Mandalas for Healing in the Crossroads Story Program: Empowering At-Risk Youth

Lesson One: What are Mandalas

The word mandala is Sanskrit meaning circle. They are large sand paintings made by Tibetan monks. They can take up to seven days to create. Prayers or meditations are chanted throughout the process. The monks use their fingers and tiny funnels to handle the colored sand.

At the end of the seven days, the artwork is destroyed. Anyone fortunate to be present at this time is given a bit of the sand, like being able to take a piece of the prayer. The remaining sand is thrown into a body of water with ceremony. The water then carries the prayer. Each mandala is usually made up of concentric circles. These circles include gates that represent north, south, east and west. I have seen them worked from the inner self out or the outer self inward to the center of self. When I do these with the youth, we usually work inward to find self and the gates represent different stages of life.

http://tinyurl.com/yaktun4
http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online/mandala/mandala.htm

Mandalas Lesson Two: the Outer Circle

This is lesson two in creating a mandala with the girls in my group home program. We drew three concentric circles on our boards. Each circle will have four gates lined up with each other for easy passage. The outer circle’s gates will be your birth gate, your dream gate, your metaphor gate and the gate that brought you to the place where you are now. We began by spending the first two weeks listening to stories with strong metaphors, discussing metaphor and identifying a personal metaphor or archetype.

1. Think of an object, animal or story character (not by name but by type such as little girl, witch, etc.) The girls chose piece of paper, caged bird, Turtapillar (turtle and caterpillar combined), snakadilla (armadillo or snake combined), and I chose a warrior.

2. Why did you choose that metaphor? Paper can be written on, I like to sing and I am caged, a turtle can hide in its shell for protection and a caterpillar is ugly but will become a butterfly, an armadillo can roll into a ball to protect itself and a snake sheds its skin and is new, I am a warrior because I need to fight.

3. How can these metaphors be helpful to you? How can they hold you back? A piece of paper can be written on or crumpled, a turtle has a place to hide and carries its home with it but if he never comes out he cannot eat or anything, a caterpillar may be eaten by something else, an armadillo is slow moving, a snake may bite others, a warrior can become overly hardened by war.

4. We did a visualization. The girls closed their eyes and I asked them to see a door before them and notice they have a key in their hands. They were asked to open the door and find a special tool on the other side of the door. This tool is just for them and their metaphor to use on the journey toward self.

In creating this outer circle, you can make the gates elaborate and also decorated the circle outline. The more decorative, the more interesting. If using sand, be sure drawing is large enough.

The Metaphor Gate: This gate will be where you draw your special tool(s). This represents the entrance that you other self can use to journey inward.

The Birth Gate: When we are born, we are a clean slate. All the possibilities of life lay before us. Some of us may have beautiful paths with everything we need along the way. Others may be missing a parent or both parents and feel lonely on their journey. Some may be born to abuse and poverty. This birth gate is open to us and we must enter but we do not have to stay on that path forever.

The Gate that Brought US to Where we are Now: This gate represents the path that brought us to our current situation in life. It may be an event that pushed us here, or a person or people who helped us get here.

The Dream Gate: This gate represents that path you would choose to travel someday. It is not looking back and wishing things had been different. Instead it holds the promise of our future.

Mandalas Lesson Three: The Middle Circle.

The Middle Circle (not the center one) is one that we used as a next step toward achieving a better understanding of self and in our group’s case, a step toward achieving our goals at each outer gate.

The Objective is to get the youth thinking about the many possibilities their lives could have taken at any given moment to empower them to take a proactive role in changing their path to be successful in obtaining what they really want in life. This was done by making them think about what was available to them at birth, what brought them where they are, who they are now, and what they would like to be in the future.

This middle circle brings them closer to self by asking them to consider what they went through in each of those initial gates (Metaphor, Birth, What Brought Them Here, and Dream).

Do they have a straight path to center from birth?
Did they have to break through a wall?
Were they incarcerated, addicted to drugs?
Do they feel in control or out of control of their lives at this time?
Where do they want to be and what is needed to get there, education, money, a job, a support system?

The girls were really forced to think beyond the past and the here and now. They had to look at layers of self-discovery.

Mandalas Lesson Four: The Center of Self

Self is something we cannot achieve until the end of our days, unless we are completely devoted to this discovery. I don’t really recommend this devotion to my groups as they are still in egotistic stages and I feel they need to mature to the stage of thinking of others more than themselves before they should begin looking inward again.

Discovery of self is not the same as ego, in fact it requires setting ego free and being unattached to self.

For the very center circle in our mandalas, I asked the girls to draw something that represented openness. They chose flowers, onions, eyes, and geometric.

The girls will be asked to tell about their creations on our last night. Using art is the way I have found they open best to telling the story of who they are and where they have been. They can do this safely through their artworks, it helps keep them at a distance and separate from the emotions attached to their stories.