I am taking a Grief Release Workshop at the local yoga studio, which meets on Monday afternoons for four sessions. The instructor’s goal is to show us ways to honor and let go of grief and break the cycle of stuffing it down, talking about it over and over, getting stuck in a loop where we hold the grief in our bodies, minds, and spirits without ever letting it or our ourselves progress.
Yesterday, we explored a form of meditation that gives one something to do: we created colorful mandalas. Not being Tibetan monks with a lifetime of study and several pots of sand, we used markers, crayons, and pencils and pre-printed mandala outlines from the internet (click to enlarge):
Most of the mandalas were overtly feminine, with butterflies and flames and lotus flowers, arranged so you could just get away with pretending not to see the sacred feminine unfolding within. (In other words, most of them looked as much like vulvas as any flower ever painted by O’Keefe.)
Horsegirl on a Journey 