MEDITATION AND MANDALAS

A few of the meditations in this book use mantras and affirmations. But all 30 are based on the long-established tradition of mandala meditation, using symbolic elements within a design to stimulate healing thought.

Meditation is a time-honoured mind and body practice widely used not only for spiritual self-development but also for enhancing calmness and physical relaxation, addressing psychological problems such as anxiety and stress, coping with illness and generally boosting health and well-being. There are many different ways to meditate, but most have four ingredients in common. First, it is usual to find a quiet and peaceful place with minimal distractions. Second, a relaxed, open frame of mind is taken as the starting point: distractions will inevitably enter the mind, but you let them go without engaging with them. Third, a particular posture is adopted: you might sit (cross-legged or otherwise), walk or lie down, but the position is consciously chosen. Lastly, meditating requires a focus of attention – something on which to concentrate the mind.

This is where mandalas come in. A mandala is a pictorial artwork or graphic design on which you meditate – often a painting, although ephemeral sand mandalas are a strand of the Tibetan tradition. The alternatives to using a mandala are to focus on a set of words or sounds (a mantra), or the sensation of your own breathing, or an object or phenomenon (such as a fruit or a candle flame), real or imagined.

The mandala was originally conceived as a symbolic image of the universe – an imaginary palace of the gods on which the practitioner meditates. Traditional Tibetan Buddhist mandalas feature a confusing array of deities, although in Hindu practice there was also a more geometrical kind of pattern, known as the Sri Yantra. The mandalas in this book are inspired more by the pictorial tradition than the abstract, although in some of the designs there are semi-abstract symbols, as well as naturalistic ones such as flowers and birds.

The popularity of mandalas in Western thinking regarding self-development is, to a certain extent, indebted to the work of the great Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who associated them with a harmonious, integrated personality. Inspired by Jung’s example, mandalas came to be used as tools for inner exploration. The Jungian psychologist David Fontana put it well when he described how the symbolism of a mandala can help an individual “to access progressively deeper levels of the unconscious, ultimately assisting the meditator to experience a mystical sense of oneness with the ultimate unity from which the cosmos in all its manifold forms arises”.

“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

Carl Jung

THE SRI YANTRA

Originating in ancient India, the Sri Yantra is an image of the cosmos at the macro level and of the human body at the micro level. It consists of nine interlocking triangles, surrounded by two rings of lotus petals, with a central point called the bindu. There is a gated surround, known as the “earth citadel”. The downward-pointing triangles symbolize Shakti, the female principle, while the upward-pointing ones denote Shiva, the male principle. The Sri Yantra maps a spiritual pilgrimage in which every step moves you away from limitation and towards pure awareness.

Such a sense of oneness can be achieved by the most profound kind of mandala meditation, which takes you into an awareness of the true nature of reality – an experience of pure being, without any impingement from past or future, rational thought or troubling emotion. This kind of deep meditation, practised regularly, can make you more self-assured and resilient, more focused in your thinking, and more at ease with time, change and the ups and downs of fortune. By reducing stress, it can also make you less vulnerable to a whole range of illnesses and disorders (see here).

Even less intense forms of meditation, in which the mind contemplates a variety of carefully chosen images and ideas, will be subtly beneficial, and in helping to relieve stress will reduce – to an unquantifiable degree – your susceptibility to many of the body’s ills.