Music Therapy | Mandalas

How does music therapy use mandala art?

The word mandala is Sanskrit for sacred wheel. The circular confines of the mandala provide music therapy patients a place from which to start as well as an assigned place for containing subliminally evoked expressions of unhealthy negative and healthier positive experiences.

Music therapists use mandalas in many ways. For example, one mandala intervention may begin with centering or relaxation exercises and very few specific instructions other than to fill three blank mandala templates with strokes using crayons, pencils, or chalk while listening to several minutes of three consecutive sound environments:

• silence
• peaceful music
• emotional music

Individual mandalas vary widely even though group members listen to the same sounds. Altering the color of the template paper from light to dark can stimulate patients to experiment with color and imagery in delightfully unexpected ways.

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Roll your cursor over the dots to see a variety of mandalas.