Mindful Mandalas 10 Day Drawing Challenge

1. Mindful Mandalas 10 Day Drawing Challenge: Mindful awareness and meditation. It's becoming a pretty trending topic but it can be that elusive thing that you wonder, how is everyone doing that? Are they really sitting still and how do you quiet your thoughts and be in the moment? Well, get yourself some paper and pencil and I will show you just how simple and beneficial this being present can really be. Hi, I'm Jane. I am a creative entrepreneur, author, and teacher. I like to design in both textiles and in illustration, and I also enjoy teaching yoga and meditation. Through the years, I've listened to many of my student's and client's stories of their experience with cultivating mindfulness, how they like to create space for themselves, to unwind, what calms them, and what works best for them. Their experiences, as well as my own, have helped me develop these simple drawing techniques that I'm sharing with you in this class. Using basic shapes and simple exercises on noticing, we'll use the activity of drawing to create a space to unwind, relax, and become present in the moment. In less than 15 minutes a day, I'll walk you through the process of developing a simple daily practice of drawing for mindful awareness. By the end of Day 10, we'll have created a beautiful mandala tile work, and we will have explored 10 different techniques for developing deeper awareness of yourself and your surroundings. You may recognize some of these techniques from yoga practice, meditation, or even simple relaxation classes. In this class, I'll share how I use them while drawing. Each day starts with a short introduction to the mindfulness technique of the day, then I'll trace along with you in real-time while I share some insights on how to use the technique with the drawing as your focal point, then I'll finish up the day's lessons with some drawing techniques showing you how I draw the same mandala we just traced using only the grid. When you've completed the challenge, you'll have a whole library of techniques and tools to create your own regular daily mindful drawing practice. Practicing daily will eventually make these techniques second nature and benefits will start showing up in other areas of your life. You may experience better focus and you may find you're retaining more information, you might find that your stress levels have decreased, and you may find you're sleeping better. Over the long run with practice, there are endless benefits to our mind and to our body. Come and join me for 10 days of simple drawing ideas and mindful activities, and you may be surprised how easy this being in the moment can really be. I'll see you in class. 2. Mindfulness: We take on a form of meditation or mindfulness whenever we do an activity that we love. We become lost in the process. We lose track of time doing something that we enjoy and it brings us into the present moment. The traditional sense of meditation is sitting with a clear and relaxed mind, usually with a focus on the breath and you're inwardly focused. Mindfulness is more about being in the moment and also using the senses so that you're present but you're aware of everything both outside and inside. Either way, just slowing down our minds enough so that we just start noticing and becoming more aware of our outer environment and our inner environment is my goal in this class. We have so many ways of interacting with the world, but we tend to focus just on one or two senses at the most, usually sight and sound. It's a noisy world we live in and very visually stimulating, but if you take these away, would it bother you? Would you know how to experience the world differently? Isn't it best to get your information from multiple sources before making decisions, like all five or even six of our senses, instead of just one or two? By doing what I call mindful activity, which is just using a repetitive action as a focus, we may notice the very subtle environment around us. We rarely take this time and then we find ourselves saying how and when did that happen? Or we find ourselves blind-sided. Life does take twist and turns but how we handle those has a lot to do with how well we know ourselves, how we react, what our patterns are, how we feel on good days and on bad days. Drawing has very meditative qualities. There's the repetition of simple shapes. There's the feel of the pencil on the paper. There's the flow of the lines. There's the paper as a focal point and the drawing itself as a point of focus. It's a very quiet activity and there's just enough activity to keep that monkey mind focused. Some of the benefits of mindful awareness will be, you may find you have better focus, you may find you're retaining more information. There's usually a decrease in your stress levels. You may find you're sleeping better and often, it gives you new perspective on how to solve problems. You're able to step back far enough to see things differently. You'll probably find you have a calmer disposition. My wish for you is to use the techniques in this class to create a space for yourself where you can become more aware of how you interact with your world and cultivate new ways to experience it. 3. What To Expect and Supplies: So what do you need for this class? Well, supplies are pretty simple, pencil and paper and just a space to draw. It doesn't really matter where. You don't have to have a desk, you can sit on your lap. I do a lot of my drawing on a clipboard wherever I am. I take it with me, I'll sit outside. I'll just find somewhere in the house that I want to just curl up with my drawing and that's where I'm comfortable. Usually the most comfortable place is your best place to draw. I've provided you with printable downloads of the worksheets, you may print as many as you like to use in your regular drawing practice that you'll be developing. There's four worksheets all together. Worksheet 1 is a light version of the finished design, and I'll be using this one through the mindful section of the lessons where we'll be tracing our design as a focal point. You don't have to think about the drawing, you can just follow along what's in front of you. Worksheet number 2 is the dark version of the finished designed to be used under a blank page if you prefer to work this way, instead of directly on the page itself. Just place a blank page over top of the worksheet and just secure it with a little bit of tape so that it doesn't shift around when you go to move and you lose track of where the grid should be under your page. Worksheet number 3 is a light version of just the grids. I'll be using this one through out the drawing section of each day where I show you how to draw the Mandala from scratch using only the grid. Worksheet number 4 is a dark version of the grids, this is placing again underneath a blank page so that you can use the grids as a guide through the page and you can create your design without the grid lines being in your finished piece. Each of the ten days is laid out with three videos. First, I will introduce you to the mindful technique we will be using and any other props that may be helpful for that day. So again, just a pencil and papers generally all you need, but there are certain senses that might be helpful if you could bring something along, such as a cup of coffee or a scented candle. Second, I'll start with a breathing exercise and reminder to release any body tension you may be feeling. This is just a simple breath in, you'll breathe in. Slight pause at the top of the breath, and then you're going to release the full breath out, and you're going to roll your shoulders back, you're going to release any tension in your jaw, in your arms, in your hands, anywhere you might be holding it in your body. This is just to bring more into the moments so you're ready for the exercises. So I'll trace the Mandala design along with you in real time, while I provide ideas and how to use the mindfulness technique of the day. The drawing will be our focus point that will give us a place to keep coming back to when our mind starts wandering off. Third, I'll show you how I draw the mandala we just traced using only the grid. This part of the lesson, we'll focus more on the technical side of the drawing, discussing simple shapes and the layout. Ultimately, I hope to share enough of my process that you will be able to tailor your own daily practice of drawing your own designs using the grids, while also practicing the mindful techniques of your choosing. I'll discuss more ideas on how to do this at the end of the class. For now, just grab your pencil and your paper and follow along with me. 4. Day 1 - Breath: Welcome to day one of our Mini Mandala Challenge. We are going to focus today on noticing our breath. We are using the drawing as our focus tool to notice. To notice things about our body, our mind, our behaviors, our patterns. So throughout this whole challenge, that's what we're using the drawing as a focus tool. Normally, the breath is used as a focus tool. In yoga or meditation or any relaxation exercises, they tell you to focus on your breath, and that's the constant. But today we're going to use the drawing because I'm going to show you how I use these Mandala drawings. You use the drawing as your focus, as your main home base that you keep coming back to, just to notice your breathing, notice the shape of your breathing, notice the patterns of your breathing, and just notice that you are breathing. Then once we notice how we breathe in and the different patterns that we have, then we can use the shapes to change that. Why would you want to change that? Well the short of it is that when we're stressed, we tend to breathe shallow and from our chest, and when we're relaxed, we tend to breathe deep and long and from our belly. By becoming aware of our breath and the way that we breathe, we can actually learn to change that with practice and learn to calm our body and our mind down intentionally. Today, we're just noticing how we breathe, the patterns of our breath, and then playing with the shapes to see if we can alter that just a little bit. Let's get our supplies together and get started noticing our breath. 5. Day 1 Breath Tracing: We're ready to start mandala number 1. Now you're going to need a printout of worksheet number 1, so have that in front of you. That's the one I'll be using in this lesson. We're going to start by taking a deep breath in and then we're going to release it back out. You're going to roll your shoulders back, release any tension in your jaw, and we're ready to start drawing. Again, in this one, we're going to be tracing the design because I don't want you to have to think about where the shapes go or how to format the mandala. We're just using what I've already drawn as a focus point so that we can focus on our breathing. Let's get started with these little petals in the center. Most of this mandala is done up as circles because I find it easy to use a circle. It's a perfect shape for learning to notice and to learn to start to control your breath. But I love these little petals in the center. They're like elongated circles. Let's just start making these little petals to get ourselves warmed up. Once we have these petals finished, we're going to start in on our circles. We're to be noticing our breath and like I said before, we're not trying to change it right off the bat. Just as you follow around the circles, notice how you're breathing and maybe draw in the same rhythm as your breath. You may find that you're drawing slowly or you may find that you're drawing quickly depending on how you're breathing. The circles are really helping you start to notice the pattern of your breathing just as it is. Just notice it as is. Try to make your drawing follow your breath instead of the other way around at this point. That's what we're going to work towards. But at the moment, just circle with one breath in and circle with one breath out. Or maybe you can get two circles in with one breath. Just notice the pattern of your breathing as it is right now. With these larger circles, we can notice it in a different way. Where we did the small circles, maybe we needed one or two of them to an in-breath. With a larger circles, you can take a breath in as you circle up and down as you circle down. Or maybe you want one complete circle in, one complete circle out. Just follow what your breath is doing right now. Just even notice and change the speed of your drawing to match your breath. It's nice to work with the different sizes of circle because they allow you to explore your breath differently. The large circles let you explore the in and out on one circle. You can draw it as slowly or as quickly as you want, but the idea is to slow down your breathing. I find naturally as I draw, my breathing does slow down and I think that's natural for anything that calms you. Now we're going to do this next circle of circles and again, we're back to the small ones. Here I can do two circles for an in-breath and two circles for an out-breath. Now you want to start maybe moving your breath to the speed of your drawing. We're trying to change up our breath a little bit. Instead of just noticing, now we're going to try to change it. We're going to do two circles in and two circles out. Try doing that for a little bit. If you want to lengthen it even more and you're already up at two circles, may be put in a third circle and then you'll go three circles out. Again, the speed of your drawing is something you can completely control. If you want to see the difference between putting that third one in, maybe speed up your drawing just a little. Then the other option is to have a pause at the top of the breath. You would put two circles in, pause for one circle holding your breath, and then release for two circles. Gives you a lots of things to work with. This is really similar to the breathing we do in meditation and breathing we do in yoga. We're going to finish this last outer circle with all the little bean circles. Because they're small, we can do four perhaps for the breath in or you can aim for that. The other thing is you can do four, just speed up your drawing a little bit and then start to slow your drawing down once you get the rhythm and your breath will follow. Breathe in for four, hold for one, and breathe out for four. You can make whatever pattern you want. Use the circles as a form of counting and for focus so that you're not getting too caught up in what you're breathing is doing because if it's new to you, you don't want to actually create anxiety in your body that you're like, "I can't control my breath and I don't know how to do this." No, just focus on the drawing. Just come back to the drawing, let the breath go. Then once you feel comfortable again, start to notice your breath. You're just always coming back to center, always coming back to the drawing. The drawing is your home base and it gives you something to just relax into. I've done all the circles in this mini mandala and now I'm just going to show you, I'm going to add in some lines. We work with the lines the same as the circles. We can breathe in as we draw one and breathe out as we draw one. We can work in whatever direction we want. Right now I'm working from the outside in. But I can turn that around and work from the inside out and I can do them all the same and I can draw two per breath. It's up to you. Use the lines to count your breath and focus. Then I have the lines out here. Let's say I draw one out and one in, so you can breathe in that way, drawing slowly. I'm drawing a little quickly here because I don't want this lesson to go on forever for you. But I'm giving you the idea. Perhaps you could do one breath for an out and an in line or you could draw two lines out, two lines in, whatever makes sense to you. Just use the lines and the drawing to help you focus on your breath. Now you've learned how to use your drawing as a focus for noticing your breath patterns and also to change up your breath patterns. You can continue to practice this. Print out more of these sheets if you want and keep working with your breath. