In 2022, I organized and facilitated a global community prayer flag project with people from all over the world. This project began as a workshop within an online creative community I organized. Each person gathered their own materials, whatever fabrics, threads and bits of nature were speaking to them at the time, and created prayer flags full of personal meaning guided by my instructions and step by step process. Together we explored stitching as a meditation process, the power of our intentions as we created the prayer flags, saying mantras for compassion and peace as we stitched and sharing who we were making the flags for and where we would fly them. I shared some of the beautiful history of the Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags tradition to inspire us with their intentions of lovingkindness, compassion and generosity that those flags and the practice of displaying them embody.

During the workshop, we talked about how wonderful it would be to create collaborative flags with other members of the community. The idea came up multiple times so I decided to organize it and see what would happen. I paired up members who lived relatively close to each other and gave the intentions for the project: each person would create a single prayer flag and mail it to their partner within a month. Then, when each person received the flag from someone, they could respond to it by creating additional flags to string together with the one they received.

What emerged was so beautiful and heartfelt. The connections and joy everyone expressed was so inspiring and the prayer flags that were created were full of depth and love.

This is one of my favorite global arts initiative projects I’ve ever done. Below are some of the amazing prayer flags that people created around the world.