Mandala Coloring Won't Change Your Life. Here's What Will.
Angelina Bliss | Art Therapist & CoachYou don't need another coloring book. You need to learn what your hands have been trying to tell you.
There's a mandala I drew many years ago—long before I even considered studying art therapy. I had always expressed myself through art materials; it was something that had accompanied me my whole life. But that particular period was one of the hardest. My children were still small. I was going through a painful separation. Everything felt like too much.
I had read about Jung's experience with mandalas and wanted to try it for myself. So I picked up a pencil, drew a circle—spontaneously, without a plan—and began to let shapes emerge inside it. Petals, spirals, jagged edges near the border that I hadn't intended. I chose colors without deciding—following an inner need, something closer to hunger than to thought. In that period especially, color felt like nourishment.
It was a bit like the principle of the scribble: doing something without deciding where to go. Following an inspiration that comes from the body—a movement that is born in the body and realizes itself on the page.
When I stopped and looked at what I'd made, I understood that I had put on paper something I hadn't been able to say out loud for weeks.
Not because the mandala told me. Because I told me—through the mandala.
Many more mandalas followed—mine, and my clients'. Through this practice, emotions of every kind found form on paper: joy, grief, the simple need for nourishment through color. And over time, passing through this language of mark, color, shape, and gesture, something else grew: awareness. A deeper recognition of what was already there but had no voice.
That's the difference between coloring a mandala and creating one. And it's a difference that almost nobody talks about.
The Promise and the Problem
If you search for mandala coloring benefits, you'll find hundreds of articles promising transformation. Color inside the lines, feel calm, repeat tomorrow.
And here's the thing—it works. It genuinely does.
A 20-minute session of coloring a structured geometric pattern can reduce self-reported anxiety. Studies confirm this, including a well-known 2005 experiment by Curry and Kasser that found both mandala coloring and plaid-pattern coloring significantly lowered anxiety compared to unstructured drawing. A more recent study on older adults in Taiwan replicated these results: a single 20-minute mandala coloring session produced measurable reductions in anxiety and improvements in feelings of calm, safety, and ease.
So the practice is real. The relief is real.
But here's what the research also shows—and what the coloring-book industry doesn't mention.
A 2021 meta-analysis published in Art Therapy reviewed eight randomized controlled trials with 578 participants. The conclusion: mandala coloring did not reduce anxiety significantly more than free drawing. The specific mandala pattern wasn't the active ingredient. What mattered was focused attention on a structured activity—any structured activity.
In other words: it's not the mandala that calms you. It's the act of sitting down, paying attention, and giving your hands something intentional to do.
Which raises a question: if any structured pattern works the same way, why does the mandala have 2,000 years of history behind it? Why did Jung draw them during the most turbulent period of his life? Why do Tibetan monks spend weeks building sand mandalas only to destroy them?
Because the mandala was never meant to be a relaxation tool.
It was meant to be a mirror.
What the Circle Knows
Carl Jung didn't color pre-printed mandalas. He drew them—spontaneously, without a plan, during what he later called his "confrontation with the unconscious." And what emerged on the page wasn't decoration. It was information.
He described the mandala as a "cryptogram of the Self"—a visual expression of the totality of the psyche. The center represents the essential nucleus of the soul. The symmetry holds opposites together: light and dark, order and chaos, what you know about yourself and what you don't yet.
When a patient spontaneously drew a mandala during analysis, Jung read it as a signal—movement toward psychic wholeness, toward what he called individuation. The mandala wasn't the therapy. It was evidence that the therapy was working. The unconscious was organizing itself into a form the conscious mind could see.
Joan Kellogg, an art therapist and researcher at the University of Maryland, built on this insight. She developed the Great Round—a model of thirteen archetypal stages that reflect developmental states of consciousness throughout the life cycle, mapped through mandala creation. Each stage reflects a different relationship between the self and the world: from the void, through struggle, toward integration. Her patients' mandalas weren't just drawings. They were maps of where someone was in their inner life—and where they were heading.
Susanne Fincher—Jungian psychotherapist and board-certified art therapist—made mandala work a central focus of her practice and described it with clarity: drawing a mandala means creating a personal symbol that reflects who you are in that moment. The circle evokes and contains our conflicting parts, and even when conflict surfaces, drawing a mandala always results in a release of tension—perhaps because the circular form symbolizes the space occupied by the body itself, a protective line around who we are.
