Mandala training in Portland.

A mandala is a geometric design organized around a center, found across many of the world's contemplative traditions: Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas, Hindu yantras, Navajo sand paintings, Christian rose windows, the Aztec sun stone, and many more. The English word comes from Sanskrit mandala, meaning circle. As a contemplative practice, drawing or constructing a mandala is a slow, focused, geometrically-disciplined act that supports inward attention.

Modern mandala facilitation in the U.S. wellness market draws on this contemplative heritage with explicit attribution. Carl Jung's twentieth-century work on the mandala as a symbol of psychological wholeness brought the practice into Western psychological vocabulary; the contemporary mindfulness and expressive-arts movements have made it accessible as a wellness practice. A facilitated mandala session today might involve guided geometric construction, freeform mandala drawing within a circular constraint, or group collaborative mandalas around a shared theme.