FINAL MANDALA

Coincidence is when God chooses to remain anonymous

This picture was originally posted by mistake as a test for a new photo website I am checking out and before I realized it was there, some of you received notice by feedblitz. I have since removed it and am now posting it with the full story, thanks for the inspiration I received from Leena in Moscow!
I was attending a Yoga and Meditation workshop in February 2006 and during the workshop we were all to get together and make a Mandala….all of the symbols have meaning in Tibetan Buddhism as do the shapes, directions etc., but I honestly don’t remember what are.

This is a picture of the unbelievable Tibetan Manadala we made at that workshop in February 2006. We started with a blank white piece of cardboard and ended up with this fully completed Mandala. Here are pictures of the Mandala in progress as well as of the most important part, the brushing away, teaching us the importance of non-attachment and impermanence of everything in this life. It was probably close to the most amazing thing I ever took part in in my life to date and hope I will be privileged to do it again. It is all made from colored sand which we poured using little funnels made from pieces of plain white paper as you may be able to see. There were 7 of us and it took us the better part of 2 days to complete and about 2 minutes to brush away. Much like cooking a wonderful meal over a couple of days and then having it all eaten in 1/2 hour! It was most satisfying and we were all quite surprised that we actually did it...as were all the other people staying at other workshops at the Kibbutz we were at.

At any rate, the person in charge, the yoga instructor’s husband, explained what we would be doing and my initial reaction was “No WAY I am doing that”. But in the end, I seemed to have been drawn to the group of “senior” women, hunched down on the floor with their haunches in the air, ove a white plastic like board, holding self-made funnels of white paper in one hand and gently tapping with the other. They were using these funnels to gently deposit colored sand, grain by grain into pre-drawn spaces which were made on the blank white plastic page using string and thumbtack for drawing circles and rulers for the lines. Each space, no matter how small, was lovingly filled with the chosen color of sand, agreed upon in advance by different “teams” working on opposite sides of the Mandala at the same time. At one point I simply found myself drawn into this group and eventually the tap-tap-tapping with the finger on the funnel to release the sand became almost hypnotic, and the need to stop an intrusion. I found myself completely in the moment with my whole being …it was quite an amazing experience…what could be called by Maslow and “peak experience” in life. So I want to thank publicly to two wonderful people who made it possible for me, Sue and Ed and also to relate the following incident which is just an interesting “coincidence”. I remembered that the same week of the yoga workshop was also the Kalachakra teachings in India with HH the Dalai Lama. They were held in Amaravarthi and Tibetan Buddhists came from all over India to attend, the main tent holding over 100,000 at a time. I received a lovely e-mail from a friend with the subject line “mandala”(!) where he described how he was fortunate enough to get a quick look at the Kalachakra mandala which the monks had been working on and chanting over all week just before it was dispersed…He says it was about 3 meters by 3 meters or maybe larger. It was the same day and almost the same hour as when we brushed “ours” away yesterday. There has GOT to be some significance to this “coincidence”…