Meditating with Sand and Toys

In a quiet therapy room, a woman digs her hands into a tray filled with sand, pulling and pushing, until it creates a mound in the center.
She goes to the wall lined with small toy figurines, looks them over, and takes a few – a small glass ball and a figurine of a goddess with a fierce look. She places them in the sand tray.
Then she chooses a plastic sword, stabs it several times in the sand, and leaves it near the ball, its handle jutting out like a cross.
Without her saying a word, the figurines in the sand reveal what this 45-year-old married woman feels at the moment: stuck, angry, frustrated.
At the end of this hour, she has shifted. “It was a body energetic,” she recalls later. “It felt like a long blocked energy that was being released. There was no judgment, no interpretation. It was just cathartic, at a very deep place. It was like a breakthrough.”

This is a typical session of Sandplay therapy, a type of therapy based on Jungian psychology and influenced by Buddhist principles. Developed in the 1950s, by a Swiss woman named Dora Kalff, who was deeply influenced by Tibetan and Zen Buddhism, this form of therapy is touching the lives of hundreds of thousands of therapists and clients worldwide. By using toy figurines to tap the unconscious, create personal images, and release the dream state, Sandplay therapy is an example of how Buddhism may be applied in modern psychological contexts, to bring more compassion and healing to people’s lives.

Ultimately, sandplay therapy shows people a way to look within their own minds, says Dr Martin Kalff, founding and board member of the International Society for Sandplay Therapists, and son of Sandplay founder, Dora Kalff. “One major idea in the Zen meditation is not to look outwards, but to look directly into one's own mind. Sandplay encourages just that, because the client has to create the scenes spontaneously, from what emerges from inside, and does not look outside for inspiration.