Introducing: Sandra
California, USA

During the cold winter months when I was a high school student in Anchorage, Alaska, I would spend a lot of time reading. And I still remember a book from the library that described the author's deep love of art. I resonated with his words, especially when he wrote about a truth or meaning found in some art not always glimpsed in the everyday world. Something ineffable that could only be felt and never really expressed in words. I sensed this, too, and thus began my long journey away from the world that my friends were settling into, and tentatively into a new world of ideas and images. This journey led me to Europe for four years and finally to a private art college where, for 30 years, I taught courses that looked at art from many diverse cultural perspectives and time-periods, focusing always on the meanings and beliefs that permeated this art.

And I looked at the philosophy of Western art, lingering for a time with Pythagoras and Plato and the western tradition of sacred geometry. Eventually I created a course on cross-cultural sacred geometry, studying ideas ranging from those of Jung and the mandalas and yantras of Buddhism and Hinduism, along with the symbols of Taoism and the infinite patterns of Islamic art, to the glyphs of Western Alchemy, Kabbalah—and finally, through the works of artists like Mondrian and Kandinsky, to Theosophy. From this it was a relatively small step to bookshelves full of texts on contemporary esoteric thinking, on the one hand, to forays into ideas found in modern physics and chaos theory on the other.

I knew that Kandinsky, under the influence of the Theosophists, had become interested in thought forms and auras, and the power of sound to transform and heal. Intrigued, I began to further explore sound and energy as possible healing tools, and coupled this with my study of the transformational power of images—particularly geometrical images. It was all very exciting, but the information I found was contradictory and incomplete. It wasn't until I discovered Kathara that all the pieces finally fell into place. And what a wonderful place that was.

With Kathara I found not only a practical way to use sound and imagery to heal one's self and others, but I was also introduced to a vision of the individual as part of a vast, conscious, loving Whole—a Whole that expresses itself systematically and according to very clear, scientific principles. I felt it was this Consciousness that I had actually glimpsed so many years ago as a teenager—and which had been guiding me on my long journey. And I discovered ways to become more aware of my connections to this Whole or Unity while still exploring creatively my own uniqueness. Gradually I came to feel that the quintessential work of art was really the molding of my own consciousness, along with the co-creation of a world where love and the expansion of awareness were the norms and not the exceptions.

Through the Kathara classes I teach I would like to share with you some of this vision and some of the tools that I have discovered in my own journey, in the hopes it will be of help to you in yours.