Gail Blate lectures at LMQG

Last Monday night Gail Blate of Tryon, NC was the featured speaker at Lake and Mountain Quilt Guild in Seneca. Gail spoke to our group about the art of making Mandalas.

Gail is studying to be a certified art therapy specialist in Mandalas. She is not planning on actually teaching art therapy but is so interested in the history and function of Mandalas that she is taking the classes.

She gave a well put together powerpoint presentation on the history and theory of Mandalas.

Wikipedia definds Mandalas as:

Mandala (मण्डल) is a Sanskrit word that means "circle". In the Hindu and Buddhist religious traditions, their sacred art often takes a mandala form. The basic form of most Hindu and Buddhist mandalas is a square with four gates containing a circle with a center point. Each gate is in the shape of a T.[1][2]

These mandalas, concentric diagrams, have spiritual and ritual significance in both Buddhism and Hinduism.[3][4] The term is of Hindu origin and appears in the Rig Veda as the name of the sections of the work, but is also used in other Indian religions, particularly Buddhism. In the Tibetan branch of Vajrayana Buddhism, mandalas have been developed into sandpainting. They are also a key part of anuttarayoga tantra meditation practices.

In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing attention of aspirants and adepts, as a spiritual teaching tool, for establishing a sacred space, and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. According to David Fontana, its symbolic nature can help one "to access progressively deeper levels of the unconscious, ultimately assisting the meditator to experience a mystical sense of oneness with the ultimate unity from which the cosmos in all its manifold forms arises." [5] The psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw the mandala as "a representation of the unconscious self,"[citation needed] and believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to identify emotional disorders and work towards wholeness in personality.[6]

In common use, mandala has become a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the Universe from the human perspective

Gail is teaching classes for fiber artist on how to make Mandalas. Donna Barnhill from LMQG recently took a class from Gail at QSC (Quilters of SC) retreat and brought her Mandalas for show and tell.

This was a very interesting program and one I think many guild would be interested in viewing.