The Symbolic Beauty of Polynesian Tattooing Nga tama o Punga Click on the image above to save or print. Nga tama o Punga is the name of the last design in the book, and in the Maori language it means “the children of Punga.” It is inspired by the author’s personal tattoos. Punga was the [...]

Clarify Your Definitions We have all been in gardens—even very costly ones—that we find oddly uninspiring. There are the landscapes around mansions where money has been lavished on moving trees, building pools, patios, and fire pits, and planting lush lawns, yet we don’t much enjoy being in those spaces and may even find them stale [...]

MATANGI: Knowledge This yantra is ideal if you’re studying esoteric subjects, music, or art. ARCHETYPE The Knowledge Yantra is associated with the wild and mystical goddess Matangi, who lives by her own laws outside society in the forest. Her presence is said to purify society’s thinking through her innovative interpretation of the scriptures, art, and [...]

Sacred geometry refers to designs imbued with symbolic meanings, as well as the techniques used to create those designs. Once thought of as esoteric knowledge, numbers operate in ways that are amazing even by today’s secular standards. The designs presented in Creating Mandalas with Sacred Geometry draw on the vast history of mathematics and philosophy, from Pythagoras—who [...]

Seeing Fresh: The Art of Contemplative Photography in Action The Practice of Contemplative Photography offers a series of photographic assignments, along with examples of images that successfully fulfill them. The purpose of these assignments is to help people connect directly with the visual world and to express that experience photographically. The book’s companion website www.seeingfresh.com invited [...]

Gardens can be so much more than merely pleasing to the eye; they can also evoke a contemplative state of mind, connecting us more fully to ourselves and to the world around us. In Landscape as Spirit, Martin Mosko explains his meditative approach to garden and landscape design and then walks us through five of [...]