Up: [[Symbols]] Related: [[Expressive Art Ideas - Larger Processes]] Created: 2026-04-06 Updated: 2026-04-13 The word ‘mandala’ is Sanskrit for “sacred circle.” The mandala has a long history, and not just in Buddhism. The 12th century Christian mystic, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, created a famous mandala called [Hierarchy of Angels](https://kerrypierce.com/2016/06/3-hildegard-von-bingen/). And before her, there’s plenty of evidence of pre-Christian arrangements of stones in circles. Jung brought forth the importance of the mandala in the work he did, first on himself and then with his patients. See [[Jung was into Mandalas]]. > [!Orbit] [[C. G. Jung]] in *Memories, Dreams, Reflections* > The mandala is an archetypal image whose occurrence is attested throughout the ages. It signifies the wholeness of the Self. This circular image represents the wholeness of the psychic ground or, to put it in mythic terms, the divinity incarnate in man. Pema Chödron gives the most expansive definition of a mandala when she says it is every aspect of our entire life. [[C. G. Jung]] offers something similar in his talk of the centre of the mandala representing [[The Self]] in [[Jung was into Mandalas]]. > [!Orbit] Pema Chödron in *Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change* > Each person’s life is like a mandala — a vast, limitless circle. We stand in the centre of our own circle, and everything we see, hear and think forms the mandala of our life. We enter a room, and the room is our mandala. We get on the subway, and the subway car is our mandala, down to the teenager checking messages on her iPhone and the homeless man slumped in the corner. We go for a hike in the mountains, and everything as far as we can see is our mandala: the clouds, the trees, the snow on the peaks, even the rattlesnake coiled in the corner. We’re lying in a hospital bed, and the hospital is our mandala. Julie Gibbons, the founder of Mandala Magic School, thinks of the mandala as a type of map, a way to *describe our cosmology in symbolic form.* But both Julie and I ultimately prefer the definition offered by June-Elleni Laine who considered the word’s etymology. Mandala comes from ‘manda’ which means “essence” and ‘la’, which means “container.” So **a mandala is a container of essence**.