Week 7: Mandala Relaxation

How do you achieve inner peace when you don’t necessarily enjoy art? Coloring is a good way to concentrate on the shapes, colors and lines.

This week, participants at the Alzheimer’s Activity Center did a coloring exercise with mandalas. Mandalas are representations of microcosms in Buddhism. Coloring within intricate designs is a step up from the Spring coloring activity last time. It requires more control in motor skills and patience. Last time, most participants were able to color within the lines, however, as the difficulty increased in this activity, some clearly had more trouble.

Here are some of the mandala made by the participants:

In addition to the coloring exercise, I interviewed Awilda, a health care worker who specializes in art related activities. I asked her why she does art activities with the patients at the center, and she responded saying that “Arts and Crafts have always been my thing and I wanted to share that enjoyment with the people who are in this facility. We do a lot of different things here, which include cooking, baking and making decorations.” She even invited me to join the baking session this Sunday. I had always questioned how she picks patients for art activities. She answered that patients are labeled as either low or high functioning. High functioning patients are placed in reading, art and board game groups. The low-functioning patients are usually placed into groups that do exercise and listen to music. According to Tuokko et al., high and low functioning dementia is often rooted in educational/occupational attainment and premorbid IQ. I found it very interesting that factors like education play a role in the severity of dementia.

I learned a lot about Alzheimer’s Disease through the interview and that’s it for this blog!