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Felicia's 2nd Challenge: Meditation

Challenge  – Meditation – Day 1 - Mandala Coloring

I already meditate every day in the morning for 5 – 30 minutes depending on how I’m feeling, how much time I have etc. In fact, I have tried many different forms of meditation at least once and quite often have created my own guided meditations for others when I’ve been speaking, teaching, speaking, or doing massage.


If you are new to meditation or want to try a very simple guided meditation, you can check out “Just Breathe” on my website at www.FeliciaBrown.com. It’s very short and totally free, though there are others available for purchase if you want more. I think they are a great entry point for someone just getting started with meditation.


Since I am not taking on meditation as a “new” discipline with this challenge, I decided to try form(s) of meditation that are new or less familiar to me. My first step was to research different techniques and styles of meditation to see if anything jumped out at me.


I stumbled across several articles about meditation including this one with suggestions about types of meditation. Somewhere I also found a more extensive list of types of meditations which included:

  • Mindfulness meditation

  • Guided meditation

  • Forest bathing

  • Cultivation meditation

  • Loving kindness meditation

  • Forgiveness meditation

  • Yoga Nidra

  • Breathwork

  • Moving meditations like yoga, Tai Chi, Chi Gung

  • Walking a Labyrinth


Having tried these and quite a few others, I was drawn to the suggestion of Mandala coloring as meditation. Basically, you color in the shape of a mandala which is “meant to relieve stress and increase focus while exercising the brain and expressing creativity.”


I have my doubts about the positive effects I’ll experience for a few reasons but am going to give it a try.


Since this decision was made at 5:54 AM and I neither had a mandala coloring book nor a printer on hand, I decided to work with a Zen Doodle coloring book, “Uplifting Inspirations” which I already had.  To speed up the coloring process, I decided to use markers which have richer colors that I find more satisfying than pencils or crayons. The doodle design I chose was “Trust.”


Almost immediately, I felt familiar feelings of anxiety and stress enter my body as I began to worry about color selection, accuracy, and the amount of time this exercise would take.

Filling in the spaces between the swirling lines, I found myself wondering why I chose “trust.” Was it about trusting myself to pick the right colors, or that the drawing would look fine no matter what I chose? Was it because I felt my trust had been repeatedly broken by someone important in my life? Or was it a prompt to examine the ways I may have caused others to question their trust in me? Perhaps a wordless mandala would be a better choice for me, so I don’t assign so much meaning and tension to what is supposed to be a relaxing activity.


I’m about halfway done and will finish this design. However, I’m not sure I’ll be coloring as a meditative activity for the rest of the challenge! In the meantime, I’m going to do a moving meditation (i.e. going for a run) to help dispel the tension caused by coloring. Ha ha!



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