The Heart's Content Questionnaire #5 - Lauren Artress

"Keep searching, let the energy of your experience guide you. Know your creative process, which is unique to each of us". - Lauren Artress

May 06, 2025

LAUREN ARTRESS

The Reverend Dr. Lauren Artress is author of Walking a Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Practice, The Sand Labyrinth Kit and The Sacred Path Companion: A Guide to Walking the Labyrinth to Heal and Transform (Putnam/Riverhead Books, New York) and The Path of the Holy Fool: How the Labyrinth Ignites Our Visionary Powers. She is Canon Emerita at Grace Cathedral and Founder of Veriditas, a non-profit dedicated to introducing people to the healing, meditative powers of the labyrinth. She travels worldwide offering workshops and lectures on Hildegard of Bingen and on the labyrinth including a bi-annual program in Chartres, France. She is on the Editorial Board of Presence Magazine published by Spiritual Director’s International. In addition to being an Episcopal priest she is a spiritual director, does Creative Coaching, and is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in the State of California.

Your Creative-Spiritual Compass: The Heart’s Content Questionnaire

1. Do you feel a connection between your creativity and spirituality?

I don’t see my creativity and spirituality as separate. They are in a smooth flow. My spiritual practice foremostly is walking the labyrinth. During this walking time, cobwebs get cleared out, new ideas flow in.

2. What do your creative or spiritual practices look like? Are there specific routines, rituals, or habits that help you stay grounded, connected, or enter into a creative flow?

Walking the labyrinth is my most basic practice and one could call it a ritual. It does all: helps me ground, connect to myself, and connect to creative flow.

3. What is a meaningful, creative or spiritual memory as a child? Has it evolved into a form of expression in your adult life?

During my childhood I spent a great deal of time in nature, roaming fields, laying in sunny meadows, crossing the Chagrin River to my spiritual home which was atop a 200-foot shale cliff overlooking the river, shaded by large pine trees. Perhaps one thing that has flowed into my adulthood is learning to take chances. There was a four-inch shale path that my brother and I called “Buglers’ Blowtop”. If you slipped, got dizzy, and fell, on one side was a 30-foot cliff into a ravine. The other side was about 100-foot drop into the river. Taking creative leaps (to give it a more mature frame) has been first nature to me.

4. Who or what is inspiring you right now?

My 30-year work with the labyrinth continues. Teaching facilitators, doing talks, and designing weeklong pilgrimages in Chartres, France are all part of the flow. Storytelling has naturally flowed out of this, so I’m actively learning to tell stories. Mythological stories seem to like me the most.

5. What book, film, play, dance, poem, or other work of art has had a lasting impact on you? Can you share a bit about why it was meaningful?

Brian Thomas Swimme’s book Cosmogenesis is providing a vision for my ongoing work. We are in a cosmological, planetary, global, Western culture, societal shift. We have long known that our traditional religions no longer nurture us. To grasp the understanding that the Universe is creating constantly and that we humans are part of that creative flow along with all sentient beings, is the leap we need to make. Every moment we live, we have choices to align with this Universal creative flow toward greater self-consciousness.

6. Are there specific themes, symbols, or ideas that show up again and again in your work? How might they reflect your creative or spiritual journey?

My work with the labyrinth surrounds me with archetypal symbols: the circle, the spiral, the meander pattern that are all based in nature. When walking the labyrinth archetypal energy from the pattern is shared with the walker.

7. How do you navigate challenges or moments of doubt in your creative or spiritual journey? Share an example of a tool, strategy, practice, or community of support that helps you stay inspired when you feel disconnected or discouraged.

Again, walking the labyrinth helps address creative challenges. During my biggest challenges launching the labyrinth from Grace Cathedral, people thought it was a crazy idea. I’d walk the labyrinth and hear the words “Keep going, keep going”.

8. Can you describe a moment when your creativity felt like a direct expression of something sacred or something greater than yourself?

For me, this is where creativity and spirituality are merged into one, so that happens often as mentioned above. Of course, there are other times when walking the labyrinth seems routine. But most time, if I am receptive and vulnerable, something shifts during a walk.

9. How does your creative or spiritual life inspire or guide the actions you take in the world? Share an example of how these aspects of your life have shaped your work for peace, love, justice, or unity.

Founding a non-profit—Veriditas.org— to introduce as many people as possible to the labyrinth has been my mission. The heart of this work is to train facilitators to offer workshops in service of this mission. In 1998, the New York Times named this work The Labyrinth Movement.

My life’s work is to inspire people, encourage their creativity, take risks, work with their traumas, learn speaking and small group skills all to introduce this powerful blueprint of transformation into others’ lives.

10. What are some seemingly contradictory interests you hold? How do these different aspects of your personality show up in your life or work?

The biggest contradiction I have in my life now is with the traditional church. I’m an Episcopal priest and Honorary Canon of Grace Cathedral. It’s sad to see all the traditional denominations’ inability to change. They ignore recent biblical discoveries and forward-looking theologians, they refuse to drop “God the Father” for broader, more inclusive language. All these kinds of things stand in contradiction to the fact that our institutions that uphold an open-minded, open-hearted Christianity need support from the onslaught of hate, division and Christian nationalism infiltrating our society. So, I continue to support them financially and yet speak up when moments of change present themselves.

11. What are you working on now? What are you excited or curious to explore next?

I’m working with the Deep Time Journey Network to deepen my understanding of Thomas Berry’s and Brian Swimme’s work, as well as the research and information coming to Earth through the James Webb Telescope, to shape an evidence-based cosmology.. We Earthlings need a new, broad, non-mythological Creation Story.

12. What is one piece of advice or encouragement you would share with someone seeking to lean into a more creative-spiritual life?

Practice it daily in some way. Keep searching, let the energy of your experience guide you. Know your creative process, which is unique to each of us. Don’t let negative people into your life. Most nay-sayers are people too scared to take risks.

13. Baker's Dozen Question. Just for fun: If your creative or spiritual practice were a living being, what kind of personality would it have? Would it be a wise old sage, a curious child, a playful trickster, or something else entirely? Why?

The wise old woman from the beginning of the world who lives in a cave weaving the tapestry of the world.

Heart's Content