3 ~ about mandalas and ancestral synchronicities

A story in three acts: facts, context, and reflection.

Throughout the week I had been preparing a proposal for Marcello, a friend who was organizing a Soft Opening of his new space, Moana Wellness Hub, for the Grand Opening of the futuristic Nuanu Creative City in Bali.

I thought it would be nice to create a mandala using an 80-centimeter canvas, but the challenge was how to guide people so they would follow the idea. My experience with The Tribe Soichu's collective co-creation performance told me I had to do it somehow.
At first, I considered drawing guide lines with a pencil and compass to generate that idea of concentric circles that mandalas have, but at one point it occurred to me to use some very thin bamboo sticks I had in the studio. I placed four of them to form a radial figure with 8 directions, an eight-pointed star...

Once at the event, I set up my easel with the canvas, on a sort of wooden staircase surrounded by lush Balinese vegetation and those garlands of orange flowers, my favorite color, scattered here and there. Before I even finished setting it up, the interaction began with all those beautiful people who came through Moana.

At one point, a Balinese healer who was at the event, Ak Wayan, came over. Looking at the canvas with the star and many pieces of bark already placed, he began to talk to me about the meaning of that figure, asking if I had done it intentionally…
Then, came the surprise,

the emotion,

hearing how he explained to me that Nawa Sanga belongs to the Balinese worldview and is related to healing and protection.
He mentioned the names each direction has, the associated color, its energy, and how they relate to different parts of the body and illnesses.

It was a revelation.
Night had fallen, and I sat down for a moment, under the cozy garlands of lights now, among those trees lit up with colors.
I felt that Nawa Sanga was in tune with what I’ve been experiencing for years with Soichu: this way of creating from what seems like pure intuition, only to later discover that the result has a deep spiritual and cultural root.

It reminded me of when I created Flesh,
not knowing that it would connect with the Māori community in New Zealand,
and their origin symbol, Koru, among so many other examples.
And the most important, meaningful, and profound of all:
“Soichu”, two years before finding out that Soychú is the Great Spirit of the Earth for some of my Querandí ancestors,  but I’ll talk about that in depth in a future post.

My participation in Moana has once again marked another moment of deep spiritual connection.
Another moment to witness the synchronicity that constantly happens in our lives in general, and in Soichu in particular.
The original statement from The Tribe sounds so fitting: "We’re only one community."
Yes, we are all connected in one single powerful energetic web.

About Nawa Sanga

Nawa Sanga, which means “nine directions” in Sanskrit, is an ancient healing system still practiced today by traditional healers in Bali to cure specific illnesses associated with each cardinal point. Each of the nine directions is connected with a particular deity, a human organ, and a specific healing energy, creating a complete map of energy medicine that has proven effective for over 700 years.

Its origin goes back to the Majapahit Empire in the 13th–15th centuries, when King Hayam Wuruk faced the challenge of unifying an Indonesian archipelago fragmented by religious conflict among multiple tribes. The royal advisors created Nawa Sanga as a “spiritual technology” that allowed each group to find their own deities within the nine sacred directions, without abandoning their ancestral traditions. When the empire collapsed around 1527 due to the expansion of Islam, Hindu-Javanese refugees brought this system to Bali, where it merged with local healing practices.

In today’s Bali, Nawa Sanga goes beyond its historical origin to become a living form of holistic medicine. Traditional healers known as balian use this system to diagnose and treat specific diseases: east heals the heart, southeast the lungs, south the liver, southwest the digestive system, west the kidneys, northwest the pancreas, north the gallbladder, northeast the throat, and the center all the body’s cells. Each direction has its own mantras, visualizations, and specific rituals that healers have perfected over generations. What began as a political strategy has transformed into one of the most sophisticated healing traditions in the world, where thousands of people find real healing by combining pilgrimages to specific temples with directional meditation practices that restore the body’s energetic balance.

Religious Syncretism

I feel that what happened in Moana is a perfect representation of religious syncretism. And not only as a historical phenomenon but as something entirely contemporary. We’re living in a moment where traditional religions have lost strength, influence, and power. We no longer feel obligated to belong to a religious institution to live a spiritual life.

Today, from a place of free will, many people —myself included— are exploring different practices that do not tie us to any specific doctrine but are connected to a broader, freer spiritual existence.

It’s not about following commandments, but about opening ourselves to experiences that come to us from different places: social media, friends, travel, books, encounters. Often ancestral practices that do not appear as dogma, but as paths to wellbeing, connection, healing.

It wouldn’t surprise me if, out of this whole great movement, a new “religion” emerged. A powerful spiritual identity, free, and cleansed of the negative burdens that so many religions carry: control, guilt, exclusion. We can break down that control in many ways: control of the body —especially women’s bodies— in Islam; behavioral control through sin and guilt in Christianity; the rigidity of certain orthodoxies in Judaism.

And yet, beyond these structures, there’s something undeniable: we are spiritual beings.

We cannot deny our spirituality, just as we cannot deny the existence of the body or emotions. No one questions that we have a body; no one denies that we feel emotions that run through us, inhabit us. In the same way, we cannot deny the spiritual dimension that also makes us who we are. It is there, present, even if we’re not always aware of it.

And on this path I’ve been walking, my star ultimately didn’t fulfill its mission of guiding the placement of the bark pieces, but it revealed something higher and more profound.
It revealed Nawa Sanga to me.

Another synchronicity.
Another moment of connection with that intuitive, living spirituality, one that doesn’t come from a sacred book, but from our genes.

To close, I want to share that I feel that, in some still undefined way, I am drawing closer to rituals, to forms of deep connection that are tied to Soychú, my Great Spirit of the Earth.

I feel that this approach is not a rational goal, but something that is simply happening.
Something that just unfolds, as if a part of me had always known it.