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The crunching of footsteps on finely chipped gravel breaks the Sunday morning silence as Meg Hansen heads down the garden path toward the site of her latest project.

Ms. Hansen, director of guest services at Honeymoon Bay Retreat on the shores of Lake Cowichan, stops to survey a patch of muddy ground where she has mentally mapped out a seven-circuit, Cretan-style labyrinth, a swirling ancient design found on Greek coins as early as 400 BC.

Later this summer, the labyrinth's winding, symmetrical pathways will be neatly paved with interlocking bricks and bordered by knee-high English boxwood bushes, inviting visitors to the Vancouver Island retreat to meditate, contemplate or simply relax as they wander to and fro.

But for the moment, Ms. Hansen is concerned that her creation will be compromised by a series of underground irrigation lines that have been installed over the weekend.

"Water has an energy flow and this isn't in keeping with the sacred geometry of the design. The alignment is off-centre," grumbles Ms. Hansen, 58. "I'll just have to work with it."

If all this talk of energy flow and sacred geometry sounds like claptrap from the New Age fringes, guess again: Labyrinths are in the midst of a popular resurgence. In recent years, variations have popped up by the dozens in churches, spiritual retreats and public spaces across the country. And the labyrinth's therapeutic qualities have attracted serious interest from health-care providers, giving rise to installations at hospitals, long-term care homes and rehabilitation centres across North America.

The Toronto Labyrinth Community Network lists more than 125 temporary and permanent labyrinths in Ontario alone, many of which have appeared in the past 10 years.

A master gardener and registered horticultural therapist, Ms. Hansen has designed and built six labyrinths on Vancouver Island since 2003 and has another half-dozen projects in the works. Her "pride and joy" occupies the grounds of an ocean-side bed and breakfast she used to own in nearby Chemainus, where there lies an English boxwood replica of the famous labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral in France, which dates back to the 12th century.

Ms. Hansen draws a distinction between mazes, in which dead-end pathways serve to confuse visitors, and labyrinths, which follow a single pathway designed to induce calm and introspection.

"It is a tool for spiritual guidance or healing or meditation," Ms. Hansen said. "Walking meditation; that's one of the easiest ways to describe it."

Perhaps the best-known Canadian labyrinth is a Chartres replica that opened in 2005 in Toronto's Trinity Square Park. In Winnipeg, fundraising is ongoing for a labyrinth project paying tribute to Canadian literary legend Carol Shields, who used the ancient archetype as a metaphor in her novel, Larry's Party.

Anne Nesbitt, co-ordinator of the Carol Shields Memorial Labyrinth project, believes the labyrinth's renaissance is a reaction to troubled times - a way for people to make sense of issues such as global conflict and climate change.

"I think it's because the world is changing so fast and people need a place to slow down and adapt to the things that are happening," she said.

But the resurgence can also be traced to Lauren Artress, a psychotherapist and Episcopalian minister from California.

In the early 1990s, Dr. Artress made a pilgrimage to the Chartres labyrinth in France, which had fallen into disuse. Dr. Artress copied down its dimensions and set about installing replicas at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, where she was canon at the time.

In 1995, she wrote a book about the experience, called Walking a Sacred Path, which presents the labyrinth as a meditative refuge that offers moments of stillness and clarity amid the chaos of modern life.

By putting the labyrinth's ancient concepts in a 21st-century context, Dr. Artress exposed "a whole new population of people" to the movement, said Lea Goode-Harris, founder of the California-based Santa Rosa Labyrinth Foundation . "Prior to Dr. Artress's book, the only books on the labyrinth were very dry and academic. There really wasn't anything applicable to everyday personal experience," she said.

Also in 1995, Dr. Artress founded Veritidas, a ministry dedicated to the "healing, meditative powers of the labyrinth."

Since opening, Veritidas has trained more than 1,900 labyrinth "facilitators." About one-third of those who complete the two-day, $600 workshop, have gone on to become certified labyrinth facilitators by continuing their training with Veritidas and offering workshops in their own communities. Ms. Hansen graduated from Dr. Artress's training course in 2005.

But for some medical professionals, the labyrinth is more than just a fad. St. Joseph's Healthcare in Hamilton, Ont., has installed two labyrinths in the past five years - one indoor and one outdoor - as a therapeutic option for people suffering from mental illness.

Roy Dahl, staff chaplain at St. Joseph's and chairman of the hospital's labyrinth committee, said researchers at McMaster University, which is affiliated with St. Joseph's, are studying the labyrinth's potential as a form of therapy.

"So far, all we really have is anecdotal evidence, but it certainly seems to offer certain individuals help with focusing or relaxing or managing stress," Mr. Dahl said.

For Vancouver Island resident Pat Andersen, the Hansen-designed labyrinth in the backyard of her Duncan-area herb farm offers an alternative to traditional meditation.

"Sitting down and chanting 'om' is just not me. The labyrinth makes you concentrate on walking a path and putting one foot in front of the other," Ms. Andersen said. "It clears your mind of all the peripheral junk."