Mandalas: Discover the “colourful” healing power of the drawings that the psychologist use as a therapeutic tool. Mandalas are beautiful, hypnotic, and magical circles, but they also symbolize the spiritual. The word Mandala comes from Sanskrit and means “sacred circle.”
The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, who was attracted to them, began to use them as a therapeutic tool to promote self-knowledge.
“The mandala is a way to open the doors to the interior of yourself and your inner wisdom; it provides you with a refuge where you feel safe from the external world full of stress and confusion and gives you a feeling of peace, and calm” Jung wrote.
Table of Contents
1. Mandalas Society
“In this society where people live with demands and try to fill the gaps with consumerism, stopping to paint, give shape and colour to a mandala helps channel stress. And when the stress leaves, you lose strength.
The simple act of painting or modelling a mandala brings the mind to a neutral state where the person is absorbed in a void in which everything is possible.
At some point, we realized that painting mandalas made us feel better, both for adults and for the little ones in the house”, says Anna Freijomil, an art therapist dedicated for years to Mandalatetherapy.
Focusing our attention and bringing our mind to a state similar to meditation leads us to is the first form of mandated healing, a state in which thoughts become quiet and emotions, which affect the body.
It favors personal self-observation and helps to fight anxiety and fear naturally.
“Our minds, in general, tend to go from one thought to another.” We tend to maintain a constant internal dialogue that does not usually leave room for silence, so necessary to calm ourselves, reflect, and make good decisions.
That is why painting the “mental silence” that appears while colouring the Mandala is healing. If you also carry out this task with the help of an art therapist, this can help you understand the origin of stress and your lack of peace and to understand things about yourself, ” says Anna Freijomil.
2. Psychological Therapy
“I began to use it as psychological therapy in the seventies when I realized that by the mere fact of delimiting the patient a blank and circular space in which he deposited all the words or drawings that came to mind, it made it easier for me to interpret his states mood and emotional and physical problems.
And creatively, he could see what was in his unconscious”, says Ahimsalara Ribera, author of the book The Healing with Mandalas (Ed. Edaf).
In his book The Healing with Mandalas, he offers techniques and exercises to deepen the knowledge of oneself through the mandalas. One of them is to make a mandala from a question related to the personal issue that you want to solve or see more clearly.
“I believe that focusing attention on a specific question and reflecting on it while making a mandala already makes us delimit the space of where and how the answer is going to be given,” he explains.
3. How You Have Painted, It Can Be Revealing
The way to fill a mandala and the tones used to colour them speak of each person’s mood.
When it comes to colouring mandalas, there are two ways to do it: from the inside out, which means that it is necessary to externalize the emotions, and vice versa, which means that we seek balance and go deep within ourselves.
The choice of more geometric drawings is also related to people who need more orders. On the other hand, the colours used to speak of the mood of each person.
4. Knowledge of Ourselves
The Tibetan, Hindu, Celtic or American mandalas help us relax, but then there are those that each one designs with the idea of deepening our knowledge of ourselves,” says Ahimsalara Ribera, author of The Sanction with Mandalas.
Ribera proposes to choose the colours with your eyes closed. Once we have finished the Mandala, please spend some time observing it with an introspective look, what evokes us, what shapes predominate, what colours are repeated. Put it into practice in the mandalas that we propose then. 8 What can you learn from it?
Some therapists attribute meaning to each colour that is used in the Mandala. “From my methodology, not only each colour has a specific function, but also the place where this colour is placed in the Mandala has a meaning.
So; In some cases – depending on what we want to modify – it is more advisable to use primary tones (red, yellow and blue); in other cases, the secondary colours (orange, green and violet); or the tertiary ones, which are the sum of two colours plus a third,” says Ribera.
Some of the possible meanings associated with each colour, although this varies depending on your experiences and your imagination:
5. Meanings Associated With Each Color
- WHITE: Symbol of emptiness, purity, and enlightenment
- BLACK: Mystery, limitation, and blocking.
- GRAY: Renewal, neutrality, and wisdom.
- RED: Vitality, passion, sensuality, and fertility.
- BLUE: Helps to relax and induces calm spiritual satisfaction and joy.
- GREEN: It is associated with healing, with a calming effect. It is related to sensory, nature, balance, and hope.
- YELLOW: Sun, light, and receptivity. It is related to the intellect, and that is why they say that it is useful for work environments, as it stimulates creativity.
- ORANGE: Provides vitality and energy. It expresses tenderness, courage, warmth, and joy.
- PURPLE: Love of neighbour, idealism, and wisdom.
- ROSA: Femininity, altruism, and sweetness
6. The Origin of Mandalas
“In Egypt and China, mandalas were placed within certain places to change their energy. Thus the idea that the Mandala is a healing, meditative, and balancing element reaches our days,” says Ahimsalara Ribera, author of the book La Healing with Mandalas (Ed. Edaf).
This type of circular structure mandalas of repetitive and fractal composition is also closely linked to the ceremonies of the Tibet region as a healing ritual and instrument of mystical contemplation.
“And everything that is and is represented within this circle is sacred, protected and empowered,” adds Anna Freijomil, an art therapist dedicated for years to Mandalatetherapy.
