Are you a doodler? Have you ever drawn mandalas ?  I had a very busy week full of medical and laboratory appointments and I spent hours traveling between them. While sitting in waiting rooms I began to doodle and produced several mandalas. My girfriend who was visiting and chauferring me between appointments got into the act as well.

“Mandala” is a Sanskrit word which lossely translated can mean circle, polygon, community and connection representing wholeness. They are a geometric compositions, symbolizing spiritual, cosmic and psychic order. Hence they can be seen as a models for the organizational structure of life itself as they are cosmic diagrams depicting our relationship to that world that extends both beyond and within our bodies and minds.

The mandala pattern is used in many religious traditions from ancient Aztecs calendar and Taoist “yin-yang” symbol to sand mandalas created by Navajo Indians and Tibetan monks to demonstrate the impermanence of life. — What is a Mandala?

Mandala (Sanskrit maṇḍala मंड “essence” + ल “having” or “containing”. It is also often translated as “circle-circumference” or “completion”, both derived from the Tibetan term dkyil khor is a term used to refer to various objects. It is of Hindu origin, but is also used in other Indian religions, such as Buddhism. In the Tibetan branch of Vajrayana Buddhism, they have been developed into sandpainting. In practice, mandala has become a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the Universe from the human perspective.

In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing attention of aspirants and adepts, a spiritual teaching tool, for establishing a sacred space and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. Its symbolic nature can help one “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. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw the mandala as “a representation of the unconscious self,” and believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to identify emotional disorders.

Zendalas- How to Draw a Mandala Zentangle Style

Gratitude Mandalas – Blog Short 2

View also:
http://thistimespace.tumblr.com/post/311544915/new-year-mandalas-art-as-meditation
http://thistimespace.tumblr.com/post/309015609/mandala-transitions

If you aren’t into drawing in the round or into drawing at all. Even if you don’t use photoshop  you can create a depiction of connection using layers of images like this one (click image to enlarge).