When Eve Hogan and her husband, Steve, purchased their 3.8-acre Upcountry Maui property in 2005, they had no idea it would one day be a mecca for visitors seeking peace, rejuvenation and inspiration.

"When our Realtor showed it to us, the owner had been living on the mainland for at least seven months, so all the plants were in really bad shape," Hogan said. "The ones in the greenhouse were dead, and the plants outside were overgrown."

The couple considered tearing down the 10,000-square-foot greenhouse, but a "voice" began planting seeds in Hogan’s mind about the wonderful things that could be done with it. "At first I balked," she said. "I told ‘the spirit’ that I was a speaker, author, relationship specialist and wedding officiant, not a horticulturist, but it got louder and more insistent. When I finally stopped resisting, the Sacred Garden began to take shape."

With the help of what Hogan calls "divine guidance," she started a nursery in the greenhouse; constructed lotus and water lily ponds; acquired sacred images, including a 5-foot-tall, 600-pound Buddha carved from a single piece of monkeypod wood; and created a seven-circuit, 21-foot-wide labyrinth in the greenhouse and an 11-circuit, 36-foot-wide labyrinth outdoors in a grove of kukui trees.

"I see labyrinths as blueprints of the human soul," Hogan said. "We all have a ‘sacred center,’ so we don’t have to look outside of ourselves to access that source of wisdom, strength, creativity, compassion, intuition and other spiritual qualities."

According to Hogan, everyone also has an "ego mind," which relates to the twists and turns of life — love, career and finances. Problems arise when people identify so closely with those things that they forget their sacred center, which is really the essence of who they are.

"Walking the labyrinths and practicing being in the present allows us to access our sacred center and quiet our ego mind," Hogan said. "When we transcend the ego and align with the spirit, we experience peace and gain a wealth of skills and perspectives, which we can then use to manage the drama associated with the ego mind, rather than succumb to it."

Unlike a maze — a game offering choices of paths that might lead to dead ends — the labyrinth has a single path to and from its center. This path symbolically leads the labyrinth walker to self-discovery, then back out, enlightened, into "real life." Labyrinths are found around the globe; the oldest examples date back 4,000 years.

"As you walk the labyrinth, be observant," Hogan said. "For example, are you impatient? Are you thinking, ‘How long is this walk going to take?’ Free yourself from that and other thoughts that take you away from being in the moment. Focus instead on what you’re seeing, hearing and smelling right then. As you let go, you’ll feel more peaceful. Being peaceful and in the moment provides the portal through which we can find our spiritual essence."

As she immersed herself in developing the Sacred Garden, Hogan recalled famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who supposedly would construct a complex and wait for people to populate it before he put in paths. By doing that, he built the paths where people walked instead of making people walk where they were built.

"I love that concept, and that is basically what happened with the Sacred Garden," Hogan said. "I watched how people ‘walked’ in the garden — how it was being used. I noticed that they came to read, grieve, pray, sketch and write in their journals. The Quakers asked if they could hold their Sunday meditations in the garden. Other groups, including schools and senior citizen centers, wanted to use the garden for classes and meetings."

In 2011, Hogan established the Divine Nature Alliance, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, to operate the Sacred Garden as a nondenominational sanctuary. DNA spearheads several community programs, including Project Grow, which teaches participants how to cultivate sustainable food plants such as taro and sweet potato.

Garden visitors can picnic beside a stream in the shade of kukui trees, or in the greenhouse, surrounded by plants and tinkling wind chimes. Free activities include daily self-guided labyrinth walks; monthly full moon labyrinth walks; the Folk Song Circle every third Saturday of the month at 3 p.m.; Sunday morning meditation from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m.; and Art in the Garden Fridays, when visitors are invited to write, paint and enjoy other creative pursuits all day.

"Being in nature is one of the best ways to be nurtured and to connect with your inner being," Hogan said. "At the Sacred Garden, walk a labyrinth, lie on the grass beneath a tree and enjoy the beauty and fragrance of a tropical Eden. At the minimum, a visit will bring you peace. For some it will be a magical, awakening, life-altering experience."

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Cheryl Chee Tsutsumi is a Honolulu-based freelance writer whose travel features for the Star-Advertiser have won several Society of American Travel Writers awards.