World Labyrinth Day is Saturday. All over the world and at the same time, people will be walking labyrinths for peace, including right here in Alexandria at the labyrinth located at the Rapides Cancer Center on the campus of the Rapides Regional Medical Center.
Rabbi Judy Ginsburgh, who is facilitating the local walk, said the one here will begin at 1 p.m. to coincide with the times everyone else around the world will be walking. Everyone who wants to participate is invited to attend.
She said the hope is that with hundreds of thousands of different people all over the world walking labyrinths with the same intention for world peace, that it will build up an energy that can hopefully bring it about.
World Labyrinth Day is every May 4. It can have different intentions, “but a lot of times it is peace because that’s what we need,” Ginsburgh said.
The RRMC labyrinth was built by Annelle and Martin Tanner are Veriditas-trained advanced labyrinth facilitators who introduce people to what it means to walk a labyrinth. They also help build and design them. They are going to be out of town Saturday and asked Ginsburgh to facilitate the walk here this year. Ginsburgh said she will be at the labyrinth from 12:20 to 2 p.m. to welcome people and guide them in how to walk a labyrinth.
“The thing about a labyrinth is you can't get lost. It's not there to trick you,” she said. It is not a maze, and you can’t get lost or trapped.
“It's one way in and one way out," Ginsburgh said. "You just follow the path at your leisure.”
Walking the labyrinth is supposed to “kind of free your mind, help you to relax and if you go in and out with an intention, hopefully those intentions build up and manifest themselves in the world,” she said.
Different people have different ways of walking a labyrinth, but Ginsburgh said the more you do it, the more you develop your own pattern of how you want to personally do it.
“You can make an intention every time you turn a corner. You can wait until you get inside to do it,” she said. “It's just everybody kind of has their own way of doing the labyrinth. So, there's no right or wrong way. Really, the only wrong way would be if you step over the line.”
Walking a labyrinth doesn’t take long, but no one should run through it.
“I would say to do the one at Rapides, to go in and out, at the most it would probably take 8 to 10 minutes,” she said, including the meditating. “Now you can make it take longer, but just walking at a decent pace and not really stopping or anything, you could probably go in and out of it like a child might do. Just go in and out of it in maybe less than 10 minutes probably.”
The RRMC labyrinth is a community labyrinth open to the public. It was built in 2021. There is also a labyrinth at the Wesley Center in Woodworth.
For more information about World Labyrinth Day, visit worldlabyrinthday.org
This article originally appeared on Alexandria Town Talk: Alexandria residents to walk labyrinth for world peace on World Labyrinth Day
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