For those who keep company with us through this Journal, we thank you! Through the years, I have discovered expression of my spirituality through drawing Mandalas which offers endless possibilities. If you are curious about the name mandala, it is an ancient Sanskrit word than means sacred circle and it is steeped in imagery. For me the circle is symbolizes God, there is no beginning and there is no end, of spirit eternal and Love unending. The center radiates pure spiritual light and union. It is here that we are born and set out on our Journey in life, each following our own unique path and at journey's end return in union with our creator.
This beautiful quote from the book “Black Elk speaks describes the circle well.
“Everything the Power of the World does s done in a circle. The sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars.
The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again. In a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where The Power moves.”
— Black Elk, Medicine Man of the Oglala Sioux Nation.
Mandalas often have cardinal points which represents the polarities that exist in nature. For example, North/ South, night/day, winter/summer, chaos/order, or fire/water. Everything engages in a movement forward and a movement away in the cosmic dance of life. Although each element has an opposite, there is no ultimate separation as all is interdependent and co-exists to create the fullness of life. In this way, mandalas offer a process of integration and harmony as one begins to live in awareness of how our differing parts are necessary in creating our wholeness. We begin to see that the shadowy more fragile parts of ourselves are to be approached tenderly and with loving kindness and acceptance .
Pema Chödrön offers this perspective, “Each person's life is like a mandala- a vast, limitless circle. We stand in the center of our own circle, and everything we see, hear and think forms the mandala of our life. We enter a room, and the room is our mandala. We get on the subway, and the subway car is our mandala, down to the teenager checking messages on her iPhone and the homeless man slumped in the corner. We're lying in a hospital bed, and the hospital is our mandala. We don't set it up; we don't get to choose what or who shows up in it. It is, As Chögyam Trungpa said, "the mandala that is never arranged but is always complete." And we embrace it just as it is. Everything that shows up in your mandala is a vehicle for your awakening. From this point of view, awakening is right at your fingertips continually. There is not a drop of rain that appears in your life that isn't the manifestation of enlightened energy, that isn't a doorway to a sacred world.”
As a spiritual art form, mandalas allow for meaningful expression that can be shared with caregivers. Contained within a mandala is the macrocosm of our vast universe and the microcosm of a human life as an interweaving our connectedness to each other and of something greater than ourselves.
I leave you with this inspired vision. "There I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy. But anywhere is the center of the world."~Black Elk
Liz Sorensen Wessel
Mandala by ~liz
