Creating A Mandala Provides Guidance and Clarity

The women around me designed and painted beautiful intricate mandelas while I worked with basic forms—two circles, one heart and a couple of colors. Like a school kid, I caught myself feeling inadequate amid their talent. And then I shook it off.

The purpose of this workshop wasn't to create a work of art. The purpose was to create a mandala whose elements and design would give me clarity about my life purpose and guide me in how to show up in the world.

Before we started designing our mandalas, the workshop facilitator led us through a guided meditation during which the symbols, colors and essence of our mandalas surfaced. My symbols and their colors were clear white circles and a red/purple/pink heart. Themes that bubbled up during the meditation were wholeness, radiance and expansion.

I placed a circle (wholeness) within my heart, and my heart within another circle, the wholeness of life. I added the feathers, which my husband gathered on our travels, because for me they symbolize soaring, expansion and vision. My husband also invited me to select stones from his beautiful collection. In the center, I placed an amethyst, symbolic of divine connection. Many of the stones in the outer circle also have powerful spiritual qualities, but the stones' overriding significance in this mandala is the quality of being grounded or anchored within the unity of all life.

After I completed my mandala, the message became clear. When my thoughts and actions are heart-based, I am whole—aligned, centered, connected and grounded —within the wholeness of life. And when I am whole, I am radiant and expansive as I express my purpose with the ease and grace of a bird riding the thermals.

The design using a heart, two circles, stones and feathers is simplistic, but its powerful message is a work of art to me.