The Mandala of Wellness

THE MANDALA OF WELLNESS. 

The mandala of wellness is a protocol tool I designed with 5 areas of interventions. When I work with a client or create my own wellness protocol or plan, rather than big sweeping changes

I come up with very tiny, manageable interventions in these different areas that will over time, add up hopefully to long term change in health outcomes

Sometimes there are really big changes that someone might want to make like rolling a diagnoses backwards, or actually changing biomarkers for potential disease like cholesterol levels or antibodies for autoimmune diseases or putting an ailment into remission and these changes can take long time and usually involve pretty significant lifestyle changes

So rather than trying to do it all at once and overnight which can be very overwhelming and not particularly effective long term, the mandala of wellness is a tool that we use to make small manageable changes overtime, each intervention making space further in the future for more aggressive or comprehensive changes and interventions.

We want tools to manage ailments and help us feel good but a tool also has to be manageable. Wellness protocols have to be manageable, and if a behavior to tool creates stress in the system, it’s not going to help the system improve. In my experience, we can’t FORCE the body into feeling better, we need to ease the body into feeling behavior 

Overall, ease and sustainability for long term effects are two foundational concepts that are part of the mandala of wellness, especially how I work with clients and with my own self care practices. 

MANDALA

The word mandala itself means circle and in Buddhist and Hindu cultures and art, mandalas are believed to represent different aspects of the universe and are used as instruments of prayer and meditation. 

They are usually circular, geometrical patterns that occur in art and in nature and often are seen as a representation of the inner and outer world. 

Carl Jung, a psychologist, brought mandalas into his psychology practice reasoning that a mandala could be made as a representation of one’s unconscious like a self archetype in a way. 

They are used in art therapy, you see mandala coloring journals and I like to think of the mandala, especially in the context of wellness protocols as a representation of the circular and interconnected nature of the systems within our bodies and that our bodies interact with, because context matters. 

5 AREAS OF INTERVENTION

1. Nourishment (aka herbs and all the others ways that we can nourish ourselveS)

2. Rest

3. Mindset

4. Movement

5. Bodywork

These 5 areas are specific to my areas of expertise, my training, professional experience, and skills but I think you will find that the other types of personal interventions you might make will fit under one of these sections like social interventions, creative interventions, or spiritual and the like. 

NOURISHMENT

The first area is the nourishment area and it is also the HERB section. Herbs offer nourishment to the mind and body in the form of phyto-chemicals which is the lens I most often take this section, 

but interventions in this area can also include nourishment with food and even less physical types of nourishment like spiritual, creative, social nourishment. 

There’s mental nourishment and sensory nourishment, and so many more ways that we can be nourished. We can be nourished by our experiences, by nature, not just the typical ways that one might think of nourishment. 

So the first area we can introduce interventions is the nourishment area. 

REST

The next area is making interventions in the arena of rest. 

There are two categories of rest including passive rest which would be taking break from a specific activity or ACTIVE rest, which might be engaging in some sort of counter action to decrease the negative effects of a primary action. 

Just like there are many ways to nourish the body, there are any ways to REST as well, as described by Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith in her book Sacred Rest. 

She includes

• Physical rest

• Mental rest

• Emotional rest

• Spiritual rest

• Social rest

• Sensory rest

• And creative rest

Even though there are so many ways that one can explore rest, often the rest area will look like getting more sleep which is a foundational behavior for wellness regardless of who you are or your context. 

MINDSET

The third area is mindset. Mindset refers to how we think about something by processing information, learning something new, or engaging in the unlearning process. 

Some of my favorite ways to change the mind and the mindset are through listening to podcasts, reading books, watching inspiring videos, and widening my circle of influence. 

Mindset work can go so far as to involve mental health counseling to process past experiences. For the most part, when I work with clients I will condense affirmations or perspectives into things that they can journal about or repeat to themselves.

MOVEMENT

The movement area  is about seeing where there might be helpful movement practices that a client can incorporate into their routine

Movement interventions are active interventions and while you might think of this as exercise, movement really involves all the movements that our bodies make. 

It might look like taking gentle walks, doing gentle stretches, taking up a gardening practice, choosing to put things on lower shelves requiring your to squat down more often, getting a squatty potty, changing up your work scenario, and other formal and informal ways to incorporate more movement into our life.  

BODYWORK

The last intervention is BODYWORK which refers to goal oriented therapeutic practices that usually effect the functioning of some part of our anatomy

Bodywork is an umbrella term for most practitioner based modalities like massage, chiropractor work, physical therapy, and acupuncture, but it can also be self initiated with practices like self massage, mobility work, nervous system regulation practices and so on. 

Something that distinguishes this type of intervention from a general movement practice, is that bodywork is most often function specific and therapeutic in nature. This might mean the mobility and soft tissue work we do on your ankle so that you can get back to your walking practice or working with a pelvic floor specialist to improve incontinence after birth. 

Bodywork might look like retraining the diaphragm in the case of chronic headaches, digestive issues, or chronic UTI’s so that we are changing the bio-mechanical loads coming from inside the body that can have an impact on how stress effects other pats of the body. 

It is a passive intervention which means someone is doing something TO you but it can be an active intervention like in the case of physical therapy, mobility work, or DIY bodywork modalities like specific exercises or self massage. 

Ultimately though, bodywork involves some sort of specific action or therapy that seeks a specific outcome. It is an intervention area that often overlaps with movement but they are distinct in that the benefits of movement interventions are more general while bodywork interventions are specific.

DIY MANDALA OF WELLNESS

Creating your own mandala of wellness is a simple process that can help you organize your own intentional self-care practice. 

In my experiences, feeling good doesn’t usually happen by accident. We have to work at it. 

Step 1: figure out which self care stage you are in because that will determine how much behavior change you can take on and where you should focus your attention like should you focus on movement or should you focus on rest

Step 2: Pick a specific goal

Step 3: Brainstorm interventions along the mandala that think or that you know will produce the results you are looking for either immediately, or over time

Step 4: refine the plan by considering context and circumstances and what interventions are just unreasonable because of what is happening in. Your life and what you have access to 

Step 5: implement the mandala

NOW if you like how this sounds, and you want to try out making a mandala, you can follow along with me in my free mini course on the mandala of wellness where I actually walk you through all the stages and steps of creating your own mandala using what you already know about your body and how to feel good. This is the tool that I use to organize my own self care practice. 

I live with chronic illness and I need to plan out my self care if I want my body and mind to function the way I want it to function. Living with chronic illness is very different than suffering from chronic illness so this is the actual tool I use to go from suffering to just living and like living well. 

All you have to do is click enroll now, create an account for the Mandala Wellness Academy which is the online school where all my formal programs and classes live and just hit play, there are videos and worksheets with captions and subtitles to make your experience easy and simple. 

One thing I also want to emphasize as you are processing this information is that at the bottom of this mandala, as in, what this mandala rests as a whole on, is the concept of EASE. 

When making a mandala, or engaging in ANY wellness behavior be sure to always emphasize ease. Ease in the nervous system is one of the most important factors in healing. If a protocol stresses you out in a way that doesn’t make you stronger (for example the beneficial stress of cardiovascular training or weightlifting), it doesn’t belong in your wellness protocol. Period. 

Many blessings on your wellness and healing journey.

Would you rather LISTEN to this article? Check out the Herbs + Ease Podcast for a more robust educational experience!

Kristen Prosen