And in this episode you're gonna hear us discuss why this is important and what I love about it is it has a maze quality in that it has those walls, but their glass walls, so it's still a labyrinth, and it still has that peaceful sort of meandering feel to it. Morris says, within the Labyrinth of Paradox is allowed we lose ourselves to

find ourselves. You know. It's interesting. This reminds me of an old short story uh titled In the Walls of Erics by HP Lovecraft with Kenneth J. Sterling, in which and this is, you know, like NT nine. I believe this is published as an old pulp sci fi story space Explorers landed on Venus finds himself inside of a glass maze and it's it's it's very terrifying for this individual because he cannot find a way out. It's a

true maze. It's confusing, it's it's disorienting, and the walls are glass so you can see the outside of the maze so clearly, but there's no way to get to it. Ah, But this is not terrifying. This is supposed to be a very soothing construct here at the museum. Yes, So without further ado, let us enter the labyrinth. Certainly, for for modern users, there is a distinction between labyrinth and maze. Is the maze it's just the space of walls that are confining you in and you're trying to find your

way out. There dead ends, there are corners, there may or may not be a minotaur wandering around after you. Uh. It is the stuff of the hedge maze and the shining. It is the stuff of everything you see in the movie Labyrinth. Despite the name Labyrinth, that is uh, it is a movie in which the individual roams through mazes. Yeah, it's a spatial puzzle. And I really think about Labyrinth as more of the antidote to amaze. Yes, because you're not engaging the hippocampus as you would in a maze.

Because in a labyrinth, you don't have to really worry about the path or your memory or even trying to stake out a blueprint, because really the blueprint is in front of you. It may look like a maze, but really it's one uh, continuing path at circles around. Yeah. You there's one entrance, there's one exit, and there are

no choices to make you simply follow the path. And the path is winding, and the path is slow going because you're having to take all these turns in these in these twists, but never do you have to actually think do I go this way or that way because there are no choices. It is. It is one curving line from one end to the other. It's like a ball of string, you know, if you were to travel through that string on the outside, and it looks intricate

and complicated, but but really it is one path. And I really think about it as an act of submission when you enter into this labyrinth, because you are following a preordained path, right, and you are submitting yourself to this path, and in doing so, um, it is a sort of meditative practice because you are now UM, I guess you could say you were busying your mind just with the act of walking. And that's what we're going

to talk about today. We talked about the stress response with m mazes, but now we're going to talk about this more meditative quality of the labyrinth and what it means to us on a psychological and physical level. But first I want to mention that labyrinths are all over the world, um, and have been for for many thousands of years. You can find them in the United States, in Europe and India, Afghanistan, Java, Sumatra, and various sites in the US left by Pueblo Indians, the Hopi and

Zuni and others. Yeah, you see the design of a labyrinth. You see it on the classic room and flooring, you see in the remains of labyrinth throughout Scandinavian Northern Europe. You see it in the graffiti at Pompeii, Ancient Britain's cut labyrinths into the turf, Bronze Age tumbs in Sardinia, other carvings dating back to three thousand DC. It's like the maze. We discussed how the maze is like this pure physical or pattern base, but certainly a physical embodiment

of either internal confusion or external navigation confusion. It is about the state of confusion in the human mind uh as a physical reality, and like you said, the the labyrinth is an antidote to that. Yeah, it really is

the polar opposite. And it's funny that those terms are used interchangeably because when you think about a labyrinth, you think about wide open spaces, right, because this is typically something that is uh cut into the earth or made with stones or made out of stones, and so you can still see the vista around you. You're not your vision isn't impaired in anyway. In other words, there's not something on your right or left, and uh, you can

see and hear everything right. In fact, some would say that you're able to pay attention more to these aspects of being. You're able to really tune into the sounds around you, the smells, the sites. So it really is the polar opposite of a maze. Yeah. Yeah, there are no walls rising up around you. It's a winding course, but there are no choices to be made, and you generally find these your You often find them rather uh

in churches, either in or in the serene garden environments. Uh. I encountered one at the Desert Museum in Arizona where they had one out amid the catt in this one little cactus garden, and it was just really serene. You start at the beginning of the labyrinth and it just curls you around and you're just walking following the path, noticing all these beautiful succulent plants growing all around you.