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to draw this mandala just by using the grid. I'll see you there. 6. Day 1 Drawing : So now we're going to try drawing this first Mandala on the grid from scratch. So we're going to be working with worksheet number 3, which is the light colored grids and we're going to draw directly on the paper. We're starting with a blank grid in front of us. This is when all possibilities lie in front of us and we're going to draw this from scratch. We're going to start at the center and we're going to draw a simple little petals, and the petals are going to fit the little triangles that are at the center of our mandala. So all you have to do for this one is follow the triangle and round it at the top so that it creates a petal, and you'll end up with this cute little flower at the center of your mandala. Sometimes the hardest part is just getting the first shapes onto the page, which we've done. Now I'm going to move to this next circle. I'm going to jump up to this one and just create little wee circles. I'm going to make them magnetize to that line, but they're hanging underneath it. They're just small circles, one per section. So you just got to work your way around the entire mandala. So bear with me. Sometimes I call them mandalas, sometimes I call them mandalas. My pronunciation changes. I use both terms. These simple circles are the easiest shape to get on the page and the more you draw them, the more they flow, so don't worry about them being perfect. They're far from perfect and they're really not meant to be. The beauty in these hand mandalas are the imperfections in all of your shapes. So moving on to this next circle, let's add in more tiny circles all the way around the rim of it. This time we're working on top of it instead of underneath it. Still putting in small circles, but we're putting two in per section. Again, don't worry that they're perfectly sized to each other. However they fit, the first one goes in and then the second one just fills up whatever space is left. You're not trying to stress yourself out with these mandalas, you're trying to relax yourself. So enjoy drawing the shape and as we did in the other one, use the shapes with your breath that calms you down and gets you out of your head so you stop thinking about whether your circle is perfect or whether it's lopsided. That part doesn't matter. What matters is the feel of doing these circles. They are perfectly joined shapes and they are not perfectly round, and that is the beauty of them. You'll get the hang of these circles by the end of this class because I use a lot of them. The next thing we're going to do is fill in this space in between. So as you build your mandala, you'll start to see- You can jump outward and inward and leave spaces blank because eventually, you'll see what you want to put in there. So I'm putting large ovals to meet both of these round circle rings that I've already put in. So these are some nice big circles and they just fill up the space perfectly. You work your way up one side, rounded at the top, and work your way down the other side, rounding at the bottom, and just keep working those all the way around. Once you decide on a shape, the nice relaxing part of these mandalas is the repetition. It's like you've already made the decision, now all you have to do is complete the shape all the way around in as many places as it will fit until you've reached all the way back up to where you started. So we're filling this up quite nicely and fairly quickly because circles are great way to fill in spaces. Up here, I'm just going to draw some lines to divide these sections again. So each section is getting a line up the middle that comes from the center of the two circles that I drew in the section. Again, you can see my lines are by no means straight. They're just in there to divide up the section again, because I'm going to add another ring of circles in. The lines themselves are very relaxing to draw and very simple to draw. You're just drawing it straight up and outward so that you have these sections divided again. Now I'm just going to go over the lines that are already there because I could have done that first but it doesn't really matter what order you're doing these things in either but I have decided I want these lines also. It doesn't really matter whether you use the grid lines as part of your design or just use them as a guide. Some of them I will trace in because I want them in the design and some of them I leave out there's simply a guide for where I put my circles. This outer ring is going to be tiny circles and I'm putting two. See how as I move outward, the circles are staying not too, I'm not going too much bigger or too much smaller, but more of them will fit. So now I am putting two of them into each of these sections and I'm going to work my way all the way around the ring. This is the part I love to show people that it's so simple to make these out of literally two shapes. We're doing circles in this one and we're doing lines. We did do petals at the very beginning. But I often think because the flower's so small, they are like stretched ovals with the point at the end. I do have, in some of my classes, I go through the basic shapes I use. I think there's like six total. All six of those in variations of them are how I make my mandalas. So I don't get too into complicated shapes and complicated designs, I really just keep adding in the shapes, and people will think, oh, that's such a complicated design. No I think, it's just a layer and layer of shapes and more layers of shapes, and they're all really simple shapes. I'd like to show people that you can do an entire mandala out of circles and lines, and maybe a few petals and you get a really beautiful design out of it, and it feels so good to draw. So it's not just about the finished product, it's about how it felt so good to draw the mandala. Now I'm just going to add in a few lines back at the beginning because I think I want those in there to complement the designs that are in the outer ring. And there you have it, your design is complete. You have drawn your first mini mandala. I hope you had fun with that, and I'll see you tomorrow on day two. 7. Day 2 - Thoughts: Welcome back to day number two. I hope yesterday that the drawing helped you notice the way that you're breathing and the patterns that you have, and maybe you even were able to use those shapes to start to lengthen out your breath and change up some of your patterns. Today, we're going to use our drawing as a focus again. But today we're going to notice our thoughts, just random thoughts again, just noticing. Not judging them, not hanging on to them, not even trying to stop them, just noticing our thoughts. Again, we're using the drawing as our home base. The mini mandala will be what we keep coming back to and we're just going to notice our thoughts. We're going to be like somebody sitting on a park bench watching the people go by. So your thoughts are just like the people walking by, you're not going to engage with them, you're just noticing them, don't judge them. Just bring your attention back to the drawing. Again, the drawing is your home base, and we're just going to notice the pattern of how our random thoughts go. How far down that path through we go before we notice that we've gone off on some tangent, and how is it changed the way we feel. What we want to do is just notice that we do that. That's all, no judging, no trying to change it, any of that stuff. We're going to use the drawing and we're going to notice our thoughts today, and we're just going to have fun just like we're sitting on a park bench watching people walk by, except they're going to be our thoughts. Get your supplies together and let's go watch your thoughts. 8. Day 2 Thoughts Tracing: Welcome back to day number 2. We're going to continue working with worksheet number 1 and doing our tracing. Again, let's start by taking a nice deep breath in and then releasing it back out. Releasing the tension in our jaw and rolling back our shoulders. Let's get started. Since we're tracing, you can really choose to start anywhere you want on the Mandala that you're drawn to. But I like to work from the inside out. So we're going to start with these petals in the center and just start warming up our hand. Today we're going to notice our thoughts and just notice we're not judging them. We're not trying to stop them. Thoughts are always running through your head. That monkey mind is always working its monkey nest and you are never going to stop but those thoughts necessarily. We're just going to notice, just like sitting on the park bench watching those thoughts go walking by. We're going to use our drawing as our focus to keep bringing us back to home base. These spirals are really fun to work. You can usually start anywhere that feels comfortable with them but I like to start on this edge, work my way around in a circle and then continue on into a spiral. These spirals, really they're my favorite shape, but I think it's because they keep my mind really active and they're good for focusing on. A lot of people find sitting and meditation or trying to quiet the mind has the opposite effects because your mind just gets more active as you have less to do. The thing that the drawing does is that the mindful activity and it acts like a disruptor to your thoughts in the sense that it brings you back because you can find yourself way down a path with a thought before you even realize that, here I'm thinking about something and I'm not in the moment. The drawing brings you back to the present moment and as we're going through all these, we're using all the different senses and the different mandalas to show us different ways to bring us back to the present moment. Again, today we're just noticing these thoughts. We're noticing how many we have. We're noticing what we're thinking about. We're noticing how quickly they go on down a path that we haven't even caught what we're doing. I really love these spirals. I would put them in everyone of my mandalas. Let's work this next outer circle of tiny circles. I do too large circles and then I follow it up with three small circles, so it's a different pattern. Again, your drawing acts as a disruptor. It's enough of a pattern that you have to pay attention in the moment. But you can still notice what's going on around you or what's going on in your head. The drawing brings you back to the present moment because most thoughts are either in the future or in the past of something in the future or something in the past. So you're thinking about something you think might happen or you're thinking about something that did happen. In the moment, none of that really matters because in the moment you're right here drawing, and that's what the drawing does for you. It brings you back. So you might be thinking about circles you're drawing right now. That's an in-the-moment thought. Otherwise, you're just going to notice what's the pattern of my thoughts? What is my go to? Do I think about things coming up? Do I think about things that have already passed and there's nothing you can do both those right now? So back you come to the drawing. Now we're just going to finish off this mandala with these nice long oval shapes that are easy to draw. The nice thing about the mandala is that by switching up the patterns as you move outward, you bring yourself back into the present moment because you have to learn the new patterns so that acts as a disruptor to your thoughts so that you can come back to the present moment and start again. So you're always noticing your thoughts, letting your thoughts go, coming back to the present moment and that's the gift that these mandala drawings do for you. Here we have mandala number 2 finished. In the next lesson I'm going to show you how to draw this from a grid. I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Day 2 Drawing : Welcome to day 2 and we're drawing our second mandala using just the grid. Again, we're going to be working on worksheet number 3, continuing on and working on the second mandala in the second grid. Let's get starting using our second grid and drawing right on the paper. I'm going to start in the center of my mandala again and I'm going to use petals one more time and I'm going to stretch them this time. They're going to go out to the second circle and then back in. Again, you start at the center point, follow the lines out round the tops, and you're going to end up with these petals. I'm only doing them in every second section, so I'm spacing them out. Then we go right around until we get back to where we started. We have one more here. There we go. We created a different kind of flower using the same shape. We just stretched our petals out a little more and space them out this time. Moving up to the next section, I'm going to put in some spirals. If you did the tracing part, you'll know how these are shaped, but I'm going to show you here. I start around the middle of the line and I create a complete circle in that shape and then I continue on into a spiral. Now I'm not rotating my paper to