I am on a journey of emotional discovery and it has led me to making mandalas.

I thought I was building a peaceful life for myself and discovered, with help from friends Bonnie & David Rowland and then Diane Munro, Gloria Marshall, and Theresa Gregory, that what I had done was to cut myself off completely from my emotions.

I then met Bert Weir who could not be more the opposite. He has studied and painted his emotions all his life and can not imagine even the possibility of being able to shut them off. Learn to control them? Yes. Not know what they are? Never!

I have come to the point of knowing that I am feeling something but not necessarily knowing what it is or its source. Ellen Kohnecki suggested using mandalas as a way of expressing what was brought out by doing yoga. I found this worked for me at any time. Bert gave us a lesson on how to get our emotions down on paper and I worked out how to use my computer to be able to quickly use those drawings to create mandalas.

The original drawing is quite often a revelation in itself. Working through the mandala is a therapeutic process and having even anger and fear turn into beautiful patterns helps with acceptance of ones' whole self.