TaikoPeace is a movement started by renowned taiko drumming pioneer and community builder, PJ Hirabayashi, to spread the kinetic energy, spiritual vibration, and pure joy of Japanese taiko drumming for positive social change and a peaceful world. Dedicated to transforming the limiting beliefs, judgments, misuse of power and ego within the taiko community, TaikoPeace empowers the taiko community to focus its collective creativity, musicality, and energy towards positive social change and peace in co-creation and partnership with the broader arts community and beyond.
Handwriting bright word mandalas is a practice of TaikoPeace. In the video that follows, PJ takes you through her journey of discovering mandalas and describes how her creative experiments turned into a transformative practice for expressing positive, peace-filled energy.
Bright world mandala is a practice that offers infinite possibilities to express words of healing, gratitude, and love. The bright words in your mandala can be anything positive, inspirational, and/or personal that resonates for you. You might make this a grateful living practice by including words that name: who or what you are grateful for, how gratefulness moves you to act in the world, etc.
You can find inspiration for your mandalas in poetry, quotes and your personal values. The mandalas might also reflect current difficulties you’re addressing in your own life or that the world is facing as a whole. What calls to you as needing or wanting the radiant energy of a mandala?
“I’d never written words in a spiral before. I let myself write one letter at a time, rotating the paper slowly and carefully.
It surprised me what words ended up on the page after ‘infinite’.” ~ PJ Hirabayashi
PJ credits and thanks Byakko Shinko Kai and the Fuji Sanctuary for sparking this creative practice. The TaikoPeace Mandala Garden offers a space for the TaikoPeace community of “gardeners” to plant mandalas of infinite love, peace, and joy. We encourage you to sit in reflective practice with the mandalas found in the garden: Feel yourself in the web of human belonging as you take in the heart-woven messages of others. What do the mandalas awaken or inspire in you? What do you feel in your body as you explore the bright words of others? How does the energy of the spiral move through you…and move you?
To learn more and support PJ’s creative, joyful, peace-filled movement, visit TaikoPeace. (Reprinted from Gratefulness.org)