And then eventually you wind your way back out and you just yesterday sought out a labyrinth within the maze that is Atlanta. So, especially since there aren't really i mean, labyrinths don't really make for great movie and and fictional storytelling, you know, because movies and in fiction, and I mean, it's all about putting you in a situation of drama. So of course fictional characters wind up in mazes. They rarely, it seems, wind up in labyrinth. So describe your experience

with the labyrinth. UM. I walked it at St. Barthl Barth follow Mules uh Episcopal Church, I believe, And it was an outdoor one and it was really like and I'm sure I was psychologically primed for the event, but UM, I spent minutes walking in a couple of times. And what I noticed about it is that it does draw you out of yourself again. The landscape is open, you can see the sky, You begin to notice things, and this is really important. I think we'll talk about this

um a little bit later. But it takes you out of that chattering part of your brain a bit um and it puts you it gives you a little bit more stillness. And that's what I notice. And here's how I actually tested the level of meditative uh quality to this experience. I went to the Whole Foods after this. Now it's uh, it's late December now and there's a

lot of bustling action that Whole Foods. I despise going to Whole Foods, even when it's a calm period, because people seem to me to act very aggressively in Whole Foods, whether or not just trying to get a parking space or they're just taking their shopping carts around and jamming into the aisles. For some reason, I find it to be a disturbing place to be, even though it has a sort of holistic vibe about it of health and

wellness and all that stuff. Afterwards, after walking this labyrinth, I was like I was floating on air, did not care. I parked really far away. Who could care about getting a parking space up close? I didn't um. But of course all of this again could be psychological priming. But I think that does speak to this act, that when you go through this physical act, that there can be

some sort of transformation mentally. And was it circular basically informed, because it seems like that that is sort of the standard for the labyrinth, is that looking at it from above, it's the circular zone of in which this path twists and turns. Yeah, it was circular, and at the very center it had symbols have three things that were a symbol of something. Now I think you guys, I will probably been hit to the fact that I'm not a religious person, so I don't know what the significance of

that is. I guess I'm gonna make a guess that it was like the what is it, the Holy Spirit of the three things? Yes, yeah, those those were the faces. I thought it was just pattern recognition, but now that you say that, I think it was Larry feeling it was then. But it's interesting that you've mentioned how it

is this. There's this feeling of guidance in the labyrinth, so it makes perfect sense that they would be in holy spaces because, certainly within a church environment, this is the idea that God is my co pilot, or you know, I'm gonna gonna trust in something greater than myself to guide me through this light life. And therefore what is the labyrinth? But it is allowing the path to guide you and freeing yourself of the worries about which way

did you go this, this way or that way. One of the most famous labyrinths that is this in a church setting is Chartress and m an archaeological excavation has shown that the cathedral. This is in France, overlies the alignment and foundations of earlier Roman buildings, and this is

building twelve sixty around today. This is really cool. If you visit the labyrinth on the summer solstice, you'll see that exactly at noon, a sunbeam falls directly on a nail that was placed in the floor, you know, And there's something beautiful about the I mean, it's still there because there are no there are no walls to fall down inside a labyrinth. You construct a maze. We mentioned

the Maze of Minos in the podcast about mazes. You know, whether that actually existed in any way, shape or form, you know, that's that's an area of discussion among historians. Most seem to think it did not. We certainly cannot find evidence of a vast subterranean maze in which a monster lived. Uh. There's some speculation that the palace itself there in crete, was kind of like a maze. It had big, thick walls, and it was very intimidating and

a little confusing. But a lot of that has fallen down and we've had to, you know, sort of to to piece things back together. So a maze not only a confusing but it can fall and change due to the weathering of the world. Whereas, uh, it's kind of beautiful to think of a labyrinth that's something that that is persistent because there's no thing that can be eroded. It can be covered up, but it's still there underneath the turf if you know to look for it. You

know what's interesting about that too. I was I was thinking about the Nazca lines, and these were lines drawn by the Nasca people. And this is a civilization living in modern Peru. Yeah, we're talking four between four hundred and six. Yeah, and uh, this civilization actually disappeared about fidred years ago, but you can still see the traces of these lines, these labyrinths that were designed by scraping away red dust and rock and revealing the white ground

underneath it. And um, and they're in the shape of of of animals. Yeah, it's so cool, like animals, the monkeys, monkeys, some humans, birds and fish are represented coming birds, sharks, lizards. Yeah, and and these are huge, We're talking about six hundred and sixty feet across and so ancient aliens people love these. The idea it's like they would tell on aliens about

monkeys that's what this was about. Well, actually, what they think is that this was a rite of passage in that it was a contemplative act done by small groups of the civilization that they walked these labyrinths in order to get to the end of UM. What was largely this metaphorical ritual. For not only the idea here is not only is this a line that creates the shape of a monkey as visible from a station, uh, this

