Tag Archives: Mandalas and Art Therapy

Artscape 04: Mandalas in texta

 

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For one week (5–12 August 2017), I attended the annual ‘intensive’ meditation and Buddhist philosophy study course taught by the Venerable Gonsar Rinpoche at the Centre des Hautes Etudes Tibétaines  at Le Mont-Pèlerin near Lake Geneva, Switzerland. There are many connections here with Mongolia, an important one is that the Venerable Geshe Lobsang Dayang Thubten Trinley lives here.

The campus is spread over two precincts above Vevey; Rabten Choeling and Les Tassonneyres. Along with many others, for a wonderful and intellectually challenging week, I was in residence there.

I shared a room with Ana-Marie Lordache, an energetic Romanian psychiatrist from Bucharest whose expressed therapeutic modality draws from the principles of inter-subjectivity. She recently established the first psychiatry-psychology clinic in Romania to specialise in trauma therapy—an innovator, to be sure.

Ana-Marie draws mandalas such as these for enjoyment and as reflexive practice rather than as an ‘art therapy’ per se (see Liebmann 2005, Gussak and Rosal 2016, Clark 2017). They also have another function: they serve as multi-coloured backgrounds and screen savers for her iPhone and young family’s other digital devices.

References

Clark, S. M. (2017). DBT-Informed Art Therapy: mindfulness, cognitive behaviour therapy and the creative process. London & Philadelphia, Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Gussak, D. E. and M. L. Rosal, Eds. (2016). The Wiley Handbook of Art Therapy. West Sussex, UK, Wiley Blackwell.

Liebmann, M. (2005). Art Therapy for Groups: a handbook of themes and exercises. Hove & New York, Brunner-Routledge.

Note: To reduce the potential for unauthorised distribution of these original vibrant texta-coloured drawings on paper, I have rendered them here in monochrome tones of black and white. All images are reproduced with permission.

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© 2013-2024. CP in Mongolia. This post is licensed under the  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Documents linked from this page may be subject to other restrictions. Posted: 22 August. Last updated: 20 June 2022.