First Mandala for Intro Workshop
Meditation and Mandalas is a workshop developed from my own experience of daily meditation following by mandala creation and then journal writing. This has been a powerfully healing and releasing experience for me, and I began to realize that it needed to be shared widely as a means of self-healing and self-therapy.
As I started on this journey of meditation, some 40 years ago as a way to stay sane in a life where sanity was barely possible, I would use the hour long bus ride from my home to downtown Ottawa as the time during which I could use the skill I had learned from a book on Transcendental Meditation. I had not taken the class, but in the book I realized that just by using a mantra (I used a just a simple word) that was repeated over and over, I could become very calm, and stop worrying and obsessing over the parts of my life, and our lives over which I had no control. I have since realized that this practice has improved my mental functioning, relieved stress, provided self-healing and self-therapy, enormous feelings of peace and calm, improved sleep patterns, as well as helping me to make healthier decisions. Of course, over-all with this type of practice, I have become a healthier, happier person, as my body now is being given the opportunity to heal itself.
This practice was continued and continues to be practiced, if not daily, at least a number of times each week, and as I do my Quantum-Touch therapy, I am in that relaxed state, as experienced in meditation, throughout each session.
The Mandala part of the practice, began somewhat spontaneously as something I had always thought I would like to do, but I couldn’t draw anything, so I had given up. I then began to find material that demonstrated to me that it was not the perfectly symmetrical drawing that was important, it was the part of me that was engaged when I created the circle with a paper plate, and the colours, and textures that came into play as (from the deep place within) I began to allow the pencils, markers, or crayons to move into my hands, and then to create lines upon the paper.
I began to realize how powerful this process was, when, upon returning from an audit trip to some city in this country, I had the most incredible urge to just toss my luggage and to get onto creating my mandala. I sat in stillness for a while, and then gradually felt the urge to put the plate upon the page in my journal. I moved my hand over to the pile of markers, and simply took whichever one seemed to jump into my hand. With eyes, not quite closed, by squinted to simply keep my focus on the paper, I began to allow the marker to create the circle around the plate. Then that marker seemed to be complete, so I moved my hand over to the pile and allow another marker to choose to be the next one..
This process continued as tears began to fall and I sensed that the drawing was complete, yet I was not finished with the process. I sat with my drawing for some time, and just allowed my being to express whatever it needed to express, then put my image away and finished my unpacking and getting on with the returning home process.
There is much more to this story, but that was the beginning of putting the mandala process into my meditation process, and to thoroughly enjoy the journey.