Medicine Wheel: The Power of the Circle

The famous pen and ink drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, renders the proportions of the human form as they relate to the geometry of a circle and the square. When we stand with our arms stretched out and our legs spread wide, like a cartwheel, (think snow angels) our bodies make a shape that relates to a circle. We are medicine wheels in our human forms.

Our bodies are an expression in the physical dimension, similar to the growth of a tree with roots, limbs and trunk. Our crown like the crown of a tree radiates energy and light.  If we imagine the cross section of our skull as a mandala, at the very center is the mysterious place that when awakened allows us to be visionary, the place where the pineal gland sits within the center of the two halves of our brain. Leonardo da Vinci balanced the perspective construction of another painting, The Last Supper, so that its vanishing point is immediately behind Christ's right temple, pointing to the physical location of the centre, or sensus communis, of his brain. The sacred point of the sixth chakra. 

The Circle as Medicine

Medicine Wheels are not so much art forms though they are visual forms, but more importantly, place holders for healing.  They are guideposts to the energy of non-ordinary reality, portals into timeless space. They can create a sacred and safe space, a functional form of support. 

When I go to the river, I often draw circles in the sand with a long stick reaching out around me from the center. I sit down in the center and ground myself into the elements of earth, air, fire from the sun and water from the rio.  I send down a wide grounding cord, which I visualize as a corkscrew type of shape, that spirals down into the earth, like a big drill bit the width of my hips.  (It is very different for me than visualizing the connecting root as a straight line of energy.)   This is a very simple yet very helpful practice for grounding and connecting into the power of Pachamama. 

There is an infinite container of support in the medicine wheel. It is an archetypal form found in many cultural teachings, I came to the mandala through more than one culture. Almost simultaneously, I was attracted to the sand paintings of Tibetan Buddhists and the Medicine Wheels of Native American traditions in New Mexico, when I was in graduate school. I wanted to paint mandalas before I really knew why. 

The medicine wheel is one way to acknowledge the six directions. There are many ways of interpreting the directions, but I will share the way I have learned,  a simple practice of centering to begin the day:

Orient the body by planting yourself, your feet, and/or your seat onto the earth. Sit or stand facing the east to begin, but this can change given the season or what we are facing in our lives as we cycle through the year. Each direction has meaning which can correlate to the seasons and cycles of life. Call upon the spirit of the east as a place to begin, to open the heart center to peace as opposed to chaos.  I like to consider the dawn light as a visual for this ritual practice, imagine the rosy pink light of a new day beginning, if you can be outside, all the better. Sit or stand in peace, calm and equanimity.

When I sit early in the morning just after the sun has risen, during that quiet time when everything feels at peace around me, the sense of outer stillness helps me to reflect that within myself. This is the way it has been taught in India throughout recorded time, to face the new day with the rising sun. Take time to bring into your awareness each of the directions: east, south, west, north and Father Sky and Mother Earth. Consider what each direction has to offer in terms of energy: new beginnings in the spirit of the east, in the west the spirits of clarity and completion, and in the south, the energy of support through the movement of the sun. The north brings in the energy of effortless action through the movement of the holy winds. 

At the river it had been raining a slow deliciousness all day and dragging a stick through the wet sand was satisfying, I felt the resistance at the end of the stick as I circumscribed a line in a rough circle.  I marked the four directions and scratched the Rune symbols, from the ancient Celtic alphabet for All- That- Is, around the perimeter: an offering for spirit, a thank you, and a recognition.

Through the process of inscribing circles, whether drawn in the sand, painted on canvas, made from little stones, or great monolithic ones like Stonehenge, the circle establishes a place of power. It relates to the womb of mother, the act of nurturing, holding arms around another and motherhood. It relates to Mother Earth.

In the beginning of my own journey, the circle emerged rather spontaneously one day in the studio when I was trying to resolve a large oil on canvas and glass assemblage. I still recall the feeling of placing a big sable brush filled with a bright Chinese Red glaze upon the canvas. Not knowing for certain if I should let go of an expanse of patterns across the surface that I had labored to achieve, in order to arrive at the clarity of a circular image in the composition, it was a risk. There would be no way to go back once I made the decision.

