Teaching Mandala Doodles is easy.

I’ve given dozens of workshops and talks over the years and I’m usually super nervous. But getting ready to teach people how to doodle mandalas and a little about the history of mandalas feels like second nature.

I’ve known for years that I want to spread the word of how life changing creating mandalas can be just like my mentor and friend Merry Norris taught me.

When the time was “right” I suppose, the process literally popped into my head and I wrote it down. It involves compasses (you know, like you used in grade school), rulers, pencils and a few little lotus petal stencils that I made.

By getting my students to immediately get hands on with tools they know , it’s an easy transition to get them to trace and then draw and color on their own.

It’s so much fun to watch the familiar head scratching, eye brow squishing process as people grab their pencils, compasses and rulers and then transition to gleefully grabbing colors and markers as their mandalas come to life! An hour or two later as the workshop comes to a close, everyone ignores my “time’s up” announcement and exhibit the “selective hearing” of a 5 year old who doesn’t want to come in the house and stop playing!

While this may seem like kids’ play (well, I guess it IS like kid’s play) – it’s been proven that doodling is integrating your creative and thinking selves (right and left brains) and putting you in a meditative and awake state that IS activating your creative and intellectual powers at the same time.

The mandala has been known to be a powerful symbolic art form that activates your inner self in an awake and meditative state, working out things in your subconscious without your conscious awareness of it. I talk a lot more about this in my book, Activate Divine Creativity: The Life-Changing Magic of the Mandala