It’s hard to begin writing from the heart about my practice of making mandalas. It’s such an on-going continuous strand of my artmaking, it feels like I’ve always being mandala-ing...
My initial encounter with mandala-making was in a graduate art seminar, where I was asked to create what would be my first intentional mandala. At that time I had so little experience with Asian sacred artforms, I had to do basic research to find out what a mandala actually was. I learned that it “Mandala” is a sanskrit word for “circle” and that the mandala as an artform is an ancient sacred geometry. It is a means of “wholing”, or connecting with what IS, by making a diagram of it. In many traditions, mandalas diagram origin beliefs, describing the cosmos as understood by the culture from which it arises.
By making my own first mandala, by bringing that circle archetype through my body with artmaking, I created my first map of wholeness, and instantly understood the most basic qualities of a mandala:
• A mandala is a round diagram.
• It has a center, around which all elements are ordered.
• There are different distinct but related parts within the one.
• It forms a container that organically holds this collection of information.
• Everything in it pertains to the whole.
• When complete, it diagrams something about the interconnectedness of all the parts contained within it.
And, most telling of all, the “Aaha!” pieces of information that had come to me as I made the mandala were permanently encoded in my psyche. My body had experienced it, and diagrammed it in a form that was accessible and easy to remember.
Since then, I’ve never stopped making mandalas.
I make them to ground, to meditate, to rest, to activate.
I make them to celebrate, to integrate, to explore.
I make them to heal, to re-calibrate, to re-align.
I make them to offer others the experience of all of similar states, and invite others to make their own mandalas with me.
For more information or to register for mandala events and meditations with Margaret Lindsey, please contact:
All images: ©2012 Margaret Lindsey
No image on this site may be used without permission from the artist.
