All spiritual traditions describe the human developmental process as a journey. Often as a journey through, or exploration of, a garden.

In this video we explore the garden — or perhaps more accurately: the park — surrounding the Garrison Institute.

Garrison Institute, located north of New York, was originally a Christian monastery, now transformed into an open center that, in the institute’s own words, is a place to find inner peace, contemplation and deepen one’s spiritual practice.

Hanneli teaches annually for Center for Systems Awareness at Garrison. In this video she invites us on an inner and outer journey at once. Taking place simultaneously. As the camera leads us through the grounds, Hanneli guides us in a modern version of an age-old practice: Mandala practice. An opportunity to organize central aspects of one’s existence in structures rooted deep in our consciousness, heart and nervous system.

Garrison’s park glows in autumn colors. While the camera moves slowly, meditatively, gently, there is a quiet yet forceful vitality in the park’s growth. Something mysterious. On one hand the walk opens onto panoramas we recognize from the Scandinavian autumn. Yet there is something else here too, other secrets. Climbing plants that evoke tropical rainforests, conifers that call to mind the Mediterranean. And everywhere: stairs. Stairs of broad stone slabs, wooden stairs, stairs carved from the earth itself. Stairs leading up to plateaus, leading into a green and secretive darkness. Winding downward and disappearing into undergrowth. Reminding us that they are also images of spiritual ascent — and descent.

There is an expression that describes Japanese Zen gardens: Miegakure, or in English: hide and reveal. To conceal and disclose at once. So that the practitioner is prompted, enticed, called to continue. Along the garden’s paths and on the spiritual way. Garrison Institute’s park possesses this simultaneously beckoning, alluring and enigmatic quality.

If while watching this video you allow yourself to sink into the park while listening to the guiding voice, what emerges is the experience of traveling simultaneously through inner and outer worlds — into the mandala practice’s growing sense of overview, clarity, complexity and ultimately encompassing release, and out into nature’s gentle, color-orgastic, almost caressing abundance of forms and colors.