Peace Pie Mandala Project: Supporting Peace
in Your Heart and Your Community
The Mandalas
Mandala is Sanskrit for circle, polygon,
community, connection. The Mandala is a symbol of man or woman
in the world, a support for the meditating person. As for the
center of a mandala, that is the essence, and the
circumference, that is grasping, thus grasping the essence.
This essence is the "heart" and the mandala
represents a "body of enlightenment."
With this in mind, I knew the mandala was
the most appropriate format for the peace project as it
embodies all the elements I feel are necessary for successful
realization of peace.
For our mandala we used pie-shaped pieces
of paper to collage on. Some of the participants found this
shape challenging to work with, but as soon as they allowed the
right-brained creative process to kick in the challenge melted
away. Also, I didn’t instruct the women to collage in any
certain direction on the paper and, interestingly enough, when
all the collages were complete we had just the right amount of
pieces going in an opposite direction to enable the mandalas to
be viewed from a single orientation.
At the conclusion of the initial collage
day, we shared our experiences and had the first viewing of
finished pieces laid together on the floor as a mandala. The
sight brought a tingle of excitement to the group. We had
immediate recognition of how the powerful process of our inner
journey work, now expressed outward, connected with each other.
It was profound and meaningful for us all.
Our completed Peace Pie Mandalas are four
feet in diameter, consisting of eight pie shaped pieces glued
down on masonite. I decided to use black and white paper for
the women to collage on as this represents the yin and yang
energy. One mandala is made of all the black paper pieces, the other all the white paper pieces. The center of each mandala
contains a single image that has a deep feeling of peace and
connects all the pieces together. For public display our
mandalas are mounted back to back on a stand. A book of the
women’s writings accompanies each side of the mandala.
For complete Peace Pie Mandala Project
details, materials needed, and instructions, email or call Jennifer
Star to order your “How To” kit.
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Our sincere thanks go out to all the
artists, photographers, graphic designers, and magazines whose
images were the inspiration for our interpretation of peace as
shown in the mandala collages. It is because of these image
gold mines we were able to express our feelings visually in the
collage pieces.
