the Way
The labyrinth, like healing, holds more than it first appears.
This labyrinth is called The Way. Not because there is only one — but because the path is made by walking it.
The Way sits on our land in Eldorado in Santa Fe, open to the sky and the seasons. It is made of river stones and gravel and patience. I built it myself (or maybe I was fortunate enough for it to come through me). Ravens visit. The grasses bear witness. A pear cactus grows inside the path, a reminder that sometimes we must step aside and re-approach. I find that the labyrinth is sometimes a guide to help us better understand the healing path itself.
Like healing, The Way asks nothing of you except that you begin.
Beginning · Permission · Witness · Pivot · Listening · Belonging
Beginning
The journey begins when you decide to walk it.
You can wait to set your intention or ask a question. You can pause to pray and reflect. You can walk to put energies in motion, or to bring them out into the world. There’s no right way — only the way you’re called to in the moment.
In Healing
In craniosacral therapy, the session begins before anything is said or done. The moment a person decides to come — to make the appointment, to arrive, to lie down and be still — something has already shifted. The nervous system begins to orient toward safety simply through the intention to seek it.
Feldenkrais teaches us something remarkable about beginning: the initiation of a movement activates almost ninety percent of its neural pathway. The body doesn’t wait for completion to begin learning. It responds to intention itself.
In both approaches, beginning is not a small thing. It is often the hardest and most courageous step. And yet neurologically, spiritually, somatically — the moment we decide to begin, we are already most of the way there. Everything else unfolds from that first decision to show up.
Permission
Fast. Slow. You can walk at your own pace.
The labyrinth doesn’t ask you to hurry. It doesn’t ask you to slow down either. It simply receives you as you are — rushed, hesitant, grief-heavy, light-footed, distracted, present.
Some days we arrive at the center quickly. Some days we barely make it through the entrance. Both are the walk.
In Healing
One of the most common things people say after a craniosacral session is that they didn’t realize how much they needed to simply slow down. Not because slowing down was prescribed or instructed — but because the session created a container safe enough to stop performing, stop managing, stop holding everything together at the pace life demands.
Feldenkrais offers a similar permission. Lessons are done slowly — sometimes imperceptibly slowly — not because slow is better, but because the nervous system learns best when it isn’t bracing against effort or speed. Slowing down creates room for the body to notice what it actually does, rather than what it thinks it does. And in that room, something new can emerge — a movement pattern that was never available before, a sense of ease that didn’t exist a moment ago.
Both approaches trust that you know or can discover your own pace. There is no standard timeline for healing, no correct speed for integration. Some people settle quickly. Others need many sessions before the nervous system feels safe enough to release. The work simply meets you where you are — rushed, hesitant, grief-heavy, or light-footed — and receives you exactly as you arrive.
Sometimes the hardest thing of all is simply to be kind to ourselves. To extend toward our own experience the same patience and gentleness we might offer someone we love. That too is part of the healing.
Witness
When we walk, we are not alone. The grasses and the stones bear witness to our journey.
They don’t evaluate or advise. They don’t remember or forget. They simply hold the space — present, patient, unchanged by whatever we bring.
Sometimes that’s exactly what healing asks for. To be witnessed without judgment. To have somewhere safe to bring what we carry.
In Healing
In craniosacral therapy, the practitioner’s primary role is not to fix or correct — it is to listen. To be genuinely present with what is there, without agenda, without judgment, without rushing toward resolution. This quality of witnessed presence is itself therapeutic. The nervous system responds to being truly met in a way it cannot respond to being worked on.
There is something profound that happens when we feel genuinely witnessed — not evaluated, not advised, not compared. Simply seen and held in our experience exactly as it is. For many people this is rare. And yet it is one of the most fundamental conditions for healing.
Feldenkrais called this quality of attention “awareness without judgment.” The teacher observes how a student moves without labeling it wrong or right — simply noticing, with curiosity and care. Students often report that this quality of neutral, caring attention allows them to notice themselves differently. To become their own witness.
The grasses and stones of the labyrinth offer this same unconditional presence. They have held countless prayers, questions, griefs, and celebrations. They don’t remember or evaluate. They simply remain — steady, patient, present.
Sometimes being witnessed is the healing.
Pivot
There is a pear cactus growing inside the labyrinth path. It wasn’t planned. It simply arrived.
