“The Mandala drawing is a representation of one’s own thoughts and its associated processes” – this I read somewhere and this idea kind of stayed with me.
A few months back, I took the first step in learning it properly from a beautiful soul, Elsa. And all through her classes, she taught me the precise way to draw concentric circles, mark angles and make space to draw the patterns in my own way. She made such an impression on me that precision was the key to doing mandalas. And her mandala drawings are great examples of the precision she talks about. Of course, there is always an interpretation to her mandala and she does it with ease and beauty.
My journey in the path of mandala drawing started after the classes. I watched and learnt many new patterns and techniques from others too. But I was still a novice in the way I used those patterns in my mandala.
And instead of stressing on how to draw mandalas which is an interpretation of something or a pictorial representation of a thought process, I just let myself to relax. I told myself that I will attend to any spark of thought that I receive from my mind and then take it forward.
I didn’t get to relax a lot. There were some sparks and some representations of them in my mandala drawings. The recent one was I wished to represent the Marigold flower in my mandala. I didn’t know what led to that spark; probably yellow is my new favorite and flowers are my new found love in nature!
The reasons apart, I gave in to the spark and started the work on my pictorial representation of marigold.
I drew petals and filled them with floral patterns and kept filling it up in my favorite yellow. In my excitement to draw more petals, I messed up one whole concentric circle. And instead of getting worked up on the mess I created. I filled it up with yellow and that filled me up with joy.
I forgot to draw the double line border in one circle. Another mess up. But I carried on and filled it up with floral pattern and yellow color.
In one petal on the outer most circle, I seriously messed up, filled it with whitener and then realized that yellow color didn’t stick on the whitener and this mess up was very evident. I still carried on and kept filling that yellow, wherever I could.
And then the borders of mandala faded and the marigold took over it all, which led to those free lines of yellow around the mandala. I felt absolute joy when I did those strokes of yellow with slashes of light brown and gold.
I felt complete with the mandala.
As always, I try to draw parallels.
I am like this mandala – I have messed up many a times with relationships. But that didn’t stop me from making new relationships, for I kept filling that space of relationship with love and more love.
Many decisions that I have taken have not been great ones.
Many times, my words were too much and there were times, when my silence was too much!
Many of my experiences stressed me a lot and were blocking me from moving forward.
There were times, when my expressions were not an absolute representation of what I felt because it was so intertwined with my emotional blocks!
And just like this mandala, I worked on it, taking one circle at a time. The past two months have been great that I worked on identifying my blocks and helped myself to clear them too. It is still going on and I am loving the “me times” where I work on this!
I used to be like these patterns – always following a strict adherence to rules and regulations. May be, it helps to relax the rules and go with the flow! I am learning to take it easy!
If you have read till here, I hope you see me in all the different shades that I express myself. The key point for me is that these drawings help me to see myself in those shades and be very accepting of myself and continue to love myself too!