show you these because I want the paper to stay still so you get the idea. I also don't want to make you dizzy. But when I do draw these, sometimes I'll just keep rotating my paper so then I'm always drawing the shape in the exact same direction. But I can rotate the paper. But here I'm challenging myself a little bit in keeping the paper still, so I have to keep changing the way that I'm drawing this. I pick a spot on the line which is right here and I draw a circle around and continue into the spiral. I'm always doing it the same way and I'm creating a pattern with my hand so that I don't get mixed up and spiral them the wrong way or start them in the wrong place. We'll finish the last one here in the last space and those are my spirals, my favorite shape. In the next section, these large sections here, I'm going to start by just putting in two circles into each section and making them small, so they're just riding on the top. I'm going to leave a space one section in between, I'll fill that later. I'm just going to do these two circles and work my way around and I'm going to keep skipping a section. Again, you're developing patterns with your hand. Once you develop the pattern, you can just go ahead and continue on and you'll do it automatically pretty much. Just remember to skip the section and on to the next. Now in that little section, I'm going to fill in with three little circles. Different than how we did it when we trace it. When we traced it, we just traced everything we saw. As we build the mandala, I put in sections and then I'll go back and fill in other sections. I don't have to do them in any logical order, I just do them the way that they feel best. In this case, I left that space empty to see what I would like in it and I decided I wanted three small circles in between my two larger circles. See it created a beautiful little pattern and I did it in what I call layers. Again, I'm going to fill in the top half of these sections with these oval beans. These are just going to fill. They're not going to touch the circles and I'm just going to go around using the top edge of the circle as my guide for the top of the bean. Starting my bean, I usually start them in the same place each time so that I'm developing that pattern with my hand. I can try a little different spot here. I can try starting them on the top, I can try starting them at the side. Doesn't really matter where as long as you find a consistent spot really helps you make a consistent shape. If I always start them in the same place, the shape will come out very similar. There we go. We finished mandala number 2 and I hope you had fun with it. We'll move on to day 3 tomorrow. I will see you there. 10. Day 3 Gratitude: Welcome to day 3 of our mini mandala challenge. Hope you're having fun drawing these little mandalas and also learning to notice things about yourself. The cool thing is that we all interact with the world differently. We're all going to notice different things about the way that we interact. We're going to notice that we have strengths where we may interact in a certain way that works for us, where someone else will work differently. Our noticing is what's important and we're trying to notice about ourselves. Today, we're actually going to learn about gratefulness. We're going to use the drawings, the mini mandalas to focus in on something we're grateful for. Gratefulness can be a game-changer. I know a lot of people say, "Oh yeah, whatever, I'm grateful for stuff." But when you really, really hold it at the front of your mind, it can change your mood, it can set your tone for the day. It can lift you up out of a grumpy state of mind. Learning to work that grateful muscle really can make a difference in the way that you interact with your life in your day-to-day experiences. What we're going to do today is we're just going to pick one thing we're grateful for. It can be anything, simplest little thing. It can be the mug of your favorite beverage that's sitting in front of you. It can be the sunshine coming through the window. It can be a smile that the neighbor gave you today when you went out to get the mail. It can be anything that just lifts your mood just a little bit, and that's all we're trying to do. Is just focus on that lifting the mood a little bit. As you draw, you might find other things come into your mind to be grateful for and that's okay too, but don't go searching for them. It's not the point of the exercise. What we want to do is just use the drawing as a focus again to just hold the thought in our mind. Yesterday we did random thoughts and we just let whatever thoughts come through. Today, we're actually going to form the thought of something we're grateful for and we're going to hold that thought while we draw, keeping our focus on everything that surrounds that particular grateful thought. Grab your supplies and let's get going on mandala number 3. 11. Day 3 Gratitude Tracing: Welcome back to day number three and today we're going to do gratitude. We're going to be working with our worksheet number one, still continuing on with the third mandala. Let's start by taking a nice deep breath in and then releasing it back out and releasing any tension we have in our body in our arms and our shoulders and in our jaw, let's get going. Today, we're going to focus on gratitude. So in our drawing here you'll notice I've put these little hearts in to help us focus on our gratitude. Let's warm our hand up by starting with some of these petals. Yesterday we allowed random thoughts to run through our head and we noticed them. Today, we're choosing a thought. We're choosing a thought of gratitude and it can be our cup of coffee, it can be the sunshine coming through the window. Doesn't matter what the thought is, as long as you choose one that lifts up your mood. When we feel gratitude our mood changes, we feel lighter, we feel happier. You're going to choose a thought and you're going to hold that thought throughout the drawing. Again, we're using the drawing as our focal point and it keeps us coming back to center, while we hold a thought of gratitude in our mind. Let's notice how this feeling of gratitude shows up in our body, does it relax us? Does it allow us to release some tension? Does it lift up our mood? You're allowing the drawing to slow you down so that you can notice these things. Now, you may find that your thoughts are wandering, but you can set that tone that's fine. My thoughts can wander and they can wander to other grateful things. Now, that you've set the tone for gratitude, maybe notice if your thoughts are wandering through other things that you're grateful for and that's good because in some sense now you've set the tone for your thoughts and they're not just random thoughts anymore, they're now thoughts of gratitude. Now, on this next part of the mandala, we're going to work on the hearts and that's also going to help focus ourselves on the thought of gratitude. As we draw the hearts, again, we bring up that feeling and that thought of gratitude, something that we are grateful for. Many people believe that when you wake up in the morning, the first thing that you think about sets the tone for the day. Often in the habit-forming ideas, they say that as soon as your feet hit the floor, think of something you're grateful for and that will really change the direction of your day. It's a really good habit to get into, to focus on a grateful thought. Our drawing today is helping us do that, it's helping us slow our mind down enough, we can hold that thought of gratitude. This is often a really good practice to do first thing in the morning if you want to do your mandala, as you have your cup of coffee and you just hold something you're grateful for and draw your mandala and that's like your morning ritual. Or you can make it in a nighttime ritual just before you go to bed, you draw yourself a nice mandala just slow down and get yourself ready for a nice night sleep and you finish off the day with something that you were grateful for that day. That's a really good practice to use with this mandala. Again, the drawing itself just allows you to come back to center and it brings you back to the thought of gratitude. If it helps, you can write that thought of gratitude out on a piece of paper beside your mandala, so that when you find your thoughts starting to wander, you can just take a glance over and go, "Oh, right. That's the thought of gratitude that I want to think about," and then you get back to your drawing holding that thought. That's mandala number three and in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to draw this just using the grid. I'll see you there. 12. Day 3 Drawing : Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to draw the third Mandala using just the grid. We're going to continue on, on worksheet number 3 and now we're working on to the third empty grid. Again, I want to start from the center of my Mandala. This time I'm just going to put a little circle in the center and then my petals that I'm going to create, I'm going to do another petal version in the center. But I'm going to work them starting the point at the first circle and ending at the second circle. We still have a petal shape and as you can see, I'm forming the petal around the dotted guidelines, and then I'm only using the dotted guidelines. Again, the point starts at the first circle and then we make a petal shape going up and ending of the second circle and coming back down again. There we have different kind of flower in our center, little more spacious. Now, we're going to put some circles around the second circle rim as we've done in the past just putting one per section all the way around. My favorite part of these guides is that they take away the guesswork, so you know exactly how big each of these circles should be and where to place them, so that you get an even number of them all the way around the center. Now keeping with the theme of our circles, we're once again going to do circles around this next outer circle. I'm going to put two into each section. We've done this before. This is familiar to you and I'm showing you how you can use the same ideas in different mandalas and get different looks. This is a great place to start. I actually find the circles really calm me down and they warm up my hand and then once I've got this all in place, then I can think about what else do I want to put into this design? Sometimes I like to challenge myself and see if I can do an entire mandala with just one shape and I've done it with different shapes. It can be fun as well because you only have one shape to work with. Now, that I have these circles all the way around, I'm going to put something in between the two circle rings and because our theme for this one is gratitude and we call this mandala the gratitude one, I'm going to use hearts. We haven't done that shape yet. The guidelines are really important here because they helped me make my heart symmetrical. I do one-half of the heart on one side of the line and the other half on the other. I'm skipping over only using the dotted lines again, just like I did for the petals. The petals are pretty much half of a heart and then you just put a petal on the other side and they join in the middle. So there's a bit of a slant to them, but the shape itself is much easier to do. I think I'm going to put in little hearts here. They complement the big hearts, they don't overwhelm, it's not too much. The other trick in drawing these mandalas is you can use the same shape but put them in different sizes and it creates a whole new pattern and a whole different design. Now, I have two different sizes of hearts in there and the guidelines really helped me place them. Now, we have these nice big spaces up here and I'm just going to fill it with one big circle each all the way around. It's almost a really nice relaxing way to finish it off because I get this nice big shape. There's something satisfying about drawing these nice big circles and filling up an entire space with them. I did say you get lots of practice with circles and by the end of day 10, you're going to have a lot of circles. They are the most relaxing shape to draw if you just go with it. Don't worry about them being perfectly round or lopsided, just enjoy the feel of drawing them. To add a little bit more in here, we're going to put these little bean shapes inside the circles and we're going to do that all the way around and they're going to be very different. Each of these little bean shapes will have their own character and that's okay because it gives the whole drawing a beautiful imperfect look that the hand drawings have. Shapes within shapes is a really great way to add in more detail to your design in a simple way. Now, we have our third mandala all drawn. I hope you enjoy it today and I will see you tomorrow. 13. Day 4 Sound: Welcome to day 4 of our Mini Mandala drawing challenge. Today we're going to start working our way through the senses. On day one, we did the breath, day two, we did our thoughts, day three, we did gratefulness, and today we're going to start working through the actual senses. Today we're going to start with hearing and sound. What we're going to do is use the drawing again as a focus to notice the sounds in our environment. I'm not going to set you up with any particular sounds today, I'm going to suggest that you just work with your natural environment. You don't need to be in a quiet room, all you need is just to find a little quiet space for yourself. It can be in a room with other stuff going on because we're just going to notice the sounds that are happening in our environment. You can go outside if you want if you'd like to have some nature sounds, or you can stay inside and listen to what's going on in your house. Again, we're going to use the drawing to focus on noticing the sounds in our environment because we tend to have a lot of noise going on in our lives these days. It's a pretty noisy world, and we also have become really good at tuning out, some more than others can really tune things out as a matter of survival. Sometimes it's the only way to keep yourself calm is to learn how to just shut out all those sounds. But while we're in our own little safe environment here, or perhaps you're out and about somewhere, let's just try and notice all the sounds, and you might be surprised at what you're missing. Usually, when you notice these is when you're alone in the house at night, that's when you notice the sounds that you've never heard before, but they've always been there. It's a fun experiment to see what sounds am I really missing? You're taking the time to slow down and notice and that's what the drawing is going to help you do. It's going to keep you focused in the moment and we're going to use the drawing of the shapes. I'll show you again how I do that to notice the things in your environment. Going forward, this one's really useful because other things you can do with it, but we won't do this time, is you can listen to instrumental music, and it's very soothing, and you can put that in through headphones. Or one thing I have found in the past is if I'm listening to a TV show or an audio, I don't even realize sometimes what I'm hearing, but the next day when I pick up my drawing, I can remember the whole show or remember the whole plot, or I remember the recording or the podcast I listened to. It actually does something with your mind that it opens it up, it expands it may be because it keeps you in the moment. You actually retain information better if you have a focus point to work on, and I find that my drawing in Mini Mandala says it has done that for me all along. That's kind of a fun little thing to use going forward. But for today, we're just going to notice the sounds in our environment. Find yourself a nice little space to sit down with your drawing and let's get going on noticing sounds. 