is also this is a line that you traverse. You're traversing the shape of the monkey or the lizard or what have you. Yeah. So again, you know, this is probably more meditative practice that was done by the civilization UM and not communication to ancient aliens. UM. But I think that it points to this idea that throughout history there has been this sort of walking meditation done in different ways. Yes, and we'll get more into the idea

of walking meditation shortly. Yeah, particularly when you consider it use as a healing practice and and actually in medical UM centers. Yeah, you around the world, you see them pop up again and again. And as we mentioned in the last podcast, a great source for these two episodes was a book by esther In Steinberg titled The Science

of Healing Places. She devotes one chapter to labyrinth and mazes, but the whole book is about how physical environments affect us both in body and mind effectively, how they affect the mind body through our you know, and this can be negative, this can be positive, and and how if you're building something like a hospital, you want to take that into account. You don't want to build a hospital

it feels like a maze, if anything. You want to build a hospital that feels like a labyrinth that's open, right, And failing that, you just build a labyrinth in the courtyard, which many places do, right, because you have this idea of opening space metaphorically and physically so that your brain can sort of acclaimate itself to that space. Um. As you had mentioned the book Healing Spaces, there is a

Harvard cardiologist that Sternberg, the author talks about. His name is Harvey Goldberg, and he says that a lot of these meditative practices, meditative walking, our yoga, or tai chi um is really about gaming the relaxation response through breathing. And he says, quote, I think of it as an unclenching when the system gets overly tense. It's like a tight fist is locked somehow, By focusing your attention elsewhere,

there is an unlocking and unclenching of the fist. Now, this is really important when you think about an act of walking meditation, but as in an elabyrinth, when you're walking around like that, because you are focusing on something other than yourself and yet you're allowing your thoughts to unfold naturally, and this is that contemplative act that labyrinth's encourage. Yeah, so think of this when you're actually walking on the path of the labyrinth. What are you doing? Why are

you feeling relaxed? First of all, you're focusing on the path you're having. You're looking down, and you're looking up a little bit too, but kind of looking down and watching the path that you're walking. There are no walls to to head you in. It's about following this path on the ground. Secondly, because of this, you're moving slower, and because you're moving slower, you're breathing slower. Also, unlike

a maze, your vision is not obstructed. You're able to hear and see the world around you like you mentioned, and you're you're not having to depend on, you know, landmarks or what have you just kind of on autopilot, Yeah, which allows you to get into that mental space that is healing as Sternberg and Goldberg and Herbert Benson, who is very much an authority of meditative thoughts and actually meditation itself. We will talk more about this. We're gonna

take a quick break. We're gonna talk about why labyrinths were built and how it affects us at the physiological level. When you look back at some of these more ancient labyrinths, like the Nasca lines, again it comes up why why did people make these? What? Why were they built? Why were they created? And certainly a spiritual reason is present. It's very much possibility for some of them. Some people

think there are astrological reasons behind them. And if you look again at Chartreu, which is the cathedral in France, again you see evidence that it was designed in conjunction with the summer solstice, so that maybe it had something

to do with that. Um. I tend to think that if the sunlight is beaming down in the middle of a labyrinth on the summer solstice at noon, that that would be very powerful to churchgoers, particularly if they're walking the labyrinth, because it's the idea that this path is in tune with celestial dynamics, with the mechanics of the universe, right, and that you are in unity with nature. Yeah, Like it makes me think that to do Dante's Inferno again,

particularly Dante's Paradise. Paradise is a very strictly ordered thing, like the cosmos, whereas when Dante's actually in Hell, it's an ordered system. But it's it's a lot more confusing. Yeah. And then there's this I like this one. There's the dancing theory. Oh yes, this is great. This takes me back. There was there were like a couple of old goofy cartoons. I'm sure Holly would tell you could tell me exactly when and where they occur in the long list of

Disney productions. But there were a couple of goofy carloro stuff. There are a couple of goofy cartoons and one he quit smoking and another he was trying to lose weight, I think. And they dealt They were really cool. They dealt with like an adult goofy like dealing with like the demands of being like a bachelor. It was weird stuff.