Not all unexpected things need to be removed from the path.
Sometimes what arrives uninvited is exactly the right teacher.
In Healing
The labyrinth path turns back on itself repeatedly. Just when you think you’re close to the center, the path curves away. Just when you feel furthest from it, you arrive. This is not a flaw in the design. It is the design.
Healing rarely moves in a straight line. People often come to craniosacral therapy expecting progress to feel like forward momentum — each session building visibly on the last. And sometimes it does. But often the path curves unexpectedly. A session might bring up something that feels like a step backward — an old emotion surfacing, a pattern becoming more visible before it releases, a period of tiredness or vulnerability after deep work.
This is not regression. This is the labyrinth turning.
Feldenkrais understood this deeply. He often said that if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got. Sometimes the most direct path to change is an indirect one — approaching the difficult movement from an entirely different angle, working with a distant part of the body to release what is held close, stepping aside from the problem entirely and finding that it has reorganized itself in the meantime.
The pear cactus in the path is a reminder. Sometimes we don’t remove the obstacle. Sometimes we simply find another way around it — and discover that the detour was the path all along.
Listening
Sometimes on the path there is a moment of listening.
Not thinking. Not deciding. Just a quality of attention that becomes very still and very open — waiting for something to show itself. This is different from pausing to rest. It’s an active receptivity. A turning of the inner ear toward something quieter than thought.
In that listening, the next step often becomes clear.
In Healing
There is a particular quality of attention that emerges in craniosacral therapy — not manufactured or forced, but encountered. Practitioners call it a stillpoint. It arrives when the system pauses, when the ordinary rhythms of the body temporarily cease, and something deeper becomes perceptible.
The poet Hafiz called it the breath within the breath. In biodynamic craniosacral therapy we call it the Breath of Life — a subtle, intelligent tide that underlies all the body’s rhythms, carrying the blueprint of its original health.
To find it requires a particular kind of listening. Not focused concentration but something more like sinking — dropping awareness below the turbulent surface of the ocean into the depths beneath. Down there it may seem still and dark at first. But there is life and movement in those depths — slow, powerful, and profoundly organizing.
Feldenkrais called this quality of inner attention self-sensing. Learning to listen below the noise of effort and habit toward something quieter and more true.
Both approaches ask the same thing — become still enough to listen. The body has something to say. And in that listening, the next step becomes clear.
Belonging
This labyrinth is called The Way. It is one of nine in our neighborhood alone.
Labyrinths exist on every continent, in every tradition, across thousands of years. They also say that a labyrinth is connected to all other labyrinths. When you walk one, you walk in the company of everyone who has ever walked one — seeking, grieving, celebrating, wondering what comes next.
Sometimes healing works the same way. Unseen forces gather around the one who is willing to begin. We cannot always name them. But they are there with us.
In Healing
The high desert of New Mexico. When you walk one, you walk in the company of everyone who has ever walked one — seeking, grieving, celebrating, wondering what comes next.
The Ancestral Pueblo people who lived on this land carved spiral petroglyphs into canyon walls across the Southwest. They understood the spiral as a transformative path — not merely a circle completed, but a journey through which knowledge is elevated and the traveler returns changed. They aligned these spirals to mark the summer solstice — the longest day, the turning of the light. The same day our neighborhood labyrinths open their paths to walkers.
The Way is new. The spiral is ancient. But they are asking the same question.
Healing also exists within a much larger web than we can see from inside our own experience. The craniosacral system itself is not separate from the world around it — it responds to relationship, to presence, to the quality of the space it is held in. We are not isolated systems trying to fix ourselves in private. We are relational beings who heal in connection.
Feldenkrais understood that learning happens in relationship — between practitioner and student, between intention and movement, between what the nervous system knows and what it is gently invited to discover. No healing happens in isolation. Something is always present, holding the conditions for change.
Sometimes we cannot name what supports us. We only know that we did not walk the path alone — that something gathered around our willingness to begin. A tradition. A lineage. A practitioner whose stillness met our own. The land itself.
You are never as alone on the path as you might feel.
Something holds us as we walk.
The Way is a private sanctuary. Walking the labyrinth can be a wonderful way to explore and support the work of craniosacral therapy and movement practices like the Feldenkrais method. For inquiries about sessions or to learn more about the work, please visit the contact page or reach out directly.