There’s something special that happens when you witness your body having a direct affect on the object in front of you. Taking raw materials and utilizing your creative force to make a new thing out of it.
Something ONLY YOU can make!
One of the things I’ve thought about doing for a long time is making a zine. Like thought about since the 90s.
Zines are self-publishing at it’s finest.
And after endless requests to turn my mandalas into a coloring book, I’ve obliged!
I present to you…
This Book of Mandalas is for Coloring.
The outside.
A real live, you can hold it in your hands, coloring book!
Comprised of 14 mandalas, made of black outlines, ready for COLOR to be unleashed within them, or outside them, there are no rules here.
This little booklet is imperfect and quirky and awkward and I adore it.
About the content: These mandalas are intuitive downloads that provide healing and clearing via encoded sacred geometric shapes when you look at them. When you color them, you are personalizing the experience to what you need to see and having your own intuitive download. It’s also very meditative, creative flow inducing and you know… fun!
The inside.
So, the moral of this story:
Have more fun, do stuff you’ve always wanted to do and
for gosh sakes, let your inner creative anima out to prowl around
(especially the imperfect and quirky and awkward parts).
(PS – Creativity isn’t just for artists – we are ALL innately creative. Everything we do and say and are is creativity!)
I’ve also put together a more refined coloring book which will be available at the end of November – you can order that here. It’s $25 including shipping. And the first 20 people who order get a BONUS surprise! Might I add these would make a great holiday gift! 😉
So for the next 24 hours (until June 21st at 4pm est), you get a FREE 30 min private session with me where we’ll dig in to one of your drawings and your drawing process and see what wisdom it has to share with you! And lemme tell you, clients have had some EPIC shifts in their non-drawing lives because of this experience.
It’s super fun to discover what it all means 🙂 and it’s even MORE fun to see that pesky pattern you’ve been grappling with shift. For good.
Yes! Drawing can really do that! It’s not just frivolous fun, it’s useful fun!!
Here’s what one person had to say about this process:
I was having one of those days when I needed to get a lot done for my business and I felt SO BLOCKED. Usually I drink more coffee or waste time on Facebook, but I decided to jump on one of Mara’s Drawsome exercises and it totally changed my whole day. I watched my mandala come alive on paper and I realized that I had a big unresolved resistance to finishing projects. As I put the finishing touches on my art piece I felt really calm and reenergized. It stirred up a lot of creative juice and I had a blast laughing with Mara. I was able to finish my newsletter and even came up with ideas for my next launch. I’ll be doing this again for sure!
You may or may not know this, but I’ve been drawing lately… a lot.
And all this drawing has added a whole new dimension to my business.
I’m telling this story for two reasons:
1. To share with you how finding a creative practice you love can be life altering.
2. And to show you exactly what rocking your WEIRD can do for you!
<3 Love letter to you and me mandala <3
It started in earnest last fall.
Well, technically, I’ve been drawing since I was a wee child (we all have!), took lots of art classes while I was growing up and then majored in art.
When I graduated from college, I became a graphic designer. All of my creative energy went into designing all day and I stopped making art for myself.
Over the past few years, though, I’ve been doing more consulting and less design and last fall, I started to feel like something was missing.
I wasn’t really sure what it was, but I knew that I was feeling burned out…
Being an entrepreneur is really hard sometimes!
It’s stressful to constantly be exposing yourself to the world and if you’re like me, you’re not very good at ending the work day at a reasonable hour because there’s always more you ‘could’ be doing.
So yea, burned out.
When you’re burned out, all you wanna do is chill out and relax and enjoy yourself.
It turns out it can be surprisingly difficult to relax and enjoy yourself when you feel like there’s a lot to do. The guilt monster immediately showed up, throwing all kinds of profanity in my direction.
But that was the whole reason I had gotten myself into the mess of feeling burned out in the first place.
I was also having quite a hard time remembering what I *actually* liked to do for fun!
So, I decided to go way way back in the archives… to childhood!
I knew I liked to hang out in nature… so many, many walks ensued.
And while I was walking, I found a playground and rediscovered the swings, so I added that to my list. But, it turns out that adults without kids aren’t really welcome in playgrounds anymore so… that was just sort of awkward!
These things were all successful at helping me call up that glorious feeling of freedom and curiosity.
And then I dug out the art supplies…
It started with a few handmade cards and some futzing around with watercolors.
I liked it because I could make whatever the heck I wanted without having to think about pleasing anyone. It was all in the name of feeling good.
Over time, I noticed that I had naturally started gravitating towards making art whenever I was feeling overwhelmed by other things in my life or feeling creatively stuck and scared in my biz. I’m pretty amazed that in a matter of a few weeks, art making had officially been inducted into my subconscious as a tool to use to take me from feeling ‘UGH’ to feeling ‘WEEEEEEE!!!!’!!!!
This one is about sacred geometry.
And then my friend Mariah Neeson sent me this video on how to draw a mandala.
And EVERYTHING JUST EXPLODED!
I had always been very intrigued by mandalas but was way too intimidated by their intricacy to try drawing one (it turns out it’s insanely easy!).
Suddenly I was a drawing maniac. I couldn’t WAIT to draw everyday!
And then something really interesting happened… I noticed that what I was drawing completely reflected whatever was going on inside me – whatever I was struggling with, or celebrating, emotionally or mentally ended up on the page. Of course, I later found out that Carl Jung touted the mandala as a representation of the inner self which explained a lot.
Drawing as play!
Every time I drew a mandala, I discovered something new about myself or solved a life problem or transformed a crappy stressed out mood into a calm one… and in the rest of my life, I saw huge changes!
I started accepting and loving myself more, expressing myself more opening, I launched a passion project, I grew the ovarios needed to state what I wanted and needed, transforming several important relationships in my life and so so many other things.
So there I was… drawing my daily mandalas and loving it! (my handle is @poodlecat if you’re curious to see them – or you can look at the Instagram album on my Facebook page)
And other people were loving it, too! Any time someone would email me or call me, they’d bring up the mandalas and how much they were enjoying them. I was really surprised by just how into them people were!
So I decided to package up all the stuff I had been exploring through my daily mandalas into a drawing workshop to see if other peeps would want to experience (and re-experience) just how effing awesome drawing is!! And thus Be Drawsome! was born.
And it turns out that all kinds of people, artists and non-artists, are super excited about drawing!! WOOHOOOO!!
Letting go of old crap.
Something that’s been there all along but that I had no clue would transform me and have such an impact on the people around me. So there you have it, the 10 month process of seeking, playing, discovering and sharing a deep part of myself.
The lesson: go after what makes you feel good,
enjoy the heck out of it and share it with others.
Be your weird self and you will totally changes lives!
If you’re curious to explore drawing, would love to have you in the latest Be Drawsome! Workshop!Check it out here!
