Mandala Madness

Nottingham station always struck me as quite a gracious architectural statement of northern civic decency (it’s northern to us soft southerners, at least): with its fine high vaulted ceiling, modest Victorian embellishments and deep red brickwork. Nowadays, as everywhere, it gets the usual commercial overlay – with newsagents selling cheap beer, ticket offices with fair queue systems, and the coffee cabin chains. Its coffee cabin shop is between the two entrances from the carriage yard, with all its tables and chairs right in the middle of the fine parquet floor. But my colleagues were on trains which arrived a few minutes before mine, and they did not agree at all with my soft-focus impression of the local civic good taste. In fact, although they had sat at one of those tables – beneath the high glass skylights on the elegant parquet floor, for a quiet morning shot of caffeine, by the time I arrived they were on their feet, quivering by the door, muttering darkly about hygiene, pointing accusingly skywards and clearly not enjoying the architecture. In fact, they had been evicted from their table by unwelcome feathered companions – who were nibbling at pastry crumbs and generally oblivious to the fact they were not wanted. Often called ‘flying rats’, or similar, and thought to harbour a vile range of high-risk pathogens, a quick exploration of Wikipedia suggests that this is an unfair attribution – and people’s aversion to these flying city-dwellers is more likely to be psychogenic and aesthetic in origin. Sudden dives from above, startling flutter of wings, no manners or social graces, and an unpredictability of action that just doesn’t fit with the modern expectation of certainty in all things. Come back, Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock – us southern softies need a bit more randomness in our lives!

The Mandala Centre started its life as a mental health unit in the 1960s when two analytically-minded psychiatrists (with Jungian leanings) set up a community unit there, in the days when very little mental health took place outside the asylums.  It overlooks ‘The Forest’ which is a wide and open green park area between Nottingham’s red light district (in Forest Road, high up and overlooking the Mandala Centre from the opposite side), and a richly diverse area called Forest Fields behind it. For about a week every October the whole area is transformed – by a fifteen foot white bird who proudly stands on the busy Mansfield Road roundabout: it is for Nottingham Goose Fair. With some claim to being largest and/or oldest traditional fair in England, where several travelling fairs come together for the last event of the season before winter sets in, it’s just about possible to imagine everybody from all around driving their geese for the pre-Christmas sale. If the farmer puts his right arm out, the geese veer to the left, and vice versa. In fact, geese imprint more strongly than any animal, and if they see their owner soon after hatching that owner will always be parent to that good gosling, and later goose. So selling them all off at the Goose Fair must have been an interesting study in disrupted attachment… But now it is now a blaze of light, a cacophony of disco-noise and a fragrance of fried onions and candy floss, with seriously scary fairground rides and the vibes of high-energy sleaze and yoof at play. As well as the gang warfare and occasional knifing, for which Nottingham is unjustly famous.

Presumably the name Mandala was then chosen for its flavour of eastern mysticism, and Jung’s use of the concept. In fact, when the building was allocated for use by the new pilot project in 2005, the name was seen as particularly apt by the project leaders:

The word MANDALA is from the root MANDA, which means essence, to which the suffix –LA, meaning container, has been added. Thus you could say that Mandala is the container of essence.

As an image, a mandala may symbolise both the mind and the body. Carl Jung became interested in mandalas while studying eastern religion and he saw the circular images his clients experienced as “movement towards psychological growth and representing the idea of a safe refuge, inner reconciliation and wholeness”.

Since setting up in 2005, the service logo has always been a brightly coloured version of Jung’s own drawing of a Mandala. This was also made as a large mosaic on a circular board, which was attached to the wall in the main community room. Since then, people who have left the programme have made small mosaics to go all around it – and this is the picture which the members and ex-members of the Mandala Centre’s programmes asked to be included in the blog. So here it is: