Lunch and Learn: Serenity Mental Art for Meditation

Our current exhibition, Common Struggle, Individual Experience: An Exhibition on Mental Health includes several ways that Connecticans approach healing and support for mental health. Please join us as Artist Jampa Tsondue and Yeshi Dorjee, a Buddhist monk and artist, discuss Thangka art and meditation to promote healing.

Thangka are sacred Tibetan Buddhist artworks. Thangka art is more than just images, it contains the information you need to relax your mind and find peace. In this talk, Jampa will share with us how thangka artworks promote natural healing within each person. Yeshi will share with us steps to meditate upon the thangka to decrease mental and physical suffering and increase healing.

This presentation is virtual and free. Click here to register. The Zoom link will be in the attached ticket you receive with your confirmation email.

Questions? Email Jennifer Busa at jennifer_busa@chs.org.

About the Speakers

Jampa Tsondue was born in India to Tibetan refugee parents. He began his art studies at age 13. He became an apprentice to this famous painter at the Gyudmed Tantric University. He trained in the Buddhist holy tradition of thangka painting for 20 years. Jampa has painted many thangka for different monasteries with his mentor. Their most important project took four painters nearly four years to complete – recreating forty-one thangkas in the Dalai Lama’s collection, each 4 feet by 3 feet, depicting the past lives of the Buddha.

Jampa moved to Connecticut in 1992. Today, he continues to paint and teach apprentice artists. As is his tradition, every morning he prays and meditates to reflect on compassion, loving kindness, and tolerance.

Yeshi Dorjee was born in Bhutan after his mother escaped from Tibet. As a child he entered into Gyueme Monastic University in India to study art and philosophy until he was 36. He moved to California and taught art and meditation at the University of California Santa Barbara and at other centers. He presented at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 2000. Yeshi is a master of Tibetan thangka painting as well as butter sculpture.

In 2019, Yeshi moved to Connecticut. He provides spiritual guidance to the growing Buddhist community in Old Saybrook and Norwich. Yeshi knows, presents, and has written down many traditional narratives of the Tibetan people as well as Buddhist allegories and lesson stories. as well.

Image: Mental Replacement, First Step of Meditation, 2001. Yeshi Dorjee.