Mandala Gallery

Created over the course of years, this page offers you a view of the full collection of Wisdom's Mandala Whispers. By clicking on each image you will open a larger view and joanne's reflections and poetry. If you are interested in purchasing a mandala the product info page will lead you through the options.

Awaken

Ever increasing gratitude for the growing awareness of original blessing rather than original depravity.

Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place, Danielle Shroyer, November 1, 2016.

Beloved

Opening to living life loved launches a journey into the unknown, and the first yes for me as a codependent was to be honest with and learn about myself. My life-long teachings were that doing so was selfish and not to be trusted.

Yet through therapy, a deep desire and longing to understand and learn about myself, and coming across a particular article, I came to the realization that “You cannot give what you do not have”. I don’t know the author of that quote, but it landed in me, and I more and more opened to Plato’s “An unexamined life is not worth living” – that it made sense if I really desired to know authenticity. But yes, it is very scary because of the unconscious, unacknowledged fear that it will just confirm my deepest belief that I REALLY am “not enough”.

Yet with inexpressible gratitude, the words came one day as to how I “tasted” the reality of Ephesians 3:14-19.

https://sojo.net/articles/sin-guilt-and-psychology-what-i-wish-all-pastors-knew “Sin, Guilt, and Psychology: What I Wish All Pastors Knew.” (Dated 03-04-2014 by Derek Flood)
Ephesians 3:14-19

A friend of mine recently emailed to let me know how the Beloved mandala spoke to her during a trying event in her life: ...I felt like the clanger in a bell, banging up against opposing emotions... battered. During this time my heart and my mind kept returning to the "Beloved" mandala that you sent me. Sometimes it made me feel like that word had been emblazoned on my heart, and other times it felt like a wax seal on my heart, like an icon for the chant that says, "place me as a seal upon your heart". It speaks to me of being loved and held.

Coming Out from Behind the Curtain

Having always been (and will always basically be) an introvert and socially shy and “inept”, it was exhilarating to begin peeking out from behind the curtain of codependency and inadequacy and take some steps into the shallow water of an individual selfhood, but learning to have and enforce boundaries, especially emotional boundaries in primary relationships, would often make me “run backstage”.

Being “thankful” does not begin to touch my depth of love and gratitude for Spirit’s gratuitous Love, guidance, and provision of the support of a Spiritual Companion, Therapist, and the practice of Centering Prayer as I journeyed along. And despite not being able to fully understand another’s journey or even agree with it all, I was lovingly supported by my daughters, my siblings, and many growing friendships.

Connected

It wasn’t something I had to work hard to understand. For me, it just is – the sense of being connected to one another. I resonate in a very small way to Thomas Merton’s famous “Fourth and Walnut” experience:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers … There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
~ from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Equanimity

I do not recall how this mandala came to me – I am just thankful for the possibility of the state of equanimity. As Cynthia Bourgeault enigmatically said:

“Don’t correct back to positivity if what you want is equanimity.”

Huh? I have no idea if this is what she meant, but to me, equanimity is a beautiful virtue of being able to remain centered, stable and steady of mind and emotions to whatever IS – whatever situation you may find yourself, whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It is usually easier to try and ‘find the positive’ or ‘dwell in the negative’, focusing on one or the other, but equanimity allows what IS, thereby able to better respond to any possible action or non-action that may be required. It is one of the four great virtues in Buddhism (along with compassion, lovingkindness, and sympathetic joy) that Buddha taught his disciples to cultivate.

Gospodi Pomiluj

Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, I experienced a vision(?), dream(?), image(?) – I don’t know what it was, but I do know it was not the result of “thinking about” the invasion and working up my imagination. It just came to me – an image of the world’s peoples standing at the border of Russia and of southern Ukraine in the Donbas region quietly gazing into Russia. I didn’t try to draw anything for awhile, but just let it be.

I was also at that time (and continuing today) zooming daily with a group of others to practice collective Centering Prayer – see https://www.heatherruce.com/. One of the participants is of Russian descent and her graciously allowing her heart and prayers to be known inspired me to to draw two mandalas titled Gospodi Pomiluj meaning Lord, Mercy Us in Russian – not as passive recipients of mercy, but as an active verb praying to be “mercied” into Presence in even the most horrible of circumstances.

Please do take the time to read about these beautiful words: https://wisdomwaypoints.org/2022/03/gospodi-pomiluj-lord-mercy-us/ .

Holy Gestures

Another area that I am currently learning so much about is my body, or moving center. I had never really been taught about the beauty, joy, and knowledge that my body contains.

So learning about the body, or the moving center, as part of the “whole” of me has been so freeing and validating. Cynthia says that though the body is “…viewed with fear and suspicion…” by many spiritual traditions, what is missed and is of “…crucial importance…is that the moving center also carries unique perceptive gifts, the most important of which is the capacity to understand the language of faith encoded in sacred gesture.”[1] It has been a joy to use my body in the sacred gestures that speak beyond my ability to utter words that would even come close to adequately expressing the depths of many of my/our longings and yearnings – depths of inexpressible awe, gratitude, surrender, joy, and/or trust, as well as cries of ‘no, I can’t!’, of ‘I don’t know!’, of ‘here I am’ and so many more. And there is SO MUCH more to learn – about how much actual knowledge our bodies contain that we could benefit from if we but learn to listen to them, and how we could find such healing if we would dare to allow the knowledge and experiences that we have suppressed or denied all our lives, but are retained in our bodies, to be heard.

[1] The Wisdom Way of Knowing, Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart, Cynthia Bourgeault, 2003, page 28.

Hope

So, the familiar verse in I Corinthians 13 (NRSV) says, “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” But, hey, I have often felt scared and without much hope, especially as a recovering co-dependent when I made choices that were not what I “should” do! What is the hope of I Corinthians? Well, in time and in the ever so, I began to notice a hope that was more than emotional, more than crossing my fingers — a steadfast hope that anchors my soul. It’s called Intrinsic Hope – A Quaker Perspective on Hope.

"Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpromising the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere.’ It is also this hope, above all, that gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.” ~ Vaclav Havel; 1936-2011; Last Czechoslovakian president until its dissolution in 1992.

Mystical Hope, Cynthia Bourgeault