Onionskin, mint, chamomile and a dash of lemon. The fusion forms mouthwatering tastes, and I was sipping away on them as we settled into the shades of the thuja trees out in the picturesque country side with Franciska and listened to her story.

I went to see her because she paints and when I encountered her for the first time whilst she was painting some freshly built compost toilets, I found hers a story worth sharing for some ‘balancing inspiration’. Through her paintbrush she manifests all sorts of inspiring and beautiful creations in a variety of dimensions and color panels, amongst which nowadays are mostly mandalas, healing mandalas.

I believe any painting, if inspired, can be soothing and healing, be it a mandala or not. Yet mandalas might just have a larger magic than an average painting. The word mandala has mainly come to be known in our Western culture through the popularisation of the Yogic tradition. It comes from Sanskrit and means ‘circular diagram’, and that is why we often find ourselves applying it to any circle painting or formation. In nearly every culture such paintings are used as a symbolic representation of some sort of reality.

A Navajo healer will create a mandala with coloured sand during a ritual to restore natural balance. A dervish will spin the sacred circle to reach different states of mind. The Tibetans use them as a pathway to and from desirable states of consciousness.

Franciska has not always lived in this beautiful place she can call home, and her path leading here has been a healing process, obviously still ongoing. A stepping stone came one day when she found a drawing exercise at the end of a book to express feelings and energies. When the painting had dried, she tore it apart and burnt it, yet she did not feel she had destroyed the content she had put in it: she felt as if it had been sent further on, not disappeared, simply transformed. She felt cleansed, and yes, you guessed – it was a mandala she had painted.

One of the first in the West to identify the benefits of creating mandalas was Carl Jung. He saw in it a natural process of generating and resolving inner conflicts that brought about greater complexity, harmony and stability in the personality. Another example was a Christian nun named Hildegard living in the 11th century who saw visions filled with symbolic circles and started drawing mandalas. She was quite ill, but when she expressed her creativity, her symptoms disappeared.

Thanks to her experiences and inner development Franciska has the beautiful opportunity to create healing mandalas for others too. They made a difference in people’s lives on more than one occasion. Let me share just one story.

A woman (let’s call her Lillian) came to Franci because she and her partner had been ready to welcome a child of their own for over two years, but were still awaiting. The doctors could not help, saying they were both fertile. Could Franci create a mandala for her?

Yes, she could, but not one that would help her get pregnant. It would be a mandala to strengthen the energies that are lacking to arrive at the place she wanted to be. They talked, attempting to find the source of the disbalance. Through the process Franci sensed what Lilian might need – a stronger awareness of her femininity, amongst other influences, and she knew what energies the mandala needed to symbolize. Franci helped direct Lillian’s attention to the changes she had to make in herself. In this case, too, the process mattered – paying attention, listening, believing. As Franci says, a mandala can be like a walking stick, there to accompany you, there to lean on it for support and give you comfort while you nurture, balance and work on what is needed. When about 6 months had past, Lillian proudly become a teleportation machine

Filled with doubts and suppressed energies, as a young girl Franci was far from the self image she encountered in her dreams – a confident, capable painter and healer who protects the ones around her. But that gap between dream and reality has narrowed since then. With curiosity about our ancestors, she continuously studies myths and legends of different cultures such as native Indians. She dreams vividly and communicates through her dreams to receive answers. When she paints she is ‘Kaniyara’, a name inspired by American Indian mythology. To any question she has at least two answers. She believes what you get in life is what you give. She is an inspiration and a gift, as are you, who is reading this.

Keep breathing, keep observing, keep expressing.