The Labyrinth and the Field: A Conversation Across Time Listening for Whispers of the Old Mind

By Alan Briskin

Lauren and I met over twenty-five years ago when I interviewed her for my co-authored book on The Power of Collective Wisdom. And now, decades later, I see how she anticipated Mary Gelinas’ and my future work on fields.

At the time, I was struck by Lauren’s language about the labyrinth as a “symbolic field.” She described it not merely as a spiritual practice, but as a relational space where something larger than individual intention begins to move. Spirit, she insisted, cannot be pursued directly. If you try to grasp it directly, the ego is still in charge. Instead, illumination “comes in from the side”—through encounter, symbol, interruption, and surprise.

I didn’t yet have the vocabulary of fields, but I recognize now that she was describing exactly what Mary and I later articulated in Space Is Not Empty: How Hidden Fields Are Shaping Your Life and Our World.

Lauren spoke of rhythm, candlelight, music, and ritual as invoking what she called the “old mind”—a deeper layer of awareness that groups access more powerfully than individuals alone. The labyrinth was not simply a path on the floor. It was a structured container that allowed something emergent to take shape.

One story remains vivid. During a labyrinth walk at Grace Cathedral, rose petals were dropped gently from high above. No one was told this would happen. The group stopped. Musicians adjusted instinctively. A woman stood holding a petal and began to weep—because the last time she had held a rose petal was at her husband’s funeral. Lauren had created the conditions, but she had not created that moment. The field had.

That distinction is crucial.

Fields are structured but not controlled. They are shaped by intention, but not engineered by ego. When people gather with shared purpose—healing, courage, release, wholeness—something begins to organize itself.

Lauren often described her role not as directing the experience, but as “holding the consciousness of the group.” Stay out of it, she would say. Protect the container. Let what wants to happen, happen.

This language feels deeply familiar now. In our work on fields, Mary and I describe leadership as clearing the path—stabilizing the relational space so emergent intelligence can surface. The leader does not manufacture transformation. The leader makes room for it.

Perhaps the most powerful metaphor Lauren offered was “welcoming the stranger.” Welcoming the stranger, she said, is about allowing your own agenda to step aside, and recognizing that a larger agenda may be living itself out.

During one labyrinth walk, a man in visible crisis entered the space. Overwhelmed, he collapsed in the center. The group could have intervened to remove him. They could have insisted he wasn’t part of the program. Instead, they made room. They stayed present. They allowed the disruption to unfold without shutting it down.

He was indeed in crisis. But as the group remained with him — not fixing, not excluding — something began to shift. People moved toward him. Support emerged organically. What first appeared as interruption revealed itself as invitation. The community became involved not only in his healing, but in their own.

The stranger was not the only one in pain. The stranger was also the parts of ourselves that can feel tortured, undone, or out of control. As the group held space for him, each person quietly confronted their own moments of collapse, their own unintegrated sorrow or fear.

Everything can be used, Lauren reflected. The path must remain unblocked, clear enough for mystery to move through it. Had the group reacted defensively -- “You’re too emotional,” or “You’re not part of this program” — the deeper teaching would have been lost. Instead, something archetypal unfolded. The stranger was welcomed. And in that welcome, the community itself was transformed.

That is field awareness.

Looking back, I see that long before we could articulate the language of personal, social, and noetic fields, Lauren was embodying it. The labyrinth became a living demonstration of what we now write about: that space is not empty. It is alive with relational intelligence, symbolic resonance, and emergent possibility.

Sometimes our future work is seeded in conversations we do not yet fully understand.

How is that true for you?