I check it out again. But but there's one where he's like trying to learn how to dance, and there's this kid he gets where you listen to a record and you place these cutouts of feet of on the on the floor and then you dance by moving and he has like a mannequin with him and you move from one these steps to this step, and this teaches you how to dance by following the patterns on the floor. It's so that he could now, in his bachelorhood, a woman. So this is helping kids who are seeing their their

father who's now a new bachelor. Well, I think these were and again pop stuff will have to clear me up in this. I think people were aimed at these were These were kind of like an early Simpsons in a way because they were they were kind of aimed at maybe a little bit at kids, but more at

the adults. But anyway, that the dancing ritual. Yeah, and the idea, So the idea here is that Labyrinth's were potentially not nearly this thing that you walk on and serenely follow but you dance through because think about what dances and I'm not talking like you know, grinding booty shaking necessarily, but but think of something like like square dancing, some sort of ritualized dance, certainly the Whirling Dervishes, where there is a pattern that you're following, and you're you're

giving yourself up to the pattern of the dance, to the rhythm of the beat, to the You're giving yourself over body and soul to the music and the movement. And and that is in a sense of labyrinth you were becoming. You kind of become the labyrinth, You become the dance, you become the music. In that becoming, you cannot be this bundle of worries and and and troubles that you are the rest of the time. Yeah, it's the rhythm of the night. You leaven all your cares

behind right the night. Yeah, I won't do that anymore. So what's interesting about that too is that this is uh, not just something that is again an act of submission, but perhaps some sort of right of passage. This is perhaps something that young men who had proved themselves as warriors would go through this dance. This is also a fertility right for women who would go through these um the labyrinth dancing. And again you're talking about syncopated rhythm.

You're talking about a group activity that would line everybody up. Yeah, we talked before. When people are singing together, it's like their neurons are all firing on this in battern and some more thing with these movements, right, think about it as the first Congo line. Is it congo or congo? I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting. In the book, Steinberg points out that this is possibly why like early in church history, like certainly churches came to embrace their labyrinths.

Sat Bart's here in Atlanta is not ashamed of their labyrinth. They're rather proud of it. But in the old days there's maybe a little suspicion where the older members of the church, especially like I don't know about these labyrinths. There's something kind of not right about them, fancy about them, you know why, because they have found all sorts of evidence. In fact, an entrustan vase from six BC depicts not just the dance in the labyrinth, but sexual acts going on.

So the church kind of like, m I'm not sure about showing the positions, the sexual positions, um, you know, overlaid on the labyrinth here. Maybe we could kind of cover that up a little bit. But there's a little bit of that involved with it and that you know, and that of course hints at paganism, right, So let's talk about the way that it affects the body. Okay, So you talked about this idea that when you're walking, you began to slow down your breath, right, and you

began to relax. So your breathing slows, your heart rate downshifts, and this is when your body gets the queue that it's time to slow down and relax. And this is the opposite of the stress response, This is the relaxation response. Yeah. The slow breathing activates the vegas nerve that counters the

adrenaline like sympathetic nervous system response of stress. Yeah. And what's really cool about this nerve is that we've known that it has it's workings with stress and counteracting stress, but it also regulates the immune system, in particular in fighting inflammation. So when we start to talk about this in the stress response, we start to talk more about the immune system as a whole, because we know that if your body is in a constant state of just stress,

that this can be destructive at a cellular level. So this is why it's important to try to uh promote as much of this relaxation response that you can. Yeah, and it's really crazy to think about it about the mazes and labyrinths in this sense, the idea that a maze in physical space can physically harm you, like on a cellular level, and likewise a labyrinth can heal you. Because when we talk about healing spaces, it's easily to think of it in terms of some hippie dippy nonsense,

has some some spiritual talk. And maybe I'm not that into the idea that a space has all these magical properties about it, But as we've discussed, a space does have an effect on the body and mind, and and we see that in a way in their purest forms in the maze and the labyrinth. Yeah, Because again I will bring up the default mode network. This is that part of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex and medial

parialtial cortex in the meadle medial temporal lobe. This is that part that is the midline chatter that me, me, me, the fear of response. This is all this is concerned with the ego and the seat of consciousness that really helps to inform is this used to balance our sense of self? But when we have too much of the chatter,

there's hyperactivity. That's when depression sets in. That is stressful, right, And as we discovered in our podcast The Shaman and the Scientist, it is meditation that is one of the things that can quiet this part of the mind. And this was really important in helping to relieve depression. And I wanted to bring up once more that Dr Judson Brewer used fm R I to scan experienced meditators and

he found this decreased activity in the default mode network. Now, meditation really is just about again gaining your breath and because if you do that, obviously that your body is going to get these cues that it needs to relax. So this walking meditation through a labyrinth is very much a type of meditation. So when you think about that, then then as you say, it's no longer just like this hippie dippie, like, hey, meditate and you will fill one with the world. It's that it is changing you