14. Day 4 Sound Tracing: Welcome back to day four and the awareness of sound. We're going to continue on with worksheet number 1, and we're working on the fourth mandala now. Let's start again with our nice deep breath in, and then releasing it back out, and releasing any tension we may be finding in our body, through our arms, our neck, and our jaw. Let's get started. Today, we are going to use our ears and we're focusing all our other sensors on the drawing. We're going to listen. Let's get started in the center of our mandala using one of these newer shapes. As I said before, you can start when you're tracing, you can start anywhere you want. Any mandala, you can start anywhere you want. But let's just flow up and down with this and just start to calm down our mind and start to bring our attention to the first thing we hear. We tend to get lost in our thoughts and it can be surprising how much we miss that's happening around us. This is really common in our day-to-day activities and often we block out sounds as a matter of survival because we live in a really noisy world. We often can't concentrate if we were to take in every sound that was going on around us. If we actually took in all the sounds around us, we'd probably become overstimulated way too quickly and not be able to function at all. There is a purpose to being able to block out sounds. But today we are using the drawing to quiet down the mind so that we can take the time to notice what's happening around us and maybe even learn to separate out the sounds that are happening around us because there's always many noises happening at the same time. What you may find is the first sounds you actually become aware of could be the ones that annoy you the most, because somehow those are the ones that seem to make it through all the other noises going on. You might hear the neighbor's TV that's too loud, or if you live in the city, you might be hearing the sirens out on the city streets. That's a start, you're actually noticing the sounds. Once you notice those, let those go and see if you can find another sound that's happening. Now you're actively trying to find the sounds. That's the thing even in a quiet room, there's always sounds, there's always creaking, there's always wind. You could be sitting in a very noisy environment right now, so you got lots to pick from, or you may be sitting in a very quiet environment and it's very obvious what the sounds are. But what you're doing is just using the drawing to bring your focus back to center and just pick out the sounds that you're hearing. You might find that you start hearing sounds you've never heard before. Today we're just focusing on the sounds in our environment, but there's other ways to use this exercise as well, such as listening to a piece of instrumental music that would give you a specific sound that you know you want to listen to. You would listen to it differently because you would be focused on actually listening to all the different levels that are in that sound. Finally, a way that I really like to use this is when I am drawing a mandala and there's a television program going on or I'm listening to a podcast, I don't necessarily realize how much I'm paying attention or not paying attention. But the next day when I pick up my mandala, I can always remember the entire program. I can remember everything was said, I can get the gist of the plot, I can even remember the emotions I was feeling while I was listening to this, so that's a really neat thing that you can try the next day. Pick it up and see how much you remember of what you were listening to. Join me in the next lesson while I show you how to draw this mandala from a grid, I'll see you there. 15. Day 4 Drawing: Welcome back to day 4 of the mandala drawing. Today we're going to draw the mini mandala that we just traced in Sound. We're going to need worksheet number 3. We're going to continue on with these empty grids, filling in the fourth mandala. Again, we're going to start at the center and it really doesn't matter where you start on the mandala, wherever you're pulled to first. I just like to warm myself up in the center and I often will put petals in here. We're going to try a different petal today. It's more like a heart-shaped, but a little bit on the loose side, there isn't an exact center to it you just wave it down and then wave it back up, so up the side, down, then back up, and back to the point. This is just another form of petal and it's a loose form of a heart. I'm a real pattern person I really love to recognize patterns in my environment, and I love to boil everything down to just a simple shape. For me, these petals are really just a loose form of a heart. Now, I'm going to put a second shape within the first shape. Shapes within shapes is a great way to add detail into your designs. I'm just going to mimic the first shape but make it smaller. Again, we've got a little loose shaped heart that's going to fit within the first one, much smaller though. See how I am not really being exact about where the center of my heart is, I'm just making it almost like a wave to the top of it. Sometimes the hardest part of these mandalas is just getting your first shape on the paper, so we've done that. Now we can move to where we're pulled to next. I'm going to try a different shape here. I'm going to try, again, going with the wave theme in this one, and I guess that's appropriate considering this one's for sound, little pun, I guess. We're just going to go up and down creating these little fingers or little waves. I'm using the lines to be the top of each wave, then I come down in the middle of the section and back up to the next line. I just continue on like that. They don't have to be centered perfectly, I'm just using the lines as a guide that when I hit the line I'm at the top and in-between the lines I'm at the bottom. I just continue on. You'll get a flow going with your hand so that the pattern will just feel right. That's a fun one to do, I love filling the space in with that one. You can do tall ones and short ones. The next space I'm going to go to is up here. I'm just going to draw two large ovals. Then I think I'm going to skip a space, so I'm going to put something different in there, and draw two more large ovals. I'm going to go all the way around my circle, filling every second section with two large ovals side-by-side. Again, they don't have to be perfect, they don't have to fill up equal area spaces. Just do the best you can with it and fill up these nice big circles. I talk about this a lot when I'm doing my mandala drawings, but the way that I do them is I layer them in the sense that I add in shapes, and then I go back and I add in more shapes. Then once I filled every section, I go back and add in more detail by adding shapes. These designs come in layers of drawing. It can take me days to do them sometimes. Sometimes I'll do them up in an hour, a couple of hours, not an hour, but a couple of hours, and I just keep layering in more shapes. Here I'm doing the three little circles. I've decided I'm just going to add these three little circles in, around this particular ring of circles. I'm going to do it all the way back around till I reach where I started. Then I'm going to do the same thing on the outer ring, but hanging below it so that they stay within the mandala area. I'm going to do three. They're going to be a little bit bigger because I have a little more space to fill there. I'm not going to make them touch the small circles, just each other. It gives you a really cool pattern. If you look at the patterns around you, it's fun to see that they're really just made up of shapes. You think that something's complicated because your eye can only see the whole picture at once, but if you break it down like this when you're drawing it, you'll understand that a lot of stuff is just a bunch of shapes put together. There we have mandala number 4 all drawn. I hope you enjoyed that. I'll see you tomorrow in day 5. 16. Day 5 - Touch: Welcome to day 5 of our mini mandala challenge. We're halfway through. Today, we're going to continue with the senses and we're going to work on touch. Drawing is perfect for this because it's very tactile. It's all about the touch. What we're focusing on is we really don't usually pay attention too much to the physical tactile feeling of an activity as we do it. Today we're going to use the drawing to focus on how our body physically feels and the feeling of drawing the actual shapes. This one's perfect for drawing because it's a really tactile activity. What we're going to focus on today with the drawing, we're going to to notice how our hand feels, how it feels with the pencil in our hand, how it feels against the paper, the drawing of the pencil along the paper as it drags. Then you're also going to notice tension. We'll notice where we hold the tension in our bodies as we focus on the drawing. Sometimes we hold it in our neck, sometimes in our arms. We'll also notice any little habits we might do. When I was young and I used to play piano, to piano lessons, whenever I'd really get focused in on a piece, I'd stick my tongue out. I would constantly have people tell me to stick my tongue back in, and I wouldn't even know I was doing it. Sometimes when we concentrate, we might stick our tongue out. We might furrow or brows and put a crease and wonder why we get a bit of a headache. There's all sorts of different things and habits that people do. In this particular day, we're going to try and notice those. We're going to notice how we are physically feeling. We're going to notice how the touch feels. We're going to notice where we hold tension in our body, so I'll walk you through all that as we go through the first lesson on mandala number 5. Let's get going on that. see you there. 17. Day 5 Touch Tracing: Welcome back to day 5, and today we're going to have the awareness of touch. Again, working with Worksheet 1, we're working on the fifth mandala, which falls in the very center. Let's start by taking a deep breath in and then releasing it back out, releasing any tension that we have in our body. By now we've figured out where we're holding this tension and let's get going. Today we're focusing on the sense of touch, staying with the senses, and this one is perfect as we draw because drawing itself is a very tactile craft. It'll be easier because we're not only focusing on the drawing, we're also focusing on how the drawing feels physically. As we draw this shapes, we want to notice, how does the pencil feel as it drags along the paper? How does the shape feel compared to other shapes? This spiral, for example, will feel very different than one of the petals we made, or even a simple circle. You'll notice that some shapes feel better and some you might resist because they make your handwork in a way that maybe isn't as comfortable for you. The other thing we want to use this for as we draw, is to notice any physical tension that's in our body. We want to feel any that is already there from the day, perhaps, maybe some habitual tension that we tend to hold all the time, or maybe we're just noticing some tension that's created by the idea of the drawings sitting still, perhaps in a chair, at a table, or maybe we have our drawing on a clipboard on our lap, and just the way that that physically feels and where are we supporting our body and where are we holding tension in our body. Again, using the drawing as our focus point that we come back to center whenever we find perhaps our thoughts or to wander to something else, maybe something that we have to do when we're all finished this drawing. Bring your thoughts back to the present moment in the drawing and start to notice how you physically feel. The other thing you might start noticing, is some physical habits you have. As I mentioned before, some people tend to concentrate by following their brow, or perhaps the way that you hold the pencil, creates a little bit of an ache in your wrist or perhaps in your elbow, and maybe you need to support it. It also brings to attention where our body is asking us for support. One thing that will point out for us is we often do a lot of activities without paying very much mind to how our physical body feels because we're so focused on getting the activity done, or perhaps our thoughts aren't even on the activity itself and then we wonder a little way down the road, why does this hurt? Why does that hurt? What did I do to my ankle? How many times have you seen a bruise on your body and gone, "Where did that come from?" Because we were so busy not paying attention, so busy in our minds and so busy in our thoughts, that we didn't even notice when he ran into something and physically hurt ourselves. This can happen all the time. You get a cut perhaps on your thumb and if it's minor enough, you're like, "I don't remember where I got that cut from." This exercise is just bringing our attention to the physical and helping us notice our physical sensations. That was a fairly quick little one, and that was mandala number 5, and I'm going to show you in the next lesson how to draw that one from a grid. 18. Day 5 Drawing: Welcome to day Number 5 of our mini mandala drawing challenge. Today we're working on the fifth mandala and we're going to be using worksheet number three with just the grids on it, continuing on with the fifth