Creating a mandala, she wrote, means creating a protected space—a center where we can concentrate our energy and project inner conflicts outward, safely. She recommended working alone, with respect for the truth that manifests in the moment.
This is not a dictionary. It's an invitation to listen.
Giuseppe Tucci documented how Tibetan monks construct sand mandalas as ritual meditation objects — then sweep them away. The mandala is never the product. The mandala is always the process.
This is what gets lost when you buy a coloring book.
What Happens in Your Brain When You Draw a Circle
When you trace a circle by hand—not fill in a pre-printed one, but actually draw it—something specific happens in your brain.
The gesture engages both hemispheres simultaneously. Your left hemisphere handles the geometry: the spatial logic of the curve, the planning of where the line will close. Your right hemisphere responds to the expressive dimension: the pressure of your hand, the weight of the stroke, the color you chose without thinking about it.
This bilateral activation is associated with enhanced mindfulness, reduced cognitive fragmentation, and a shift toward parasympathetic nervous system activity—the body's "rest and restore" mode, which lowers cortisol and quiets the amygdala.
But there's a deeper layer. Research on mirror neurons—pioneered by Giacomo Rizzolatti—suggests that when we perform expressive gestures, the brain simulates not only the motor act but its intention and emotional resonance. Drawing a circle may engage this same mechanism—the hand in conversation with something inside you that doesn't speak in words.
Neuropsychological research adds another dimension. The Circle Test, used to assess frontal and parietal function, evaluates how the brain programs and controls a continuous circular gesture. The smoothness of a circle reflects the smoothness of the neural pathways producing it. Drawing a circle is, in a very literal sense, an act of neural integration.
None of this happens the same way when you color inside someone else's lines.
What Coloring Doesn't Do (And What Creating Does)
Coloring a mandala offers something real.
It creates a space of focus. It introduces rhythm. It allows your attention to settle into a repeated gesture. This is part of why it often brings a sense of calm.
In the Creative Mindfulness Kit, coloring is approached mindfully—not just filling in shapes, but staying with the gesture, the body, the sensations that emerge as you move through the page. And sometimes, with a few simple questions, what happened there can begin to take form.
Giving yourself permission to create imperfectly is itself a radical act—one I explore in The Art of Imperfection.
But I include coloring as a beginning, not as a destination.
When you color a pre-printed mandala, you experience relief. Your mind quiets. Your body settles. This is real, and for many people it's the first moment of stillness they've had all day.
What you don't get is recognition.
Sometimes, when you allow a deeper contact, what emerges can be surprising—sometimes even telling a story—and deeply connected to what you're actually living.
Colored pencils on paper.
You don't get to see what your unconscious produces when given a blank circle and no instructions. You don't get to notice which colors you reach for—and which ones you avoid. Visual journaling is one way to begin noticing—I wrote about it in When Images Speak What Words Can't.
Sometimes it begins with a gesture. Something gathers at the center, starts to move, wants to expand. The circular movement itself can feel calming and containing.
Wax pastels on paper.
That's the difference between relaxation and self-knowledge.
Sometimes the experience is very physical. This was layered, pressed, then scratched—letting what was underneath emerge. The hand doesn't just draw. It works the surface.
Wax pastels on paper.
And sometimes, it's quieter. Gathering shapes, traces, small symbols that you learn to recognize over time.
Oil pastels, softened and blended by hand.
Relaxation comes from any focused, structured activity. You could get it from knitting, or from a jigsaw puzzle. Self-knowledge comes from creating something that didn't exist before—something that emerged from you, through you—and then having the curiosity to look at it and ask: what did I just say?
But here's what concerns me about the way mandala coloring is marketed today. When a product is labeled "art therapy"—and many coloring books, apps, and kits use that phrase—it creates a confusion that harms people in two directions. It overpromises to those who need genuine clinical support, suggesting that a coloring book can do the work of a trained professional. And it underpromises to everyone else, reducing a profound human capacity to a simple "relax and de-stress" exercise.
Understanding why mandala coloring is not art therapy isn't about diminishing coloring. It's about respecting both practices for what they truly are.
