Creating Mandalas

This book is an amazing way to find out more about yourself and where you are at any particular moment. I teach in a school for massage therapy and this is one of the things I do with my students. We spend a few hours discussing Mandalas and what their significance is and then they create one. It always gives them such great information and it's a great way to chart progress as well. Some of them do mandalas on their own throughout their time in school and we can watch them morph and change. This book gives detailed information, instructions and assements of what your mandala means. I highly recommend it.

A lot of great information! If you want to know about mandalas, get this book. No art. No actual mandalas. Still, the best info I've found.

Susanne Fincher brings you a wonderful, comprehensive and easy to understand book on creating Mandalas and the meaning behind them. This gem of a book explains how to create a Mandala as a reflection of yourself; Creating and Interpreting the meaning behind your Mandala; What each color means in the Mandala; Using numbers and forms. In the section on "The Great Round of Mandala Forms" there is a wonderful paragraph that will better help you understand how much this form of art therapy can help you heal, it states: "A healthy connection between the ego and Self is very important if one is to be a fully functioning person. It is this linkage that is forged by the individuation process." In this wonderful book's preface, Susanne shares that Mandalas are widely used by cultures around the world, such as Tibetan Buddhism, and Native American cultures. She genuinely shares how creating her own Mandala helped her to feel better while suffering through the death of a child. She shares how she uses Mandalas with individuals and groups in art therapy. On a personal note, I learned that if you create a Mandala with the wish or intention for something in your life to come about, and look at it every day, it WILL manifest in your life. I actually tried this, and much to my delightful surprise, what I wanted did come about within a week. Whether you want to create Mandalas for fun, healing, manifesting, art therapy, or just the joy of creative self-expression, this is one of the best books I have found on the subject. Highly recommended! Barbara Rose, Ph.D. author of Know Yourself: A Woman's Guide to Wholeness, Radiance & Supreme Confidence and Stop Being the String Along: A Relationship Guide to Being THE ONE

I bought this book AFTER I had done several mandalas in an art therapy class. I was amazed by the insight of the author into art (and mandalas) as a healing & exploratory tool, and by the extra dimensions Fincher's writing helped me to find in my art work. Using her book as a guide, I'm continuing to create mandalas... and am using her research to augment the interpretation of my OTHER artworks as well. I highly reccommend this book -- especially to folks who want to access and improve upon the instinctive, artistic side of their nature but fear that they "don't know how to draw". You'll find, using Fincher's book, that sometimes simply WHERE you put a blob of color on a piece of paper, and WHAT color you're using is far more important than whether or not you've drawn something that looks "perfect" or "realistic". If you want to learn more about YOURSELF, buy this book. It's a fabulous and fun tool!