grid. Again, we're starting in the center and I'm just drawing a simple circle with a little bean in the middle, and it's going to be the center of my flower. I'm going to draw a nice big petals. I'm just going to use the solid lines as my guide so that I'm going to have eight petals all the way around my center. These are simple petals. you just go up one side round the top and back down. And now I'm going to show you how I add a little bit of detail into my petals. Just simple lines, I used to put two or three whatever will fit. One long, one short. I just go with the feel of it, and that creates decreases in the petals, gives you a little more realistic look to your actual petal flower. Gives you the idea that this is a flower. Next thing, I'm going to get into some more spirals, but these ones are going to have a little slant to them. When I do these spiral designs, I try to do one side first, all the way around, so I have the feel for it. Then I'll come back and do the other side. Now again, I'm keeping my paper in place so that I don't get you all dizzy. But often when I will draw these, I will rotate the paper. I'm always drawing in the same direction. I always, am drawing my spiral exactly the same way and it's the paper that's rotating. Now I'm going to put in the second half of my spirals. These are spirals with stems, so they basically are creating hearts with a little extra spiral in the middle of them. This again is an example of how you build up the design with layers of shapes. I put in one shape in one direction, then I'll go back and put a shape in a different direction. And It's actually creating a completely different shape which is a heart, but I'm making them up with these little spiral extras in them. Another simple way to add in some detail is to simply outline what you've just done, and it separates that section off from the next section. It gives a little depth to your design. It's a really simple way of putting some more detail into your mandala, and it's really relaxing to do. Outlining what you've done has different purposes to it, and in this particular mandala, it brings the whole center into one piece, it creates that as one flower. Then I'm going to add in more petals on the outside so it's almost like you're looking down at many layers of petals in a flower. Again, I'm just filling this entire last part with large petals. Really simple ones, just like I did at the very beginning, and the other thing is it's mirroring design from the center. Another trick with your designing is to use a similar shape in the outer part as you did in the center part, and it draws the eye back and forth between the two, and it just gives a nice flow to your design. This design is made up of some simple shapes and some more complex shapes, which gives you lots of tactile experience for this one in particular. Now again, I'm going to add these little short lines in to give my petals a little more dimension. When you're looking at a petal in real life, it has folds in it, and that's what these lines are supposed to represent. Now again, I don't go for realism very much in my designs, I'm very symbolic and I'm very simple shapes. But that's the concept of these lines. You can put two or three and you get to a point where you just shoot them in there however feels best for you. They go in at different lengths. There you have day Number 5, your mandala is drawn. Hope you enjoyed that, and I'll see you back in day Number 6. 19. Day 6 - Emotion: Welcome to day 6. Today, we are going to pay attention to our emotional responses. Yesterday, we did physical sensations tactile, and today we're working off that because we're going to do the emotional responses and we may not realize how connected those two are. We tend to have an emotional response to just about every thought or feeling we have that goes through our body. The fun thing about this is we're going to actually try to back it up and notice that by focusing on the drawing. An example of this that I've experienced quite a bit is when I do the yoga. You can be in the middle of a pose, and you think, I'm done, I can't hold this pose any longer, and your teacher encourages you to go through further, take another breath. What you realize is that your body actually can do it. It's your emotions that are kicking in saying, "I don't want to do this." It's dividing that actual physical sensation from the emotional response to the physical sensation. So, really, I don't want to get that complicated with just this drawing. I just want us to notice the emotions that come up. So no judging of the emotions, just notice them. Just back it up and see if you can see, like when you're drawing, is there tension, or are you developing an emotional response to that tension? I don't want to do this anymore. Is it because I actually can't do it anymore? Or is it because I'm just tired of it type of thing? We just want to notice our emotional response to these physical sensations. As we draw, we're just going to notice those, not judge them, and again, just like the guy on the park bench, we're just going to watch them walk by and then we're going to let them go and start again from the drawing. This will be fun. So let's go and get started on it. See you there. 20. Day 6 Emotion Tracing: Welcome back to day 6 of our Mini Mandela drawing challenge. Again, we're working with Worksheet number 1, continuing on with our sixth Mandela. Let's start with a deep breath in and then release it back out and release any tension you may be holding in your body, your shoulders, your jaw, and let's get going. Now, yesterday, we did physical feelings, physical sensations. Today, we're going to notice our emotional feelings or sensations. Let's just start warming up here by tracing from the center of our Mandela, and we'll just work our shapes outwards. We may not realize how our emotional state colors everything we do in the moment. We may think that we're emotionless at times, but we really are always feeling something. We probably don't realize that our emotions creep in all the time to have an opinion about everything that we do. We may think that these are physical sensations, but if we go a little deeper, we might realize that they're just an emotional opinion of the physical sensation. Recognizing our emotional state is very important to how we deal with things. For example, you come home from a long day at work and you sit down, you say, "I'm tired, I'm too tired to do anything." Well, are you really physically tired? Which you may be. Or are you emotionally and mentally tired? Which is a different thing. If we can recognize that, then we'll know how to re-energize ourselves. What is it we need? Do we need an app because we're physically tired? Or do we just need to go do something that lifts our mood because we're just emotionally and mentally drained and just want to do something fun? Slowing down helps us bring down our emotional tempt when we're feeling worked out. The way we're breathing is also a reflection of our emotions. Now you're starting to see how each of the senses that we're becoming aware of are connected to each other and how we can use each of them to calm our whole system down. Notice now as you draw, is there tension somewhere in your body, physical tension? Now, is there an emotion we're attaching to that tension? Do I find any of the shapes hard to draw? How do I feel about that emotionally? Am I my annoyed? Am I frustrated? Or am I excited because I want to learn how to do these? Do some of the shapes make me happy? Do some of the shapes scare me, like when I see a spiral coming up as that one I don't really like? Notice the emotions that are going along with your drawing. Then just as we let random thoughts come through, let the emotions come through. I don't mean like emotions, like extreme emotions, I mean just the gentle emotions. How am I feeling about these things? Any thoughts you might be having? Are you judging any of those thoughts? The judgment is an emotional reaction. If you're thinking, oh, there goes those thoughts again, how do I stop that? That's an emotional response to the thoughts. We don't actually realize how much of this is emotion. As we draw, let's just notice any judgments or emotion that come up so that we can recognize it, and the practice of the drawing, what we see here, we can start to bring this into our daily life. I often compare my drawing of Mandelas to my yoga practice because in yoga, what we learned on the mat is what we take into our daily life. Drawing these Mini Mandelas is the perfect place to practice and work these muscles, I call them, of noticing an awareness of our senses. Again, we're very site oriented and that's pretty much the way that we see the world literally. But there are so many other ways to experience the world and ourselves. If you're struggling with any of these, the ones you're finding the most difficult, those are probably the ones that you need to work with and have fun with this. Don't put any pressure on yourself. Just enjoy the drawing and gradually you'll start to notice things that maybe you weren't aware were there before or things that you weren't sensing before. That's the fun of it, that this happens over time. Again, just enjoy the drawing and work with it gradually. Now, here is Mandela number 6, and I'm going to show you in the next lesson how to draw it just from the grid. See you there. 21. Day 6 Drawing : Welcome back to day number 6 of our mini mandala challenge. Let's jump right into it. We need worksheet number 3. Again, we're still working on the same one with the blank grids, and we're in our sixth mandala spot. We'll start by drawing another circle in our center and we're going to add our petals onto the circle. You're going to see that this is similar to what we did in day number 5, so I want to show you how you can use similar designs and create different looks with them. We have our center flower, but we're going to add different details than those little lines. This time we're going to do a shape within a shape, so we're basically mimicking the petal shape inside the larger one. We're just making smaller ones inside the larger ones all the way round, and then we'll just add our little bean in the center here, and we have our center flower design. Now that we have that then, let's add in some little heart shapes here, just tiny ones. We're just putting them in between the petals, and they're creeping up as if they're their own little petal growing out of the in-between space of the previous petals and I'm centering them around those solid lines. So just really small heart shapes this time around, and we'll work our way around until we get to our last solid line. Now, I'm going to add in some spirals. We're going to be a little bit different this time, we're going to go up the center dotted line and create a spiral, and I'm going to do the opposite spirals all at once. Normally, in the last one I went around and did only one direction, then I came back and did the other direction. Here I'm showing you how I can do them both directions at the same time, so I complete the shape. Up the dotted line and around into a spiral. Again, I'm creating spirals out of the first flower, but these ones are a little bit different than the previous mandala. This time, we'll have them all then in one round instead of going back around and doing the second half of them. Little bit of a heart-shape, but this time they don't come from a point. Then again, I'm going to trace around them with an outline, just like I did in the previous one, to create my center flower look before I move on to the outer ring. I'm just creating a single outline here, but another method is to outline a second time, so you create a double outline around your shapes that gives you a nice detail and it also is a lot of fun to color if you're going to color these in after. Now, we're working on our outer ring and we have to decide what we want to put in out there. I think I'm going to put in a large petal. This petal is going to stretch across two sections and I'm going to use that center line for my little dip in the top of the petal, so it's an extremely subtle heart shape that doesn't have a point. There's not going to be a lot of them because I'm going across two sections this time, so there'll only be eight petals total around the outside. These are nice and big, they're almost like drawing large circles. They're easy to do and they feel good. Now, we're going to add in a little bit of detail here. I think what I'm going to do, is a second shape, mimicking the first shape. So shape within a shape again, drawing the second shape just like the first one, but a little bit smaller. On the sixth mandala, you're starting to get the idea of some of these tricks. Simple shapes, drawing shapes within shapes, outlining the shapes, there's lots of way to put detail into your drawing. Now, just to finish this off, I'm going to put some lines up here just to fill in that large space created by these large petals, and I'm just flicking really short lines in there. There you go, there is mandala number 6. Hope you enjoyed, and I will see you tomorrow in day 7. 22. Day 7 - Taste: Hey everyone, welcome to day 7 of our Mini Mandala drawing challenge. Today we are going to notice taste. This will be fun one, pretty simple taste. To set the stage for this one, I suggest that you get a beverage of your choice. It can be a hot or a cold beverage. It can be a cup of coffee, it can be glass of water, it can even be a glass of wine. Whatever your favorite calming beverage is, that's what we're going to use today with our drawing. Before you get started on the drawing part, make sure you go and make yourself your favorite calming beverage and bring it to sit beside you. Taste, we're going to talk about that just a little bit. Not many people realize the connection between taste and smell. Taste can actually happen when you smell things. We're going to work on smell tomorrow, but it doesn't even have to be food in the room for you to taste it. Someone can just start talking to you, you can be watching a TV show where someone is cooking something and you can taste it, your mouth just starts watering. Taste is a funny thing. It can actually be brought on with our imagination as well. The other thing that we're going to also notice is how we use taste words. We can say something left a bad taste in our mouth. Or we can say that that person is bitter, or we can say that person is sweet. Those are all taste words. We also want to notice how we might use those in our daily life. What are the words that are our go to words? These are all the things we're going to notice today while we draw our Mandala. Let's have some fun, go get yourself your favorite beverage and I'll meet you in the next lesson. See you there. 