I trained as a clinical art therapist—four years, over 1,600 hours. What I learned is that every person carries a symbolic language inside them. It lives in the colors they're drawn to, the shapes their hands make when they stop thinking. This language doesn't need a therapist to exist. It was there before any therapist existed. It's been there since the first human traced a circle in the sand.
My work is not art therapy. I say this clearly, everywhere—on my site, in my legal notice, inside the kit itself. It's a self-directed creative practice, rooted in the principles I learned during my clinical training, designed for one purpose: to help you reconnect with that symbolic language on your own terms. Not because I interpret your mandala for you. But because you learn, over time, to read yourself—through color, shape, gesture, and the quiet attention that follows.
That's not a product. It's a practice. And the difference matters.
From Coloring to Listening
This is where most mandala resources stop. They give you the pages and say "color." Or they give you the neuroscience and say "see, it's good for you." But neither teaches you how to listen to what you've made.
Listening is a skill. It requires practice: the willingness to sit with what you've created and notice, without judgment, what draws your attention. If journaling draws you in, Narrate Your Way Home explores writing as its own form of listening. It requires time: not one session, but many, so that patterns begin to emerge—recurring shapes, persistent colors, tendencies you didn't know you had.
Learning how to create your own mandala by hand—from a blank circle, with no template—is the first step into a different kind of practice. What begins as a mindful mandala coloring practice can evolve into something much deeper—if you're willing to listen.
Sometimes there is a desire to soften. To let things dissolve. To stay in the transition.
Watercolor pencils on paper.
The Creative Mindfulness Kit is built around exactly this journey. It starts where you are—maybe that's coloring a mandala from the eBook, choosing a color palette, following a guided prompt. That's the door.
But when you're ready, it takes you further. Into creating your own mandalas from a blank circle. Into noticing what your color choices reveal—not through a formula, but through your own growing attention. Into building a ritual that becomes yours: a place to return to, again and again, where the conversation with yourself deepens each time.
What This Means for You
If you've ever colored a mandala and felt something shift—a softening, a pause, a moment where the noise stopped—that was real. Trust it.
And if you've ever finished coloring and thought that was nice, but now what?—that instinct is also real.
The "now what" is where the practice deepens. Where you move from filling in someone else's design to creating something from a blank circle. Where you begin noticing what your hands are saying—and where, over time, the mandala becomes less of a relaxation exercise and more of a conversation with yourself.
A conversation that doesn't require words.
A mandala practice for self-discovery doesn't require talent. It requires curiosity—and twenty minutes that are genuinely yours.
This practice doesn't start with the kit. It starts with twenty minutes.
Ready to go deeper? Explore the Creative Mindfulness Kit—15 tools, 240+ pages, designed to take you from coloring to creating to listening.
Not ready yet? Join the Inner Circle and I'll send you Come Home—a free 15-page guided creative ritual, yours to try tonight.
⭐ Craft your soul every day. Little by little. A tiny action away.
🌿 Take a moment: What might emerge if you stopped filling in someone else’s lines — and let your hand begin instead?
Sources:
- Curry, N.A. & Kasser, T. (2005). "Can Coloring Mandalas Reduce Anxiety?" Art Therapy, 22(2), 81–85.
- Koo, M. et al. (2020). "Coloring Activities for Anxiety Reduction and Mood Improvement in Taiwanese Community-Dwelling Older Adults." Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
- Bø Bjarnadóttir, V. & Halldórsdóttir, S. (2021). "The Effect of Mandala Coloring on State Anxiety: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis." Art Therapy, 39(4).
- Jung, C.G. (1959). Mandala Symbolism (R.F.C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.
- Kellogg, J. (1978). Mandala: Path of Beauty. MARI.
- Tucci, G. (1961). The Theory and Practice of the Mandala. Rider & Company.
- Fincher, S.F. (2009). Creating Mandalas: For Insight, Healing, and Self-Expression. Shambhala.
- Rizzolatti, G. & Craighero, L. (2004). "The Mirror-Neuron System." Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 169–192.
- Hobson, N.M. et al. (2018). "The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework." Personality and Social Psychology Review, 22(3), 260–284.
- Kaimal, G. et al. (2016). "Reduction of Cortisol Levels and Participants' Responses Following Art Making." Art Therapy, 33(2), 74–80.