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  108 Names of Now

108 Names of now

Free/Not-Free Paintings

Here's a good question: What makes you free?  Here's another one: what makes you not-free?  All the photographs you see below are of people making their own improvised mudras - hand-gestures  - to represent their embodied sense of freedom, even in the midst of the "full catastrophe" of this life.  
From those photographs, and from stories people told me in my travels, I created the Free/Not-Free Thangkas, a series of scroll paintings and accompanying texts, designed to be shown anywhere there are humans asking, What makes me free?  What makes me not-free?  They are paintings designed to be unrolled in the sacred-ordinary everywhere.

In form, they owe much to the traditional Himalayan thangka painting skills I learned from Master Lochoe and Sarika Singh at Thangde Gatsal Studio in Dharamsala, India. I have chosen secondhand bedsheets for the scroll material instead of Varanasi silk brocade, in honor of all the hospital patients I spoke with during my chaplaincy training, who could not wait to get back home to their own colorful beds. 

Below, you will find images of a few of these paintings, with their accompanying stories.  Some of them went on the road with me for the Inner Beauty Pilgrimage to the Sacred-Ordinary Everywhere… Enjoy!
  • Home
  • About
    • Press
  • Therapy
  • Art
    • Everyday Regalia
    • Free/Not-Free Paintings
    • Trumpovers
    • Pilgrimage >
      • Sacred-Ordinary
    • Home / Away from Home
    • Mapping the Trikaya
    • Turtlenosed Snake
  • Meditation
    • Retreats & Facilitation
    • Old Dragons' Club
    • Inner Beauty
    • Treatments
    • Meditations for Resilience & Resistance
    • Guided Meditations >
      • Lovingkindness
      • 5 Directions
      • Compassion
      • Coming Home
  • Writing
    • Stories from the Road
    • Stories from the Now
  • Teaching
    • Suitplay: A SoulCollage® Partswork Odyssey >
      • Overall Course Map
      • 1. World / Source / Self
      • 2. The Fool / Pages / Young Parts
      • 3. Knights
      • 4. Queens
      • 5. Kings
      • 6. Cups
      • 7. Pentacles
      • 8. Wands
      • 9. Swords
      • 10. Space
    • SoulCollage® and the Five Buddha Families >
      • Blue
      • Yellow
      • Red
      • Green
      • White/Black
      • Complete Mandalas
    • SoulCollage® for the Interim Times >
      • Suits of a SoulCollage® Deck
      • Protectors
      • Transpersonal Cards
      • A Four-Card Reading
      • Greeting New Cards
      • Working with Negative Spaces
      • Companion Cards
      • Pausing
    • Upper Valley SoulCollage® for Justice
    • Retreats & Facilitation
    • Murals
  • Contact
  • Shop
  • Walking Each Other Home