You Can't Get Permanently Lost: What the Labyrinth Walk Keeps Teaching Me

Under the kukui trees at the Sacred Garden in Makawao, there's a path of stones laid out in a wide, winding circle. It's a labyrinth, and before you picture a hedge maze, it's the opposite of one. A maze is built to trick you, full of dead ends and choices. A labyrinth has none of that. There's one path, one thread to follow. It curls slowly into the center and then back out, and you walk it on purpose, slowly, the way you might walk a prayer.

I walked it again this week. The first time was almost four years ago, and coming back to it felt like running into an old teacher who'd been waiting for me to catch up. The same small path gave me two different lessons, four years apart. Here's what happened both times.

The first time on the labyrinth walk: "Am I on the wrong path?"

The first time I walked it, I spent most of the walk worried.

The path kept winding. It went one way, doubled back, then carried me out toward the edge again just when I thought I should be reaching the center. And the whole time, one thought kept circling: am I on the wrong path? Did I take a wrong turn somewhere? For a moment it felt like I'd dropped the thread and would never pick it back up.

Which is a little ridiculous, when you think about it, because a labyrinth has only one path. There's no wrong turn to take. You can't get lost. The wrong path I was so worried about didn't exist anywhere except inside my own head.

That was the lesson, and it stayed with me. The feeling of being lost is not the same thing as being lost. I'd carried that worry through most of my life. Am I doing this right? Is everyone else further along than me? The labyrinth just handed the worry back to me so I could finally see it for what it was.

I want to be honest, because part of me always argues back. In real life, some paths really are "better" than others. Some choices cost you. That's true, and I'm not saying every road leads to the same "good" place, or that it doesn't matter what you choose. It does. What the labyrinth quiets is something more specific. It's the fear that you've already ruined it, that you took one wrong turn and now you're off course for good. That fear is almost always lying. You can take the long way and still get there. No detour wastes you. The labyrinth doesn't promise the path will be easy. It promises you can't get permanently lost.

And even easy and hard are partly something we make as we go. So much of what makes a path feel impossible is the story running in our head while we walk it, not the path itself. The stones stay the same. What changes is what we decide they mean.

This time: there's no wrong way to do it, either

Walking it this week, I noticed something new, because this time I wasn't alone.

There were other people on the path, and some of them weren't really following it. They were stepping over the lines, cutting from one ring to the next instead of letting the path carry them. At one point I thought, "Oh, that's the wrong way to do it."

But there's no wrong way to do it either. The labyrinth is guidance, not a rule. You can follow every curve of it or you can cut straight across, and either way you start where you start and arrive where you arrive. It's an invitation, not a cage.

Four years ago the labyrinth showed me there's no wrong path. This time it added that there's no wrong way to walk it.

And then, the part about time

There was one more thing.

I started later than some of the others. A few people were ahead of me, walking slowly, and for a while the path kept me right behind them, gravel shifting under my feet. Then it curved them one way and me another, and without trying to, I passed them. I reached the center before people who had set out before me.

The thought that came was simple. It doesn't matter when you start, or how fast you go. You're walking the same path as everyone else. Sometimes you set out later and arrive earlier, sometimes it's the other way around, and none of it is really the point.

The point is to enjoy the path you're on.

So much of life gets spent measuring ourselves against where everyone else is. Who started first, who's moving faster, who got there before us. The labyrinth quietly takes all of that apart. Same path, different pace, and no prize for finishing first.

Older than you'd think

If you've never walked one, the short version is this: it's not a maze. A maze is a puzzle you solve. A labyrinth is a path you follow. One asks you to use your mind, the other lets you put it down for a while.

And they're old. Older than most people realize. The same basic design shows up all over the world, in cultures that had no way of reaching each other. The classic seven-circuit pattern appears on ancient coins from Crete. It's carved into rock in Bronze Age Europe, dated to around 2000 BCE. It's woven into baskets by the Tohono Oʻodham people of the Sonoran Desert as the "Man in the Maze," echoed in Hopi symbols, set in stone along the Baltic shore in Scandinavia, and drawn in India and Nepal. People separated by oceans and thousands of years, who never could have copied one another, all drew the same path.

That's the part I keep turning over. It's as if the labyrinth is something people reach for on their own, again and again, like the shape was already in us somewhere.

The version most people picture, and the one the Sacred Garden is patterned after, comes from Chartres Cathedral in France, laid into the stone floor around the year 1200. Back then, walking it was called the Chemin de Jérusalem, the Road to Jerusalem.

For people who couldn't make the long and dangerous trip to the Holy Land, walking the labyrinth was the pilgrimage. The journey was the floor under their feet.

The Sacred Garden actually has two of them, both tucked under the kukui trees: an eleven-circuit Chartres-style one with an open heart at the center, and a smaller seven-circuit classical one based on the old Pleiades design.

How to walk one

There's a simple, old way to walk a labyrinth, and it follows the natural shape of letting go and coming back.

On the way in, you release. With each step you set down whatever you've been carrying. This is the part where I walk with hoʻoponopono, the old Hawaiian practice of forgiveness and setting things right: I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. It feels right to do it here, on the land the practice comes from. By the time I reach the center, my hands are usually a little emptier.

At the center, you receive. You stop. You stand still. You don't ask for anything or try to work anything out. You just stay open and let whatever wants to come, come.

On the way out, you return. You walk the same path back, carrying whatever you found, letting it settle as you go, crossing slowly back into the rest of your day.

There's even some research on why it works. The slow, winding walk seems to settle the brain into a calmer state, easing anxiety and quieting the mental noise a little differently than sitting still does.

You are the thread

There's an old story tied to the very first labyrinth, the one from the Greek myth. A young man named Theseus goes in to face the monster at the center, and a woman named Ariadne gives him a ball of thread to unwind as he walks, so he can find his way back out. For thousands of years that thread has stood for being rescued, for someone outside of you handing over the way home.

Walking this path, I've come to believe it differently. Nobody hands you the thread. You are the thread. The way back out isn't something another person gives you. It's the steadiness you find in your own feet, in trusting the path under you even when it bends away from where you thought you were going. You unwind yourself as you walk, and that's what leads you home.

What I'm taking home

Three walks, from the same small circle of stones, and this is what I'm keeping.

Some paths are kinder to walk than others, and choosing well is real. But the long way is still the path, and it doesn't matter much when you start or how fast you go.

And almost everything that scared me out there was never on the ground. The wrong turn, the being behind, the lost feeling, all of it lived in my head. The path just kept going, the way it always had. I was the one adding the story.

You're on it. Even when it winds away from the center, it's still taking you back there. So keep walking, and try to enjoy it while you do.

The Sacred Garden of Maliko is in Makawao, Maui. The labyrinths are open to the public, and full-moon walks are led there by Eve Hogan, author of  Way of the Winding Path.