R is for Round: Circles and Mandalas in your Visual Journal

Coloring and creating mandalas was the one thing that brought me back to my art over a decade ago. I remember sitting on the couch with my two young kids, a mandala coloring book and a box of colored pencils. We would watch Emeril on the food network and color together. Over the years my love affair with working in the round has continued.

My passion for mandalas spread to my son and over the past few years he and I co-created 3 mandala coloring workshop series that combine meditation, affirmations, journaling and coloring mandalas. I love printing out the mandalas that he created and coloring or painting them to include in visual journal pages.

Mandala Coloring Pages

Here is one of my favorite designs that Conner created and I colored. I find that this type of coloring is so soothing, calming and relaxing. The past year and a half of the pandemic have created high levels of anxiety for many people, me included. I return to the art of the mandala and my visual journal over and over again for rest and relaxation.

The words scrawled across the bottom capture how I was feeling in the moment: A spiraling in of wonder, delight, joy as I travel to my center of inspiration. Cosmos.

Working in the round with JourneyCircles™

Another way that working in the round has showed up in my work is through collage and using JourneyCircles™, a template created by Cat Caracelo, founder of the Journey Path Institute. A few years ago I became a Certified Creative Depth Coach and it changed my life and the trajectory of my career.

This process also had a powerful impact on my personal life. Working with intuitive collage and JourneyCircles™ has helped me to heal some of my past wound and work through painful stories as well as open me to my own intuitive gifts.

Using Circles in My Visual Journal

The final way that round shows up in my visual journal is my love of drawing circles into my visual journal pages. Whether they are tiny bubbles or larger rounds that hold words and images like in the visual journal page above, I find myself drawn to circles. My hand loves to create them and they are pleasing to my eyes.

Circles represent wholeness and completeness on the one hand but they also are spacious and expansive. There are no hard edges, they are not a box, constrained or limited by size and shape. That’s probably why I love mandala coloring pages so much as well as JourneyCircles, there is a freedom in the way they hold ideas, dreams and images as well as allowing them to spill over into my consciousness.