Nine Designs for Inner Peace: The Ultimate Guide to Meditating with Color, Shape, and Sound

A complete guide to creating planetary yantras to access their healing and centering benefits

• Provides easy-to-follow instructions to create the yantras

• Serves as an introduction to active meditation, which focuses the mind while the body is engaged in a meditative activity

The tantric art of drawing or painting the nine designs known as yantras is an ancient practice of active meditation that releases positive healing and centering effects. Each of the nine designs corresponds to one of the nine qualities of body and mind essential to well-being: radiance, nourishment, passion, intellect, expansion, bliss, organization, uniqueness, and spirituality. From the basic elements of the square, the circle, and the triangle, dynamic visual meditations unfold as the practitioner works clockwise from the outer elements inward toward the central point of stillness, or bindu, the source of happiness within. An accompanying mantra is recited while preparing each yantra to fully engage the senses in the meditative process.

Creating the design that “speaks” most to the practitioner enables its unique healing quality to be transmitted. For example, working on the yantra named “Radiance” cultivates optimism and the self-confidence to succeed in one’s endeavors, while “radiating,” or imparting, one’s inner light to others.

This workbook provides an important resource for active meditation, a practice revered for its effectiveness in revealing the spiritual underpinnings of everyday life. The active participation of the body in meditation while creating the nine planetary yantras raises to the level of spiritual ritual the practitioner’s intention toward wakefulness and gives access to profound states of healing integration.

Sarah Tomlinson studied yantra painting in India with tantric master and artist Harish Johari, who revealed to her the healing power of meditation with yantras. She is the founder and codirector of the Ayurveda-Yoga Institute of New York, and she trains teachers and students throughout the U.S. and U.K. She lives in New Jersey.