Sacred Circle

At the beginning of the new school year I enrolled in a one day workshop on teacher stress relief. We spent the day on four types of stress relief: Sitting meditation, walking meditation, mandala meditation, and yoga. I really enjoyed the class and one of my favorite parts was the mandala meditation. I had never heard of a mandala before, so I was curious to learn more about it. Here are some of the things the teacher told us.

For thousands of years, cultures throughout the world have drawn from the circular inspiration of nature in snowflakes, planets, cobwebs, flowers, faces, and seashells as cosmological symbols of the sacred, archetypes of wholeness, and instruments of healing.

Carl Jun discovered the healing benefits of the mandala in his practice of psychotherapy. Just as meditation can bring on the relaxation response, when breathing and heart rate slow down, so has drawing or coloring mandalas been proven to produce a similar response.

There is no wrong way to draw or color a mandala, only one's personal way, which becomes an important metaphor for the journey of the Self. Often we will choose a special symbol to experiment with in the drawing, such as circles, spirals, triangles, or crosses, then begin in the center and expand on that shape or combining a few as we move outwards from the center. As a pattern evolves, we reflect on what the image may be attempting to communicate from our unconscious mind and soul, taking care to not overanalyze. The beauty of a truly sacred mandala lies in any lesson learned from the process of creating and reflecting on them as we carefully open a small window to the soul.

The picture that you see is actually my mandala. I had so much fun creating it and it was very relaxing for me. I am not an artist, but I found that art therapy seems to work wonders for me. And I also learned that the colors and placement of my mandala tell a lot about my emotional life. Things I don't just tell people. The teacher pretty much analyzed me from what she saw in my work. I would like to explain some of what she told me. She said, "spiritually is important to you because you used a strong dark purple in the center of you mandala. Everything is centered on your spirituality. The pink color in the top right part of the circle shows that you feel vulnerability in a relationship. The black to the shows that you are holding on to something in that past, something that has really upset you. But you will move past that because you have so much positive energy in the rest of your mandala." She also mentioned that I might feel overwhelmed because I had smudged the color outside of the circle.

If you have read my blog from the beginning, then you would know how dead on she was in her analysis. Since then I have made a few more mandalas. I'm thinking about taking a color theory class. I just find it amazing to see how art can tell a lot about a persons soul.

"The sacred circle mirrors an illumined state of consciousness through a symbolic pattern--making the invisible visible."
- Judith Cornell, PhD., Mandala: Luminous Symbol for Healing