"My aimless walking one spring day in 2008 led me to a Christian bookstore…a foreign experience” for my Jewish nature. I was drawn to the shelves of midlife offerings and the book “Crossing to Avalon by Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. called out to me. “If we are spiritual beings on a human path then our lives were meant to be meaningful and authentic, our losses and suffering can either burnish the soul or diminish it.” 
 

A week later in a conversation about Avalon with my closest friend and spiritual soul mate, she had received an announcement for “Crossing to Avalon: A Pilgrimage to Chartres and to the Sacred Feminine. This felt like a welcoming we needed to heed. We landed In Chartres that September. Chartres Cathedral is built upon an ancient goddess and Druid sacred site, where pilgrims journeyed long before Christianity to quicken the divinity in themselves.
 

 We slept at the foot of the Cathedral in a nearby Monastery. We walked daily within the Cathedral’s walls drinking in the nave with its harmonious lines, its grandeur and balance, and the colors of its mosaic windows with their soft light flooding the pavement. We sat at a café across from the Cathedral, enchanted by its mystical glory and historical statuary, savoring French omelets and lattes. This sacred ground spoke to me like no church or temple ever had; full of mystery and pagan divinity. Our sites were on the 13th-century labyrinth where pilgrims traveled to walk its circuitous path of 11 concentric rings, carved from limestone rock, carried to the Cathedral from a nearby quarry. People from around the world walk its path, together, in silence and community. There is symmetry to its pattern. It is not a maze, but a single way.  
 

 At night the cathedral was bathed in light. We walked the pilgrim path up through the crypts where we wrote and burnt our intentions in the baptismal font. Mine was: to shed the barriers that interfere with my being with my compassionate self. Inside we walked the stones barefoot and felt those who had walked before us, feet calloused and bloody, comforted by the cold smooth stones and the sweet sound of dulcimers and basses that quietly matched our steps and dreams as we proceeded in silence. A mantra came to me as I walked:
 

Be with your heart

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Your heart is light
 

The light is your heart
 

These words spoke clearly and repeatedly with every step as I turned to leave the center of the labyrinth. While there is a linear chronology to our lives, there is usually a labyrinthine quality to following or finding the thread of meaning. A pilgrimage allows us to recollect liminal experiences, moments out of time. This was my experience within the Cathedral and on the labyrinth’s path. It was my initiation into my ever-deepening spiritual life and with it the allure of the powerful voice of wisdom in Sophia, the divine feminine. My spiritual practice has been nurtured through the paths of my own spiritual journey and my connection to colleagues steeped in their contemplative practices, such as the Contemplative Studies Project."