23. Day 7 Taste Tracing: Welcome back to day number 7 of our mini Mandala challenge, and again, we'll be working with Worksheet number one and we're working on our seventh Mandala. To get started, let's take a nice deep breath in, and then release it out again, releasing any tension we have in our hands, in our arms, in our shoulders, and let's get going. Today we're working with taste, so let's use this time to warm ourselves up with the center pedal on this Mandala and just follow the shapes and bring our awareness to the page, so that we can slow ourselves down and enjoy the flavor of whatever we have chosen today, whether it's our favorite drink or whether it's our favorite piece of food, let's just come into a more expansive awareness of what we're experiencing. We're using this exercise to become very mindful, so don't take large bites and don't take big gulps of your drink, you want only small sips or small bites because it's the flavor we're looking for or the taste. You're also going to feel textures as well, so we want to become very aware of how we know what it is we're tasting, what's familiar and what's not familiar. When you take a sip of, say your coffee, you may be able to tell if it's a decaf or if it's a regular coffee, and have you ever stopped to think how do you know the difference between that? This is when we have that chance to take the time to spend and become very aware of what it is we're tasting, so as we draw today, let's just notice all the different layers that go along with that sensation of taste and where else we're feeling it throughout our body, and do we recognize that there's more than just a one dimension to the taste that we're experiencing. The drawing today is giving us an opportunity to slow down and experience the taste in slow motion, how many times do we gobble down a meal and not even taste what we just ate? Or if someone says, "Oh how did you like the taste of that?" You're like, "I'll have to have another bite, I wasn't really paying attention." It makes you wonder, boy, we put a lot of food in us without experiencing how it truly feels. Eating can be such a joy if we experience the flavors involved, and so that links us over to the other senses. How does the taste affect other parts of our body? Does it make us happy? Sweet things often calm us down, whereas bitter or astringent things can actually rev us up, and we don't necessarily notice that this is going on with us. Taste is also very interpretive and sometimes it's good to use two different beverages, one hot, one cold, and notice how different the tastes are, how many times have you actually had a sip of something not paying attention and not realizing it wasn't the beverage that you were expecting, say you had a glass of water and you were thinking it was a glass of milk, and how different that hits you when you take the sip. Also pay attention to how you use words that have taste association with them. We will call someone sweet, they have a sweet personality and we can say something left a bitter taste in my mouth. Also, pay attention to how you use taste words. Some are common phrases, but somehow we tend to gravitate to certain once. That's another thing to pay attention to while you're drawing. Here is Mandala number seven, all finished, and I'm going to show you in the next lesson how to draw it from the grid. See you there. 24. Day 7 Drawing: Welcome back to day 7 of our mini mandala drawing talent. We're going to start again with worksheet number 3, and we already have six mandalas drawn already, so we're working on our seventh, so let's get going. We're going to start in the center, as I have been doing, and create a little flower. This time I'm going to do it a little different. I'm going to do half petals. I'm working with every single section, coming up the line and curving around and stopping at the next line. I'm going to continue to do that all the way around and going to end up with 16 of these little petals each per side. There you just see how I'm just hooking a little bit, and stopping, and up the line, hook a little bit, stop. That's going to give me the look of overlapping petals in this flower with many, many petals. That's a little different than any of the ones we've done before, and we've used every little section involved. Now we're going to move into the next ring. I'm just going to put some floating petals. I call them floating because they're not attached to anything. They're just right in the middle of the section. They are not touching the previous flower. They're just floating above it, and they're not touching each other either. You just put it right in the center of this section just use the section lines as a guide, not go over. You just create a simple petal in every one of those sections, you'll end up with 16 of those as well. I like putting these little floating shapes in. Because I have the guides and I have the sections already mapped out for me with the grids, it's very easy to put them in symmetrically because all I have to do is make sure that they stay within the section that's already on the grid. I'm going to go all the way around until I have all 16 of them. Now I'm going to move into the next ring. I'm going to put some spirals here, but I'm only going to go halfway up. I'm going to draw up the line and spiral around, and keeping it in this section but keeping it only half of it, and then I'm going to put another one in. I'm skipping over a section because I'm going to once again come back and do the opposite direction. So coming up. I don't really have a guideline there for the halfway point. I could pencil one in, but I'm just eyeballing it right now. I'm once again keeping my paper still so I'm trying to make these similar to each other. Well, not moving the paper, just moving my hand. Now that I have all of those, I'm going to do the opposite direction, coming all the way up and around. I'm sprawling back again, a little bit of a heart-shaped going on there but they're not meeting at a point. I'm just going to keep going around and making the opposite. You have to, if you're not moving your paper like I'm, you have to go and look, where does this meet up and where did I start again? That's why I find it's always important to start in the same position on your drawing because then you'll draw the shape similar all the way round. Now I'm going to fill in the rest of this space with just simple petals sitting over top of the spirals. Again, I'm just filling them in to fit the section perfectly rounded at the top and just coming down in between where the spirals are. Simple petals just like last time except that this time there's spirals moving up into that section as well. There's not as much of the petals showing. I'm just going to continue around until I've got it all the way back to the top, and then I want something else in that petal. I'm just going to put something very simple in there, a simple circle. Just a little accent in there to fill up the space, give it a little more character, personality, little more detail. It's amazing how just a simple shape can really change the look of a design and just give it that much more personality. There you go. There's day number 7. Hope you enjoyed that, and I'll see you back here on day number 8. 25. Day 8 - Smell: Hey, everybody. Welcome to day 8 of our mini mandala challenge. Today, we're going to use our drawing focus to notice smell. Yesterday, we did taste, and today, we do smell, and they're actually very closely related because often when you smell, you can taste, they work from the same area of the body. This one sometimes is fun to do with someone else because we all smell different things, so it's fun to be in the same room and notice what each of you is smelling. It's very, very personal, your sense of smell. We're going to maybe get something again today. Just like yesterday, we got our favorite beverage. Today, we want to have something to smell. We could just be in a room where we just want to appreciate the smells or you could be out in your grade, or you could be out in nature on your porch. Those are good places to do the one for today, anywhere that you can pick up smells, pleasant smells because you really don't want to be running away from the smells. You want to be attracted to the smells, you want to be able to sit in the smells while you're drawing. Another option is to make yourself a cup of coffee if that's what you love if you love the smell of coffee. There's many things that you could do. You could light a candle or your favorite scented candle would give you a nice smell because what we're going to do is just notice that smell. We're going to notice any other smells that might pop up. Our sense of smell again is very different for everybody, so what you pick up, you may have not even noticed was there before, and you may notice smells you don't want to notice. That's always the fun thing with this. That's why I say pick a spot or pick an item around you that you're going to like the smell of. Good scentologist tell you that smells are made up of many different layers, and there's often similar things making up different smells, but they have very similar layers in them. That's all fun to explore as well. Today, we are going to use the drawing to focus on smell. Before you pull out your drawing and get set up, find yourself something that you love the smell of or go to an area where you like the smells, like I said, outside if you want to go outside or if you want to bring some flowers in and put them on the table beside you, or even just make yourself a cup coffee, or maybe someone in the house wants to bake some cookies, any smells that you want to work with, and then we'll get going on our drawing. I'll see you there. 26. Day 8 Smell Tracing: Welcome to day 8 of our mini mandala drawing challenge. Again, we're working with worksheet number 1 in this lesson and we're doing the eighth mandala. Let's take a nice deep breath in and then release it back out. Release the tension out of your arms, out of your shoulders, and out of your jaw, and anywhere else in your body. Let's get going. Today we're working with another sense. We're working with smell today, which is very closely related to taste. To start with our mandala, let's start warming up by drawing some of our center pieces and bringing our awareness onto the page and slowing ourselves down. Again, we have something beside us to smell or we're in a location where we have a smell. Like I had mentioned, either a cup of fresh brewed coffee again works well, or a bouquet of flowers or if you're outside, you have the smells of nature. Wherever you have set yourself up or whatever's beside you, we're going to use the drawing to keep that monkey mind activity going and busy, and we're going to notice the smells. Smell and taste are very closely related, so you may find that when you really concentrate down on it, you might not be able to tell whether you're actually tasting something or actually smelling something because often they can originate from the same place. But what you want to do is notice the smell and where you're noticing it. How does it make your body feel and where in the body are you feeling that? Does the smell calm you down? Or does it light you up? Does it get you thinking about other things like the smell of fresh brewed coffee for me often makes me think of starting a new project because that is something that I always do when I'm starting a new project. Sometimes smells can bring back memories. Often certain flower sense remind me of my childhood depending on where I was at the time. I spent a lot of time outdoors and I think that's why. Also, the smell of my mother's favorite flowers that she would have in bouquets in the house, that takes me back to my childhood as well. They say the sense of smell is one of the strongest for memories. Using the drawing to bring yourself back, this particular mandala drawing has a lot of little intricate pieces to it. I did this one on purpose because I wanted something that would continually bring you back to the page because I think smells can really take you away. They can really get you lost in your thoughts because they stir up so many memories that sometimes you can find yourself way down that path again in your head, not paying attention to what's in front of you. This one has a lot of little intricate pieces to trace that will slow you down and bring you back to the page, and once again, bring you back to the smells around you or the smell you're trying to focus on. Notice that smell, does it have a lot of layers to it? The science of smell often talks about how many layers there are to a scent. When the perfume companies are making perfumes, they have go-to bases, they say, that are in certain kinds of scent and then they build on those. That means the smells are layered up. Some of them quite similarly to each other. That could it be again why certain smells remind you of things even though maybe you haven't smelled it before. Allow the smell to, just like you did with your thoughts, allow it to bring the memories up and then let them go. Then notice if there's something different about the smell, does it smell different the first time you smelled it as opposed to, as I say, five minutes down the road? Does it smell the same or have you adapted to it differently? It's really interesting when we slow ourselves down to notice how these things first become aware to us and then how they change as we stay with the awareness of it. Our sense of smell is also very personal, so we're going to smell things differently than the person sitting next to us. This one's fun to do with someone else in the room as well. Each of you can pick out what you are smelling because it is amazing how you can sit beside someone and they smell something that you don't smell. They smell the neighbor cooking dinner, and that's not what you're smelling. You're smelling the flowers that are on the table. It's interesting to do this with a friend and see what is standing out in your mind. Here we have mandala number 8, all finished. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to draw this one just from using the grid. Well, see you there. 