Sri Chakra
As I get closer to releasing my self-help book, I realize the best metaphor for how it came together was like picking berries to make jam. There were little pieces that came together to form a unique whole over a 15 year period. However, the biggest unexpected piece came from a trip to India. While in southern India in 2011, our group happened to take a day trip to an ashram that incorporated a children’s school and orphanage. We were briefly led into a meditation room and I happened to notice across the room an enlarged triangular design called a mandala but I didn’t think much about it. As we were exiting the room, a couple of women in my group commented on the mandala and took some pictures of it so I decided to take a couple pictures of it myself and I still didn’t think much about it or even ask anyone about it. A month or two later as I was sorting through my pictures, I decided to learn a little about this mandala which is called Sri Chakra (or Sri Yantra). This geometric shape was meant to serve as a tool for a person to concentrate on all the significant details of the world including one’s thoughts and feelings inside.
I decided to meditate on the mandala every day to see if anything would happen. Not much seemed to be happening for quite some time until about a year later I began to place different emotions into each triangle and created a mandala map of our inner life. At that point, I saw the healing value of integrating emotions into the mandala. I ended up with this figure:
Unfortunately, most of the feedback I received about this figure was that while the triangles were cool to look at, the triangles also made for a complicated drawing that was difficult to comprehend and keep track of the different emotions. I sat with this issue for several months until I decided the best remedy would be to convert all the triangles into squares and ended up with this figure:
This figure no longer resembled a mandala but seemed to look more like an apartment building which is the metaphor I decided to expand upon in the book. I created a hierarchy of emotions within this square apartment building from emotional overwhelm and hopelessness at the bottom to peace at the top and all the other emotions somewhere in the middle. Once I understood that the square apartment building was the visual foundation of the book, I was then able to incorporate visualizations, cognitive behavioral therapy, and other psychotherapeutic techniques to develop a healing map. By starting with negative emotions at the very bottom level and moving up one floor at a time, I guide you through a 5 step technique with the goal of reaching upward to higher floors where you can access more positive emotions. Stay tuned for more updates on the release of the book in the coming months.