First, I had to be willing to let go of what I had already created. This painting would eventually mirror my own healing, letting go of old patterns in order to get to a more resolved place. Finding more clarity would become an ongoing theme in my art and life. Years later, I would see the mandalas of the Swiss psychotherapist, Carl Gustav Jung in his extraordinary dream study, The Red Book.  His work gave me a much greater understanding of what my psyche was drawn to create during a time when my emotional needs were great raw wounds.  I didn’t know it then but I was on a desperate quest for wholeness, and a deep sense of grounding. Creating circles was natural enough, a geometric form for resolution.  Jung might say I was drawn to the power of the archetypal form through the collective unconscious. Maybe I was, or maybe it was something already present within each cell of my being.

I had not known that Jung was a supremely gifted visual artist until I saw the publication of this large scale reproduction. I was and remain stunned by his skill, the scope of his illustrative dream imagery and his expert calligraphy. The illuminated manuscript, a weighty tome of dream investigation, his magnum opus, was a work in progress for sixteen years between 1914-30.  It was left unfinished, mid-sentence.  I have an intuition that that was his intention, though, we will never know for certain. 

In November of 2013, I had the good fortune to be able to walk around the actual book, enclosed in a protective round glass case, in the Central Pavillion at the Venice Biennale.  On my first trip to this dreamland, watery Venice along with the dreams of Jung, brought me easily into a heightened state of reality. The exhibition, Encyclopedic Palace, curated by Massimiliano Gioni was an incredible achievement, bringing together drawings from Rudolph Stiener’s lectures; the mystical paintings of Hilga af Klimt; Jung’s Red Book; anonymous Tantric paintings from Southern India, and many artists -- a plurality of visions.

Gioni said that the “representation of the invisible [as] a central theme” and the “challenge of reconciling the self with the universe,”was the intention. A sense that the spiritual was alive within this vision coincided with the curatorial decision to hang fine artists along side of unknown artists, artists within the canon and as well as outsider artists and Jung was the bridge to both, and to the unconscious realms. His mandalas and illustrated dreams were the gateway to this show.

Indeed red, weighty and bound in a thick leather cover, embossed in gold leaf, Jung’s book is something one might expect to see during the Renaissance, mid-fifteenth century in a Florentine palace. His monumental imagery, like the book itself, is too large to hold, it needs to be on a table or a pedestal to view. I find a New York Times article from 2009 written by Sara Corbett about the Red Book’s coming out from hiding from the Union Bank in Zurich.  It’s a cold day in Switzerland in 2007 when as Corbett says, a change was under way:

…the book, which had spent the past 23 years locked inside a safe deposit box in one of the bank’s underground vaults, was just then being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a discreet-looking padded suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the guards, out into the sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded into a waiting car and whisked away.

The images and calligraphy, -the examination of his dreams, visions and fantasies- were presented as the center piece of the rotunda as you first enter the exhibit hall for the biennale, 2013.   The book, opened to one illumination and enclosed under a dome of thick glass (probably bullet -proof glass,) was slightly angled on an easel so that as one circumambulated it, the red leather cover was revealed. Around it, in the exhibit space, were mounted reproductions of other illustrated pages from the book. I would have travelled far to lay eyes on this holy relic and it is not an exaggeration to say the marriage of Venice and Jung was a dream come true.

During Jung’s lifetime, the actual Red Book had only ever been viewed by people within his family, friends and his patients. I guess one could say that, the book was hidden in plain sight. Later, the board of his foundation, close advisors, and those who worked on the reproduction were fortunate to view it first hand. Known widely as a psychotherapist, psychiatrist and writer, Jung, was also an exceptional artist. His mandalas, dream illustrations and the accompanying calligraphic text are exquisitely crafted in the manner of a fine illuminated manuscript. Examinations of his profoundly complex dream imagery, Liber Novus or The Red Book, was a personal journey and an archetypal reference to the unconscious, a healing tome of epic undertaking that he worked on following the ravages of World War I. It’s not hyperbolic to say, his dreams were of mythic proportions. 

Jung said this was the ....”the culmination of his self-analytic search for meaning”. He began the preliminary work for the Red Book one hundred years ago at a time after he was in the service during WWI, as a commander of the English prisoners of war.  “Swallowed by war” as he wrote, he felt he was in a state of psychosis which began to clear at the end of the war. From August of 1917 to the end of September, he drew a mandala nearly every day in an army notebook. These drawings would become the precursor to the Red Book. He said, “my mandala images were cryptograms on the state of myself, which were delivered to me each day.”   

His conversations with his soul-self could be considered as a way through. He said, “[w]hoever speaks in primordeal images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers...he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from the peril and to outlive the longest night."

 

 The Red Book on Jung's desk

1. The Red Book Reader, pg. 43-44

2. Ibid, pg. 63