27. Day 8 Drawing: Welcome back. We're on day number 8 of our mini mandala drawing challenge, and we are using worksheet number 3 and working through our eighth mini mandala today using the grid. We're going to be working again as we have been starting from the center of our grid, starting with just a circle, and we're going to create a center flower as we have been doing. I have my circle with my little bean in the middle, and now I'm going to create some paddles. I'm going to do some heart-shaped paddles, and where before I did a loose wavy one, these ones are actually going to have the heart forming at the center dotted line. I travel up the solid line, curve into the dotted line, and then continue the other half mirroring it. We end up with these little hearts, even though they don't come to a point, the tops of them look like hearts. If you're interested in learning more about the shapes that I use and how I create them, I'll leave links to my other classes in there that you can learn a little bit more about that, I go into more detail in my other classes on the specific shapes and how I work with them. Again, here we are just adding in a second small shape to mirror the first shape. Tiny hearts inside the larger heart paddles, and these ones actually meet at a point with the center circle. I'll just finish up this last one, and now we have our center flower finished. Now, moving on to this next section, this next ring of segments. I'm going to add in some circles. Back to my lovely circles that I love. I'm going to put two circles in a section, and I'm going to skip over and do it only in every second section. The first circle is a little smaller and the second circle is a little larger just to fill up the section as it expands moving outward. My hope for you is that as I show you all these different ways to use these simple shapes that you can go on to create even more interesting mandala's of your own designs. Once I have those second sections filled in, I have these blank ones to do and I'm going to do a little intricate design in here, simply starting with a paddle, very simple with the paddle, and I'm going to work that all the way around. Again, like I say, I add these shapes in layers. First, I put in the large shapes and then I move into putting in smaller shapes to add detail. It's a very relaxing way to do it. Now, to add in a little more detail, I mimic the first shape and just make it a little bit smaller. You're almost like outlining the inside of the shape. You're just following the same line all the way around on the inside of the shape, and you're going to create a little more detail inside your paddle. We're going to do this one all the way around and I could just leave it like this, but I'm going to put a third one in here. So very small. Sometimes you might think it might not fit in there, but I just squeeze it in and it gives just a little more interesting look to your design. A little more detail in a few more places to color if that's what you're going to do with these. That finishes that second ring and now we're moving out to the outer ring. Again, we're just going to put another paddle in here. I'm making one of these wavy, loose heart paddles, but I'm putting it into one section and again, it doesn't come to a point. It's just the paddle version of it. These are fun to make because you just go up and you wave at the top and come back down the other side. They're very relaxing to draw, if you recall, we did these paddles on a previous mandala, but we stretch them over two sections. This time we're just creating them within one section so they're a little bit smaller, and there's a lot more of them. Again, the meditative factor of this, the mindfulness is that you create one shape and then you repeat that shape all the way around, so you really don't have to think about it. You just let your hand flow in that pattern all the way around your mandala. Now let's add in another layer of detail with a little more shape and it's just a wavy line this time that follows at the top. You're not creating an entire shape within a shape with this one, you're just mimicking that wavy line at the top. Again, it's just like an outline only you're doing it on the inside of the line. It creates it inside the shape. Just a simple wavy line, it doesn't have to match it perfectly because that's the beauty of this imperfect drawing, is that you're just sticking another wavy line in there to give it some character and some personality. I just love drawing these for the feel of the drawing, but if I am making them for coloring books or for a coloring page, I love to put in as many shapes and as many lines as I can because it gives you just that many more places to color. We'll finish off this paddle with just our nice little straight lines, and I just put two or three yen and you just let your hand flick them in wherever it feels right. They all go in at a different length to give it that character, and you just go all the way around to every paddle. Again, your hand just follows the pattern. You actually get to a point where you don't have to think about it, you just do it. That finishes up mandala number 8. Hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you back here on day 9. 28. Day 9 - Visualize: Here we are on day number 9, almost done our mini Mandala challenge of drawing with focus and noticing things. Today, we're going to do the sense of sight. This one's different because you're eyes are actually focused on the drawing. You really can't be looking to see what you notice in the room and use the drawing as your focus. What we're going to do for sight is we're going to turn it to visualization. We're not going to actually use our two eyes. We're going to use what they call the third eye or your inner eye, and you're going to visualize something. What I suggested is to visualize a loved one, whether it be a family member, or a friend, or a pet, that's a good one. We want to visualize something we love or someone we love, and we're going to use our visualization to experience our other senses. We're going to visualize it and notice how we visualize it, and notice how it makes us feel, notice all the different sensations in the body that this brings on. For example, if I was to visualize my kitten, I would visualize his little furry paws, and I would visualize myself hugging him, which makes me feel like a heart center feeling. You're just noticing what the visualization does while you're drawing, so it's interesting to say that you can draw and focus on what is in front of you with your eyes while visualizing something in your head. This is a fun one because we do this all the time. When you're driving, you're actually looking at the road, but you have visualizations going on through your mind. Something that happened at work or where you're going in the grocery store, whatever you want, what food you want, what it looks like, and you're always visualizing things. Let's use our drawing to focus our attention in the moment, and also, try visualizing something in our mind that gives us a good feeling. Someone we love, that's a good one. I'm going to let you decide on what it is you want to visualize. Then we're going to go ahead into the lesson, and I'll see you there. 29. Day 9 Visualize Tracing: Welcome to day 9 of our Mini Mandala challenge. We are again going to be working on worksheet number 1 in this lesson. Let's start with relaxing by taking a deep breath in, and releasing it back out and releasing any tension we hold in our body, in our shoulders and our jaw and let's get started. Today we are working on visual. Because our sense of sight is being used by the drawing, we're looking at the drawing, we can't really notice what's around the room. But what I am asking you today is to use that sense of sight, that's the third eye or visualization as we call it. While we're drawing and being brought back to the page and slowing down, we're also going to visualize. Today I asked you to visualize a loved one, whether it's a family member or a friend, or a pet, or even a favorite place. When we ask people to visualize something, some people will resist and say, that's hard, I can't do that. Yet we do this every day, all the time. Whenever we're driving, we're usually visualizing what we're going to have for dinner, or where we want to shop for the weekend, or about a movie we saw last night, or what plants are going to fill our garden this year. We visualize all the time. It's usually when we're doing another activity. As we draw these shapes and we keep getting pulled back to the page, so we can slow our mind down let's visualize that item that we have already planned to visualize. Whether it's a loved one, or whether it's your pet, or whether it's a favorite place that you'd love to be, like a tropical beach. Let's focus in on what that looks like in our minds. Again, you're focusing your thought to the visualization and you're trying to bring all the images of that thing into your mind as if you're seeing it standing in front of you or if you're actually there, what your surroundings look like. This is one of the main ways that we do guided meditation. We actually take you to a place that's different from where you actually are. In meditation or in yoga when you're doing your end relaxation, we'll talk about floating on a cloud or you're in a green forest and you're visualizing these things. As science has said, our body doesn't know the difference between what's actually in front of us and what we're visualizing in our mind. Again, we can calm ourselves down and we can lift our moods simply by visualizing something pleasant, or something we love, or somewhere that we love to be. As you work this Mandala and the shapes that are involved in it, focus your visualization on the thing that you have chosen and experience it as if you are actually there, or as if they are actually standing in front of you. Experience all the emotions, all the other senses that go along with that. This too, is how you manifest, you visualize, you experience it with all of your senses and you draw it to you. This is one of my favorites to relax to while drawing a Mandala. Here we have our ninth Mandala and in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to draw this one from the grid. See you there. 30. Day 9 Drawing : Welcome back. This is day 9 and we're doing the drawing section. We're just drawing our mandala on the grid. We're using worksheet number 3 with just the grids. Let's get started on our ninth mandala. Keeping with the pattern that we've been using all along by starting in the center of our mandala, we are going to draw a circle. Now again, when you do your own, work wherever you feel comfortable first. From the outside in, from the inside out, or start in the center somewhere, as in the middle section. We're starting today with just some simple heart shapes. These are going to be our petals today, and they're actually going to come down to a point that meets our circle. They are full on hearts. They are falling between the two solid lines. I'm using the dotted line as my center point to mirror the other side from. I'm just using some simple shapes in this one and not getting into too much detail because we're using this one for visualization. We're actually attempting to redirect our thoughts. We're just going to stay with some nice shapes that keep us on the page, but not too complicated with too much detail. Here I am using spirals and I'm just going up the solid line in creating a spiral on the end of a stem and in one direction. I'm skipping every second section. Then I'll go back and I'll place the other end of the spiral in. Now that we've got them all going in one direction, I'm going to come back and do them in another direction. We have done this shape before and I'm just coming back in. You're going back up the solid line and just trying to meet with the spiral that's already there. If you recall the last time we did this, you have to start in the same place and make sure that you're drawing in the right direction. Because again, I'm not moving the page, so I have to keep taking a second look here to make sure that I am spiraling back in the right direction. Again, really important to start in the same place when you're drawing the shape every time. Now we're going to do the outer ring. This time I'm going to introduce a new shape, not a new shape, but a new design with the shape. I'm using petals and I'm filling these sections. I'm doing three stacked petals I call them, in each section facing towards each other and then a center one in the middle. It looks like a bit of foliage is what it looks like. We do three on one side, mirror it on the other side with three more, and then right up the center with one. I also love music. For me, I actually feel the rhythm of these patterns. It's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 in the center. I basically go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Then I know I have exactly what I need. Or you can go 1, 2, 3, and then start again, 1, 2, 3, 3, and then you put a big one in the middle. Then in this case, we're actually trying to redirect our thoughts. Once you've developed the pattern, you feel it in your body. Almost like when you're tapping your foot to the music, but you don't realize you're tapping your foot. Your hand will follow the pattern of the 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 and then one. Or you can do all the way to seven. Your patterns, you're also trying to develop those in your body so that the awareness can go somewhere else. So that you're drawing and your aware enough of the drawing, but then you can also notice other things. Developing those rhythm and patterns is the secret sauce to using the mandala drawing for awareness. There is mandala number 9. I hope you enjoyed that one. Tomorrow we're going to do day 10, which is a little bit different. I'll see you there. 