Mandalas and self discovery

There are those who believe that the mandala carries messages from your inner most self.  The idea is that drawing mandalas is a way to get in touch with your intuition, a path to self discovery.

Carl Jung believed that a mandala is "the the psychological expression of the totality of the self".  For a period, he himself drew a daily mandala investigating it as a tool for self discovery.  The artwork he created in this process has since been published as The Red Book.  There is also a 'reader's edition', which is considerably less expensive but does not contain all the original artwork.

I find that I usually just draw without thinking too much about it. Sometimes the finished result is just an image to me, sometimes it seems to have more meaning. This one, mandala no 7 is an example of that.  When I had finished the mandala it seemed to make a lot of sense. It says to me that we construct a few external layers to present to the  outside world. Those layers have dark and light, ups and downs. This exterior might be patchy and uneven but it forms a cohesive, recognisable and whole shape nonetheless.  Inside, however... well, that's more complicated. Colourful, but complicated.