Mandalas and Active Imagination

With respect to the mandalas, a good approach to getting started is to buy a small journal or notebook for sketching and a package of colored pencils. If you enjoy artistic media, you might work with pastels, watercolors, or other media that inspire you.

Try one mandala each morning, on a new page. I suggest dating each page, as you would in a journal. I recommend a circle roughly 3 to 6 inches in diameter. Draw the circle yourself.

Jung's Mandalas

Jung recounts that he used mandalas for active imagination during World War I (1914 – 1918). The military drafted him at the start of the war, when he was working as a Swiss doctor. He served as a medical officer. He did not resent the work and felt it was his duty to do what he could to promote the health of everyone he worked with. As usual, Switzerland chose neutrality, but there was always a chance that others would not honor this, and the advent of trench warfare and nerve gas had dreadful consequences for all nations of Europe, resulting in an influx of horribly injured soldiers.

Jung got a small notebook and, each morning, sat at a wooden table in his quarters for a while to sketch a mandala. He followed generally the procedure Yasmine describes and illustrated in the video. 

Getting Started

Here is what I suggest. As you begin, allow yourself to be aware of your dreams. I recommend that you make a dream journal entry right at breakfast or soon after getting up. Continue to do so. But now add a mandala after you have completed the dream log entry.

Allow memories of dreams to occur to you, but do not invest cognitive focus. Instead, allow a sense of openness to the moment to come to you, draw the circle, and then choose colors and apply strokes without analysis. Think of skipping stones on a pond or tossing popcorn to pigeons.

A few minutes are needed. After you feel the mandala has reached a point of completion, allow your attention to go to the colors and lines and simply experience the feelings and thoughts that come to you. Allow themes to develop as they will and attend to them without applying analysis or heavy cognition.

Attend to Attending

During this activity, draw in deeper breaths. Feel the tingling in your body with the deeper breaths. Note that tingling is occurring because you are altering the neurochemical configuration of your brain. Periodically look away from the mandala and give your attention for a second to some other object. Attend to attending. Then go back to the mandala. Active imagination engages the brain’s ability to renew its awareness of the present moment and its relation to memory and anticipation. 

You will arrive at a feeling. The feeling is what you feel in the foreground. Breathe deeply and be aware of what you feel. Think of sniffing a flower and the air in the morning as the dew evaporates. You are learning.

“Tag” this feeling. By this, I mean make it so that you are aware of it as a memory, but do not name it or analyze it. Then allow it to be with you as you go through the day. The central question is “What is this telling me about myself at this moment?"

Continue Learning

Exploration using mandalas is an aspect of active imagination. For a somewhat clinically oriented discussion of active imagination, Marie-Louise von Franz, who worked directly with Jung for decades, provides a discussion in this video. 

Author

John P. Flynt, 2025 

Sources

Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz and others, Man and His Symbols.

Jung and Aniela Jaffé, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.