31. Day 10 - Intuition: Welcome to day number 10. This is our last day of the Mini Mandala drawing. So today you're obviously not going to be working on a Mandala itself, you're going to be working on the framework that goes around the Mandalas. So that you end up with a finished piece of art that you have worked through all the different sensations and senses in your body. So you have all these different techniques on how to become present and notice things. Today's focus is going to be on asking a question. We're going to use all the awareness that we've gathered over the last nine Mandala drawings and we're going to ask a question, a simple question, it doesn't have to be deep. It can be, "What do I want for supper or what's the next book I should read?" Whatever it is likely that you'd like to know. Then we're going to draw and use this framework as our focus and then we're going to notice what pops up. We're going to notice where things pop up in the body. We'll start to notice our breath then we'll notice any sensations and we'll notice how we physically feel and how we emotionally feel. So everyone gets answers differently. We've explored nine different ways to access awareness in your body and what you'll find is some are stronger than others. Some were probably easier for you and some more difficult, some you never want to do again, and that's because we all access and interact with the world differently. What you're going to do in this one is by asking a simple question, we're going to see how our intuition works. How does the world interact with us? We're going to pay attention to the different ways that an answer might come up. It might come up as an image. We might hear something. We might be drawn to a smell or taste. It's an interesting way to explore how you perceive the world and how you might be getting answers to things that you are unconsciously asking and maybe you're missing them, which is fun to become more aware. So the whole point of the exercise is just to become more aware in the moment and be more present and the Mandala drawings really help you to do that. I'm just giving you lots of fun ways to use these Mandala drawings to see if you can just get to that place of noticing in the moment and what you might be missing. So this one's fun. Just decide on a simple question. You can even write it down on a piece of paper so that it's there. It's out there. Then we're going to work on the framework and I'll walk you through how to notice what's coming up. So I'll see you there. This will be a fun one. 32. Day 10 Intuition Tracing: Welcome back to day number 10 our final day. We're going to use our worksheet number 1 that we've been using all along to do our tracing. We're going to start by taking a nice deep breath in and then we're going to release it back out again. Release any tension you might be holding in your body and let's get going. Today on day number 10 which is our final day, we have already done the nine mandalas, and now what we're going to work on is the borders that go around all of them. This is so that when you completed your piece if you want to, you can hang it up on your wall as a piece of art. For today, I'm going to give you a different perspective of the drawing. We're going to have this zoomed out version so you can see the entire page that we're going to be working on. As I mentioned in the intro, today we're going to choose a question that we'd like to find an answer to. Then we're going to use the drawing to focus while we wait for our favorite senses to come up with some suggestions. We're going to be working all the way around the borders of what we've already traced. All these borders here and lots of circles in here. So we'll be able to focus on the drawing while we notice what comes up. Once again, we've explored all of our senses, and you may have found that some are easier for you to use than others. This is useful to know because this is just how we naturally interact with our world and it's useful to learn some of the other ones because that can expand on how we interact with the world. So while you draw today, just notice what comes up. How are your senses working together? What's coming through the strongest? For example, if you would say, what do I want to eat for supper tonight? Do you get a certain taste coming through? Or do you see an image of a plate of food? Or do you see an image of a specific restaurant sign? Or if your question is, what movie shall I watch? Do you hear a theme song? Or do you see an image of an actor? Or do you hear a specific word that might be in the title? As you sit and notice, you will become even more aware of things that are coming through. As we reach the end of this top line, there's a lot of circles going on here. So I'm just going to suggest that you stretch your hand. Just simple hand exercises. You don't want to cramp up because when you're trying to notice other things, you may not be noticing how much your hand is hurting you. So just take a drink of your favorite beverage if you have it with you, stretch your hand out, and let's get going down the far side. It's good to take these short breaks because if your hand is cramping up or you're thirsty, that's all you're going to notice. You're not going to notice anything else that might respond to your question. The drawing is creating a space for us to sit quietly and notice these things. Often when you ask the question, your responses can come through so quickly that you miss them because we're just not used to being in the moment where we ask a question but immediately flipped to another thought and not realize that the image we got or the taste in our mouth or something along that lines was actually an immediate response to it. Often we filter out all these extra sensory type things that happen to us because we think that they're insignificant when really they're the answers to the questions we were just asking. So as we reach the bottom of this one, let's do a few more hand exercises. You really don't want to cramp up that hand with all the circles that we're drawing right now. It is so easy because the pattern is repetitive and you don't want to end up with a really sore hand. You definitely won't be able to pay attention if your body is complaining about other things that need to be addressed immediately. I actually very rarely sit at a desk to draw unless I'm working on a commission piece. But as far as the sketching and even my inking, I tend to do it in a relax position, so I'm usually sitting with a clipboard. Usually, I'm sitting on a couch or I'm sitting in my comfortable chair in my den or I often sit out on the porch in the sunshine. That's one of my favorite places. Make sure you're comfortable wherever you're drawing. Do not feel you have to sit at a desk unless that's what really works for you. Take your time with this one. I might be drawing a little quickly here just to get the point across about what we're working with. But you can draw these as slowly as you want and take as much time as you want to pay attention to the senses that your body is speaking to you with and the mindful techniques that we've learned. I call drawing a moving meditation the same way that the physical practice of yoga prepares your mind and body to be able to relax and meditate. This moving meditation, it keeps the monkey mind busy. I've pretty much covered all of the other ways that your thoughts can get in the way of your senses. As we learn to calm ourselves down and quiet the mind, we start to realize that there are so many other parts of us that are speaking in their own ways. You'll start to notice them more and more, and it gets to be a really fun game to pay attention to what pops up. The more you work with this, you'll find that you have a go-to that always comes through for you whether it's a sound or an image or some other means. As you practice being in the moment with your drawing, it'll start to become easier to access the state of awareness. So just remember to go at this slowly. Make sure you don't cramp up your hand. Even get up and go for a little walk, make sure you have some water, and then you can continue on here. I'm not going to do anymore because it's all the same. I want you to be taking this one at your own pace. Enjoy this. Good luck with your intuition. I'll see you in the next section where we'll learn to draw the border. 33. Day 10 Drawing: Welcome back to day number 10, the drawing section. Once again, we will be working on worksheet number 3, just the light grids and drawing right on the paper. We already have our nine mandalas already drawn and now we are going to be working on the borders that go around each of these mandalas. I'm going to go back into using our close-up mode so that you can see what I'm drawing into each of these little squares. The grid is divided into these little wee squares and what I've done is just draw circles. You could draw a circle in every single one of them if that's what you'd like to do for relaxation. I'm drawing a circle in every second one as I did on the tracing. Now one thing you have to realize on this, if you're looking to do symmetry, you have to work from both edges because it doesn't necessarily meet properly in the middle. So at this point, I'm going to start over in this corner and duplicate what I just did. It completely depends on what kind of design that you are looking for. But I always recommend if you're trying to do the symmetry thing, that you work your way in from the edges and then decide what to do when you hit the center. Once again in this part, I'm just doing every second square is going to be a circle because I'm following along with what I had on the tracing, which was one circle and then too little circles and then one circle. But at this point, we're drawing it in. So I'm just showing you how I do this symmetrically. You work from each of the corners and these two center parts right here, are going to both have big circles in them. It all depends on whatever pattern you are drawing. So I always recommend going from the outside in. Now that I have that all figured out and I'm going to go back and put something into these empty squares. So when you notice we did the tracing, these small circles were in the center of these squares, and now I'm putting them along the bottom line of the squares. It's really just personal preference I like to explore as I go. So in this time, I am putting them along the bottom line. When we reach these points that intersect with another one, you can do something different. I'm just going to continue on with the little circles and since I have my pattern already set up, I can just continue on. I don't have to work from either end in this particular case because I know exactly where my spaces are. So I just continue across making these two little circles in all the empty spaces. Simple circles are the most relaxing to draw, but you could do anything in each of these squares. That's why I've divided them up like this. You could put a tiny flower in each one of these squares if you wanted to do that, that would give a really beautiful border. Since the theme of this day is intuition, this is another thing that I love about this drawing process is sometimes you can just sit and look at your page and you are inspired to draw something particular into a space. So if you feel like you want flowers in those little squares, go for it. I rarely plan my drawings out ahead of time but I always like to draw with a grid. So that's about as far as I go with the planning. I have the grid in front of me so that all I have to do is fill in the spaces and it just works symmetrically. So I can access my intuition as to what I want to fill into those spaces, as I do the drawing. So I'm just showing you as we work around one particular mandala, the first one that we did because it's pretty much the same thing around all of them. So what you see I am doing here is what you'll do throughout the entire grid. Again, I'm using these small circles and putting them on the bottom line. Now when I get into this center here, this might not have worked as well as I thought it would, but I'm going to keep on going with it because that's another thing I find is that when you get on an idea, if you keep second-guessing yourself and erasing it out, you'll never know where that idea could have gone. If I'm making the drawing with the idea that I want to actually finish it and get and frame it, I can get really in my head about what I'm drawing thinking, "Oh, that's not going to work," and I erase it out. But I have taught myself at times to just keep going with an idea, just keep going, see where it ends up and some of those have been my most favorite drawings I've ever made. Just to give you an idea what I did different here, this is the tracing one where I did two in the center of the squares, three at a junction, and three down here at the junction. So quiet down that judgmental voice and just pick something and go with it. When you put it all together, it always comes out beautiful. So some other ideas that you could use, simple little squares, inside the squares gives you a really cool look and then you could also do like a zigzag, which is really just simple lines inside those squares. It looks complicated when you see it as a whole but it was really simple to draw because it was just a bunch of lines and there you have it. Your mini mandala tile work is complete. So what's next do you say? Will join me in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 34. Your Project & What's Next: Congratulations. You have worked through 10 days of mindful drawing and hopefully learn some new ways to be present and maybe even learned a little more about yourself and how you interact with the world. The more you work with this, the more you'll realize that you have a go-to sense that you generally use to receive information from the outer world and your inner world. You'll be able to expand on this by trying out other senses as well. As you practice being in the moment with your drawing, it'll start to become easier to access this state of awareness. If drawing your own designs and trying to practice mindfulness seems like too much multitasking at this point, don't stress about it, take it slowly. I would suggest just enjoy creating your own designs using the grids in pencil and then while inking them, you can try the mindfulness techniques. I like to revisit my designs many times. First, I'll create it, then I'll go back through and ink it. Then sometimes I'll go back through a third time and possibly color it or fill in more black ink for contrast. Each time I revisit the design, I remember and go a little deeper into what was going on the first time I drew it. I've included a PDF download listing each of the days of the challenge with other ideas you may want to try exploring with each technique or you may come up with your own. I'd love to hear how those are going for you. Remember to share your experience in your drawing in the project section. I've suggested three ideas that you can approach for this. You can post your favorite day's mandala and tell us your experience while drawing it. You could post one thing you learned about yourself and your awareness of yourself while drawing, or you can post one thing from class that you'll incorporate into your daily routine to help you become more present. As a bonus, if you want to post your entire design or when you've created yourself, I'd love to see that. Thanks so much for joining me in this class and allowing me to share some drawing from mindful awareness with you.