Make a Sand Mandala

Make a mandala!  Get a tray of fine "sandbox" sand, and at a craft store buy colored sand.  Take a turkey baster, remove the suction end, and use the tube as a funnel for drawing with colored sand on the surface of the regular sand.  Tap the tube gently to get a smooth flow of colored sand.  Or take a paper funnel or paper cone water cup and cut a 1/8" hole at the tip, fill it with colored sand, and tap the funnel gently over the sandbox to get a smooth flow. 

Begin making the mandala with meditation.  Observe your thoughts, emotions, sensations, and urges.  Attend to your highest and best intentions.  Watch your breath.  Then begin, and see what emerges on the sand.

The word “mandala” is Sanskrit for “circle”.   It is a tool for meditation and prayer in many different world religious traditions.  Generally, mandalas are visual portals into contemplative spirituality, facilitating the integration of inner experience into a harmonic whole.  In the Vedic religious traditions originating in India, it takes many forms, including Tibetan Buddhist “thangkas” and sand mandalas.  In Christianity, the rose window of a cathedral is a form of mandala.  Christian mystics like Hildegard of Bingen created mandalas to constellate visually the spiritual states to which they aspired.  Navajo Native Americans use sand to create mandala-like images to invoke healing and inner harmony.  A similar practice is found among the Aboriginal people of Australia.  The Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung studied mandalas and painted them as part of his own spiritual practice, and Jungian transpersonal psychology continues this tradition.

Jungian Sandplay:  In Sandplay psychotherapy, the client chooses objects and figurines to place in a diorama in a box of sand, while the analyst watches nearby in respectful silence.  When the client is finished, the client and therapist discuss what was created in the sand.  Developed by Swiss Jungian Analyst Dora Kalff, Sandplay is a form of therapy that gives both child and adult clients the opportunity to portray, rather than verbalize, feelings and experiences often inaccessible and/or difficult to express in words.  Sandplay helps maintain a place of internal integrity as well as a sanctuary for contact with the symbolic world out of which can emerge a healing experience.

Godly Play - http://www.godlyplayfoundation.org - is an imaginative approach to Christian formation and spiritual guidance, primarily with children, influenced by the Jungian tradition of psychotherapy.   One of its modalities is the sand tray, in which the leader uses unpainted wooden figurines to act out Bible stories – asking the children to finish the story as they wish, using the figurines in the sand.   It approaches the Bible stories as myths with great spiritual power and meaning that can be creatively interpreted and appropriated by the child.

(My office hosted a group of Tibetan monks, who made a mandala in our Fishbowl Room at the USC Office of Religious Life.  I watched them create it over the course of a week, and then watched as they ritually destroyed it in an elaborate ceremony.  As I watched them sweep their creation away, I wept for mother, who had died the week before.  After 88 years of creating her life, it was swept away like the sand of the mandala...)  Then I wrote this poem to mark the moment:

 

Rasping a brass stick across grooves on a narrow brass funnel full of sand,

A monk, leaning over a table, listening to a recording of deep, throaty Tibetan chants,

Deposits a few grains at a time onto an emerging symmetrical pattern,

Ordering the soul's cosmos into an intricate mandala.

Across from him, another monk in a robe of cardinal and gold

Rasps out a tiny line of a different colored sand, reflecting a pattern etched in memory.

It takes a week, or an eternity, depending on how and if one counts,

Moving from the inside out in four directions bounded by a circle. 

Students arrive on their beach-bikes, lock them up outside,

And give themselves a minute to observe the monks,

But end up staying longer - half an hour?  an hour? - lost in the sand,

Vibrated away from assignments, test anxieties, computer screens,  

Smart-phones, schedules, and expectations.

The mandala focuses them on the universal here and the eternal now, 

On a constant indefinable center surrounded by change.

Reaching the outermost circle, the monks lay down their brass funnels,

Don their golden crescent head-dresses,

Lift ornate brass horns to their lips, 

Close their eyes to chant from the bottom of their voiceboxes,

And wave their whisks through the ordered sand in spirals of release: 

A creation including its dissolution, 

A creativity embracing its impermanence.

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM     Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
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Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California