Creating a Sand Painting

With my thanks to Chris Waters of Spirit of the Inca.

Sand paintings can be created whenever there is an issue that feels stuck in your life. Sometimes you may choose to work with a particular dynamic that is challenging you, such as a repeating fear about something or a lack of fulfillment in your work. Sometimes it can be a more general sense of not being ‘in the flow’ that you want to explore further.

You will need to gather sticks – larger for the boundary of the sand painting and smaller to go inside. Choose a place in nature where there is no human traffic, checking you are not on a path. It needs to be somewhere that you feel comfortable to experience any emotions that may come up and where you can spend as much time as you need for the process. You may choose to have the sand painting open for a while and so you will need to be able to find it again and to visit it regularly until it is finally closed and dispersed.

Once you have found your spot, create a boundary circle with larger sticks. This is the area of your sand painting.

Now open sacred space over the sand painting, you can refer to the separate handout for details on how to do this.

Next open your wiracocha over yourself and then over the sand painting. This is the essence of your light body, I can show you how to do this if need be.

With the handful of smaller sticks, allow any energy, emotions, feelings to come up and, as they do, blow each one into a stick and place it into the sand painting.

Continue until you feel the process is over for now. When you are ready to leave, remove your wiracocha from the sand painting and bring it back up into you. Leave sacred space open until the sand painting is ready to be dissolved completely.

As thoughts, feelings, issues come up over the days and nights ahead, blow them into your sticks and take them to put in the sand painting. Each time you work with the sand painting, open your wiracocha over you and it. Mother earth needs our heavy energy to make into compost and withholding it stagnates her balance as well as ours, she welcomes all true emotion and is healed as we heal.

When the time comes to close the sand painting, disperse the boundary sticks back into the environment, thanking them for holding the boundary for you. Then take the smaller sticks and disperse them into the environment and allow them to compost down. Then close sacred space.

Occasionally you will find that animals or the elements have moved things around. This is always feedback. What can you learn from what has happened? Enjoy the live interaction with nature that the sand painting brings to you and listen deeply to the messages coming from nature. Has your sand painting been played with by the wind or a rabbit?! What does it mean to you? And if all is exactly where you left it, what does that mean? No judgement, just curiosity.

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