Art & Entertainment
All crazy about Mandalas
Mandala, Medicine Wheel and the wild acceleration of the first two decades of this century.
The first two decades of this century showed up under the sign of a frantic acceleration.
It seemed that our time, both the exterior time meant for action and the interior time for being, was more and more exiguous. We have been engaged in chasing something over and over again.
We have been living with the feeling we could never get to do all we wanted to do.
We have been living with anxiety and stress, wildly running breathlessness.
But running to go where?
So, we sought relief in meditation, in bioenergetics and long walks in contact with nature. And also in the power of mandalas, of course. Mandalas during the last twenty years have been particularly loved, reproduced and re-proposed.
"Mandala_Om" by MandalaShaula
I can remember that, during the 90s of the last century, while I already was very confident in knowing and using mandalas, I used to have really hard times each time I decided to introduce them during my growth and awareness courses. It was so evident that many had never even heard that word!
Today practically everyone knows what they are, and everyone is attracted by mandalas.
But, much more recently, the lockdown came and, as in the game "red light-green light", we suddenly got stuck, in the place where we were at that precise moment of our life, a place where, perhaps, we had arrived by chance.
On a Monday, (March 9, 2020 in Italy), our crazy race was stopped. Not so the anxiety, stress and breathlessness we used to live with: they still went on to gallop within us.
Anxiety about not knowing and not understanding exactly what was going on, stress about not being able anymore to draw plans for our future, breathlessness trying to lead "normal" existences in an absolutely exceptional situation, loaded with very heavy and challenging energetic flows.
And here it is… An extensive flowering of mandalas, everywhere ...
As a matter of fact, we can see them more and more often.
Why? I believe it is easy to guess.
"13 Moons Mandala" by MandalaShaula
The space of mandala is made of order, based on simple and precise geometric rules.
Symbolically, it helps us to identify the relationship between our interiority and exteriority, to re-evaluate their connections, to rebalance them.
Intuitively, we feel that that order- based on circular movements, both centrifugal and centripetal - stimulates our eyes to a continuous movement from inside to outside and vice-versa, bringing us closer to our essence and giving us the right perspective on our exteriority.
The mandala, making us repeatedly change our point of view, helps us to activate our interior observer, it opens our mind in a creative way, and points out opportunities and solutions otherwise not so easy to get in touch with.
A well-made mandala is full of colours…in balance; it is full of harmony and it conveys these qualities to us. A well-drawn mandala is charged with energy and joie de vivre, and helps us to recharge and find positive momentum when we feel we have lost our path. When the burdening question marks of exteriority make it difficult to perceive any encouraging idea for the future. Mandala also recalls the concept of circular time, according to which our soul lives and evolves, with a very different rhythm from the linear time, that is just an instrumental invention of a very narrow part of our mind.
Circular time is based on the natural periodicity of all events: it is the time of the alternation between day and night and among the seasons. It is the time of complementary energies that create the movement of life and evolution.
It’s also the time of the "Medicine Wheel".
Furthermore, mandala reminds us that complementarity, and not duality, is the keystone for living in harmony and appreciating every single situation.
It reminds us that we can value the light because we have been living in the darkness, and we can enjoy summer, because we went through the winter. It teaches us that everything is useful and everything is precious, and everything leads us exactly where we are supposed to be.