Mandalas

My kid's yoga class and I have become intrigued with Mandalas.  The whole thing started as an enrichment activity.  My class is part of summer school, and is two hours.  Two hours is a long time to do yoga with kids, so I've infused story telling, art, and discussion of the yamas and niyamas to the class.  We simple began by coloring some mandalas.  We found it was easy to color mindfully, because of the symetrical patterns.  We then did a mandala meditation.  One girl said that she visualized sending her mandala to all the people she meets.  We then looked at pictures of Tibetan monks making sand mandalas.  After those mandalas are completed, the monks simply sweep the sand back together, and place the sand back in the river, as a meditation on impermanace.  We were all amazed by this, but none of us has been able to tear up our mandalas just yet.

More mandala information from Wikipedia -

Mandala (Sanskrit maṇḍala मंड "essence" + ल "having" or "containing". It is also often translated as "circle-circumference" or "completion", both derived from the Tibetan term dkyil khor)^[1] is a term used to refer to various objects. It is of Hindu origin^{[citation needed]}, but is also used in other Indian religions, such as Buddhism. In the Tibetan branch of Vajrayana Buddhism, they have been developed into sandpainting. In practice, mandala has become a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the Universe from the human perspective.

In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing attention of aspirants and adepts, a spiritual teaching tool, for establishing a sacred space and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. Its symbolic nature can help one "to access progressively deeper levels of the unconscious, ultimately assisting the meditator to experience a mystical sense of oneness with the ultimate unity from which the cosmos in all its manifold forms arises." ^[2] The psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw the mandala as "a representation of the unconscious self,"^[3] and believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to identify emotional disorders and work towards wholeness in personality