When drawing an enso circle, there are no fixed starting points: one can begin anywhere and draw in any direction. You start with an empty page and just follow your intuition. I have my personal preferences and habits, so I begin most of my enso circles at the bottom, but it wasn’t always this way. For the first few years of practice, I varied my starting point and mostly initiated my circles from the top as that felt the most natural.
The teachers I studied with all drew their ensos starting at the bottom, but I believed in doing what felt most authentic to me. I started drawing them from the bottom after co-taught a Naropa University class. My fellow teacher was an accomplished artist who had studied with Tibetan and Japanese calligraphers. She mentioned how a teacher-friend, Kobun Chino Roshi, began his ensos at the bottom of the page. I decided to try that again, and when I did, I realized that it felt pretty good. Since that time, I have been drawing most of my ensos clockwise, starting from the bottom, even though I occasionally like to mix things up.
Zen Enso 