I recently came across this wonderful gem of a book: Healing Mandalas, which is of course all about mandalas and their innate healing qualities. Lisa Tenzin-Dolma offers a wealth of information to expand your consciousness and exploration of mandala meditation as the hugely healing practice that it is. Not only are the words a breath of fresh air, but the mandala images themselves are quite stunning, intricate AND calming all at once~ a welcomed surprise in contrast to the few other mandala-themed books I have perused to date. Tenzin-Dolma gracefully shares on topics such as: finding one’s whole self by living in the present, embracing change, and trusting intuition; engaging with others through balancing opposites, fostering freedom, and offering loving kindness; and dealing with challenging times such as grief, illness, and fear. Each visual mandala is accompanied by text suggesting how to meditate on the mandala itself, though the offered guided meditations stand powerfully on their own without the accompanying picture (if, for example, you wanted to share the meditations with a large group of folks and didn’t want to have to make a bunch of color copies of the mandalas). I leave you with the wonderful words of Jung on mandalas, as they appear in the beginning of this beautiful book:
“I saw that everything, all paths I had been following, all steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point- namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation… I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate.”