Inner peace evading you? Try participating in Prasun Balasubramaniam's mandala workshop for some art therapy

Ever tried meditating and failed at it? Artist Prasun Balasubramaniam recommends that you try drawing a mandala, for a change, to find your inner peace. "A mandala has its own energy and it doesn't really feel like you're working on it, it just stems from your subconscious," explains the 23-year-old. A mandala is basically a diagram that represents the universe (those diagrams which have a circle at the centre and circular or other kinds of patterns around it), and this is what she will be teaching at her workshop Neon Mandala which will be conducted at Studio Pepperfry in Hyderabad on October 7. This workshop is being organised in collaboration with Unekha, a talent community While the mandals will be drawn on a black sheet of paper, the neon effect will came from the pens used, the ones that glow in the dark. She also plans to conduct more mandala workshops in Hyderabad, except this time, she will teach the participants to draw mandalas on their umbrellas and even on a wooden block. And if all things fall into place, she might even take a workshop abroad. 

There is usually no age bar for my workshops as mandala drawings can be taken up by young kids as well

Prasun Balasubramaniam, Artist

Prasun is an engineer turned self-taught artist who hails from Salem and this is her second workshop in Hyderabad. Though she has a graduate and master's degree from PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, she has always been interested in arts. Prasun is also the author of two books; one book is a collection of her artwork and the second one is titled Mindfulness Magic. Drawing mandalas has helped her overcome depression in the past and she believes this art form can help soothe and calm minds. "This workshop is also very helpful for children as multiple patterns are involved. It helps increase their attention spans," suggests the artist who has taken this workshop to several cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Coimbatore. Somewhere in between, Prasun has also managed to bag the title of the fifth best doodler in the nation when she participated in Red Bull Doodle Art 2017.    

On display: She has more than 11,000 followers on Instagram

Towards the end of our conversation, we got talking about how Buddhists monks create mandalas with sand, mandalas that take them weeks or months to create, and then destroy it in a flash to practice detachment. And as we said goodbye, we decided it would be best if we learnt our moral of the day from that story.  

For more on them, click on instagram.com/prasun_finearts/