I am recently ack from conducting an intensive week-long set of Mandala Lab Workshops on emotions at California State University's CSUSM Innovation Hub. Reviews are in. Students can be tough critics. Fortunately all we got were statements like this:

It brought me some clarity and made me face and think about things that I never really realized or thought of before. Something that I really took out of this experience is: don’t let your emotions define who you are. This is something that I really needed to hear.

And this the week before finals.

The Mandala Lab Workshop is a 90-minute set of exercises modelled on the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art Mandala Lab installation that in turn is inspired by the teachings of the Vairocana Mandala. Students and Faculty at California State University San Marcos banged a gong and dipped it into water to transmute anger into ‘mirror-like wisdom’. Artists on faculty shared a smell that evoked a very strong memory in them to illustrate how we each have a discernably different response to the same experience. Certainly sitting in the perfect circle of the mandala sniffing Liz Taylor’s “White Diamonds” was the closest any of us have been to what may now be termed a “smelling bee”.

The Workshop is now available to communities, universities and museum settings around the globe. That is what being it means to be a “museum without walls” + a "collection with a mission" (as Stephen Reily at think tank Remuseum calls it). If interested, please get in touch: mandalalab@rubinmuseum.org

The take-home teachings were particularly popular:

“You don’t have to change your emotions. You don’t have to control them. Just be aware. It is the awareness that is the first step to wisdom.

—Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

Do not be defined by your emotions