Creating Inner Peace
Updated: Sep 17, 2022
A creative exercise to find inner peace and self-compassion in a creative community.
Letting it Flow with Painting and Drawing Prompts
Creating Your Essence and Seed within a Mandala
When I want to return to a place of calm, I have several activities to turn to. One of them as you might have guessed is painting. On Friday afternoons, I attend a painting class taught by friends in an online international group. This week it was taught by Judy in Hungary. Today I learned about mandalas that have Indian/Buddhist origins, often spiritual in nature. Our assignment: paint your essence. Include a seed in your painting. Mandalas are circular, so your essence must be contained within a circle. Use any colors that speak to you. Time yourself for twenty minutes to paint or draw what best represents your essence. While painting, listen to classical music or anything calming. In our session we listened to classical, namely Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, one of my favorite pieces.
After the assignment ended, the rest of the artists commented on the artwork about what they thought it represented of the artist who created it. After this part ended, the artist had a chance to explain what the piece meant for them. Each of us artists knows each other through our online meetings in the past year and a half since I joined. One of them I met in person, Alessandra in Italy when I went to Rome this summer on an art scholarship.
I painted this watercolor this afternoon. What it represents is the chakra and how each one interacts within my being. Japanese characters surround the mandala which Alessandra taught me in August. I chose the most important ones: sun, moon, heart, soil, tree, water, and fire. I don't have a favorite color; I feel influenced by purple. I didn't like how the colors were blocks so I used a technique learned at Rome Art Program to blend them more cohesively. In my life chakras blend and sometimes I experience too much or too little of one when they're unbalanced. What would your essence look like if you created your own mandala?
© Amanda L. Mottorn, 2021. Author of Finding Moksha: One Woman’s Path in Uncertain Times and Artist at Modern Moksha Designs & Publishing.