I have been drawing mandalas for years now, and people sometimes ask me why I keep returning to the same form. It is a fair question. The circle, the symmetry, the repeating patterns, it can look like the same idea done over and over. But every time I sit down to make one, it feels like starting fresh.
The honest answer is that a mandala asks something of you before it gives anything back. You cannot rush it. The moment you try to speed through a section, the whole thing falls apart. It is one of the few things I do where I have no choice but to be fully present.
Where the tradition comes from
Growing up in India, mandalas were everywhere, on the floor at festivals, stitched into fabric, painted on the walls of temples. I did not think of them as art back then. They were just part of how things looked, how celebrations felt. It was only later, when I started making them myself, that I began to understand what goes into each one.
The word mandala comes from Sanskrit and loosely means circle. But it is more than a shape. It has always carried a sense of wholeness, of something complete in itself. When I work the Sanskrit verse into the outer ring of a piece, as I did with the Bhagavad Gita piece above, it is my way of connecting the visual to the written, two ways of holding the same thought.
What the process actually looks like
I start at the centre and work outward. Every ring is a decision: how many petals, what size, how much space between them. There is no erasing halfway through, so you have to trust yourself to commit to each line before you make it. Some pieces take days. Some take weeks.
Working digitally gives me a kind of freedom I did not have when I painted or draw on paper or floor. I can adjust colour, play with how the light sits on each petal, layer gradients that would be impossible with a brush. But the patience it demands is exactly the same. The tool changes. The attention does not.
That is probably why I keep coming back. Not for the result, though I do love seeing a finished piece. It is the process of making something that holds still long enough for you to really look at it. A mandala does that. It waits for you to catch up.