Week 45--in which we ponder the mysterious magical properties of a mystic mandala

Beautiful Ones,

Last Sunday, I talked about the power of looking back and the radical insights that surface when you look back at a whole nine-year cycle. If you missed that Notes from the Field, you might want to read it because it lays the foundation for today’s deep dive into why the mandala is so powerful.

In The Lotus and the Lily book, the thirty-day process culminates in creating a special personal retreat—your soul day. On your soul day, you take the time to review all that has happened in looking back and harvesting the past, untying knots of old crusty stories clogging up your mystical arteries, and the sweet mysterious experience of listening for whispers from the life that wants to be lived in the year to come.

Then, when you feel ready, you ask the critical question: What are my conditions? Or to put it another way: How do I promise myself I will live every day in 2026 so that the life that wants to be lived can take root in me?

It’s a massive question and one that no so-called manifestation books explore. The answer to the question “What are my conditions?” will generate your mandala, help you perceive the name of your year, create a daily prayer chant, and carry you through an entire year of prayer, discovery, and surprises.

You don’t make the mandala until you’ve asked the conditions question. It’s the daily practice of your conditions combined with the natural power of the mandala that together welcome miracles into your life.

Today, I will attempt to answer the question: Why is a mandala so powerful?

Humans have been making mandalas—a circle with an invisible or visible center—for thousands of years. Every religion uses the circle to attempt to articulate the presence of the invisible, the sacred, the transcendent.

Consider the:

• Native American medicine wheel
• call of the four directions
• dome of a mosque
• Celtic cross
• labyrinth
• yin/yang symbol
• Tibetan mandala
• everyone everywhere returns to this sacred symbol

But I didn’t know any of that when I made my first mandala on January 1, 2010.

I did it out of instinct and desperation. After I asked the magic question, “What are my conditions?”, I traced a dinner plate, drew a six-petaled lily in the center, and wrote a key word of my conditions on each petal.

I did make little circles around the outside of the circle with hints of what I thought I needed to get out of bankruptcy. (That example is in the book, BUT, if you’re doing the book on your own please ignore that.)

It took me four years to realize that putting what I thought I wanted or needed on the mandala actually just gets in the way. Since 2014 I have not tried to tell the universe what I want.

And, well, I think you know, the beauty of all that has unfolded since I stepped out of the way, is astonishing. Janet could never have asked to be a prayer artist, or be guided to write a whole new genre of prayer, or redefine prayer altogether, or embrace being called a witch, who in turn led to five years of exquisite prayer intensives culminating in The Witch Sequence.

So let me try to condense seventeen years of making and living mandalas into a few thoughts for you to ponder.

1. A mandala is a circle.
   But not just any circle. As you make it and surrender to its wisdom, you are tuning into a massive ancient morphic field of everyone who has ever made one.
2. You do not make your mandala, your soul does.
   You will not know what you have created until you’ve lived with it for a full year. We just recorded a delightful conversation with members of last year’s Lotus as they talked about what they’re now realizing about their mandala. The recording is on the Resource Page for this year’s Lotus.
3. It’s not about what you want.
   It’s about welcoming the life that wants to be lived in and through and as you. How do you do that? By not just chanting your conditions but living them.
4. The mandala is not about Intention. It’s about Attention.
   I know this is diametrically opposed to every popular manifestation teaching. But it’s solid brain science. It’s your right brain that has creative power, not your left. Intention is a linear left-brain attempt to manipulate the world. Attention is a way of living.
5. The Mandala is alive. Conscious. Creative.

   Jung said:

   “Mandalas have an intuitive irrational character, and, through their symbolic content, exert a retroactive influence on the unconscious. They therefore possess a magical significance."

   Jose and Miriam Arguelles in their definitive book, Mandala, said:

   "The mandala may be regarded as an engine of change, releasing energy to the extent to which the individual using it and concentration upon it is capable of identifying themself with it.”

One more mystical, magical thing.

The magic of the work we do together in The Lotus and the Lily is amplified by, exponentially multiplied by, doing it together.

• We call that “The Theatre of the Miraculous.”
• The Buddha called it “inter-being, inter-becoming.”
• Science calls it "quantum entablement."

Whatever you want to call it, there's something magical that happens when we join in community to look back, release, and finally make our mandalas.

I hope you'll join the global community gathering in The Lotus and the Lily to harvest a nine year cycle and seed a new one.

We open a week from Tuesday, but please don't wait.

To prepare you'll want to read the Welcome and Prayer Handbooks and watch the bonus videos including the one of members of last year's intensive talking about what they are discovering about the meaning of their 2025 mandalas.

Follow the link to the Registration page with all the details, schedule, and registration options.

The Lotus and the Lily Harvest 2025 Seed 2026

Life is Fragile. Handle with Reverence. And sacred Attention. 

Janet

PS Lotus is NOT offered OnDemand after it ends. But everyone registered will have access to the Resource Page until next October. So register, even if you won't be going through the process now.

website: janetconner.com

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