Collaborative Prayer Flag Project

In 2022, I organized and facilitated a community prayer flag project with people from all over the world. It was part of the Creative Unearthing Community that I led online for most of 2022. This project began as a workshop that I taught on how to make poetic prayer flags. Each person gathered their own materials, whatever was speaking to them at the time, and created flags full of personal meaning. We explored stitching as a meditation process, the power of our intentions as we created the flags, saying matras for compassion and peace as we stitched and shared who we were making the flags for and where we would fly them. I anchored the workshop by sharing some of the beautiful history of Tibetan prayer flags to inspire us with what the possibilities for generosity, love, energy and compassion that those flags embody.

During the workshop, we talked about how wonderful it would be to create 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 were so inspiring and the flags that everyone created were full of subtle depth, healing energy and love.

This is one of my favorite community projects I’ve ever done. Below are some of the flags that people created around the world.