at a cellular level. And we talked about this too, with meditation changing you um your genes as well your stressed genes, being able to actually turn those off their stress responses. Steinberg pointed out too, with resuscitation. When you're resuscitating an individual, you're you're talking about one breath every six to seven seconds once the heart is started back up again, and that is the optimal breathing pattern to get the optimal amount of oxygen carbon dioxide into the

body to nourish tissue and keep the brain working. So it makes sense to me that you would begin to see some of these labyrinths popping up in medical centers because no doubt, those are some of the most stressful places to be in because either you or a loved one um is in this medical center of being treated, or you're someone who works there. It's a high stress job,

right um to be in the medical professions. So if you have this labyrinth there and you had patients walking it, that could or you have family members or friends who are walking in these times of despair and stress, then it could help you that relaxation response to open you up a little bit more in your mind and to sort of tamp that down again at a mental level.

At the cellular level, yeah, it has a lot in common with walking meditation, which is a form of meditation you do walking being and remaining conscious of your steps and your breathing. But it is also, as Cimberg points out, it has a lot in common with tai chi as a gentle exercise. You might not think of walking a labyrinth as exercise, but essentially it is. It's a gentle exercise. But even this has a positive effect on the body. Yeah,

it does. There is a small study that finds that mindfulness meditation and moderate exercise have protective effects against cold and flu, with people who engage in the practices having less severe, shorter, and fewer symptoms of acute respiratory infection. So what we're talking about is a study that was published in the Annals of Family Medicine, and it included a hundred and forty nine people and average age of

fifty nine. Fifty one of them were assigned to have mindfulness meditation training for eight weeks, forty seven did moderate exercise for eight weeks, and fifty one they didn't have to do anything. And what they found is that those who went through the mindfulness training were linked with a forty to decrease in symptoms fluid symptoms, while exercise was

linked to a thirty decrease in symptoms. So, in other words, again what you're seeing here is that this act in hi achieving a moderate exercise, in walking being a moderate

exercise does have real ramifications on your health. All right, I'm going to close out here with just a brief little bit of quotation from Kick not Hahn, who is of course a zen master in the Vietnamese tradition, and he wrote a book called Walking Meditation that came with like a DVD in a c D. It's still out there if you want to learn more about walking meditation. It's a good source. So this is the Welcoming Path

by Tignahan. The empty path welcomes you, fragrant with grass and little flowers, the path paved with paddy fields, still bearing the marks of your childhood and the fragrance of mother's hand. Walk leisurely, peacefully, your feet touch the earth deeply. Don't let your thoughts carry you away. Come back to the path every moment. The path is your dear friend. She will transmit to you her solidity and her peace. And I think that applies beautifully to the idea of labyrinth.

I think so too, And it's very nice if you're interested in finding a labyrinth in your city, you can actually go online and there is a database of them. I believe it's called WORLDWIBEH or Hold Wide Web Labyrinth UM or something along these lines. Just google it and you'll find it UM and it will actually give you all the locations. That's how I found the one near our work here in Atlanta. All right, So there you have it. Mazes and labyrinths. Two sides of the same coin,

one dark, one light, one confusing, one uh inspiring. One is intentionally losing yourself. The other is trying really not to try to lose yourself exactly. I wanted to call the robot over here for just a minute. There we go. I'm not going to read this email of its entirety, but I wanted to mention that a listener, Dominic from France, wrote in and he mentioned that the final episode of the first season of HBO's True Detective includes both a

maze and a labyrinth. Now I'm not gonna get into the details here because I don't want to spoil it for anybody. It's a fantastic series and I'm a huge fan. But if you've seen it, you'll know what I'm talking about. And if you haven't, this won't spoil anything. But just know that two characters engage in the same environment, and for one of those characters you could argue it is a maze and for the other character it is a labyrinth. Yeah, so think about that when you see it or when

you see it again. All right, Well, thanks for listening, guys. If you want to check out more of our stuff, you can do so in many different places, but there is one place that contains at all, Yes, stuff to blow your mind dot com. Hopefully it's more of a labyrinth than a maze, and in that labyrinth you will find all of our podcast episodes are blog posts, our videos links out to our various social media accounts, including Facebook, Tumbler, Twitter, and oh Yeah. Check us out on YouTube where we

are mind Stuff Show. And if you would like to send us some correspondence, you may do so by sending us an email at below the mind at discovery dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics because it how stuff works dot com