2015 Featured Speakers

The following information highlights the Featured Speakers that presented during theGathering in October 2015.

Ellen Bintz Meuch
Transformative Uses of the Labyrinth: Where the Branches Grow

Ellen Bintz Meuch has worked with the labyrinth since 2000 when her minister at Gary United Methodist Church asked her to learn more about the practice so she could educate her congregation. At the time, she was leading some classes at the DuPage County Jail for the female inmates and saw how beneficial the labyrinth could be for the incarcerated. In 2001 she trained to be a certified facilitator with the labyrinth organization Veriditas. After creating a successful jail labyrinth program, she has since helped people all over the world get labyrinths into jails and prisons. She is a founding member of the Veriditas’s Council, and serves as their Global Regional Representative Coordinator and founded the Global Healing Response in 2005.

Along with her work with the labyrinth, Ellen holds a deep passion for social justice. Her initiatives include starting a book club and labyrinth program in the DuPage county jail, creating an anti-violence program in the Southside of Chicago called Sacred Ground Ministries, serving on the DuPage County Family Violence Council and being a committee member for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration for DuPage County.

Ellen lives in Wheaton, Illinois, works with her father in their family business, and is the mother of four children.
 

Robert Ferrѐ
Two Decades on the Path: Where Labyrinths Have Led Me

Labyrinths have led Robert Ferrѐ in many directions during the past two decades: Labyrinth maker, designer, consultant, author, editor, publisher, instructor, tour guide, sacred geometer, co-founder of TLS and more. Still very involved during his semiretirement, Robert continues to expand his horizons by willingly following where the labyrinth leads. In 2002 he gave a keynote talk in Sacramento about his life and transformation as a labyrinth maker. Now, thirteen years later, it’s time for an update.

Maia Scott
Seeing the Journey Ahead with New Eyes: Living Through the Lens of the Labyrinth

Maia Scott is freshly grown from the California Institute of Integral Studies where she completed her Masters of Fine Arts, concluding the good times as student speaker for Commencement. She is ripe and ready to combine this degree with her AA in Dance, BA in Therapeutic Recreation and almost ten years bodywork career to blend a curious elixir of creativity, play, and healing. Maia continues to develop her interdisciplinary arts thesis project, “SEE.SAW”, through producing additional performances, offering playshops to community programs, and developing a new hundred affirmation squares from crowd-sourced suggestions. Maia has a self-published book of the first hundred squares that hung in the San Francisco main library. She is also in conversation with Laguna Honda Hospital about creating labyrinths along with other fun and artful things with their wellness center.