Do you ever feel your difficult times or “mistakes” left wounds in your well being?
Maybe you suffered from major illness, were assaulted as a young woman, abused as a child, rejected by a lover or lost someone you loved dearly.
Maybe you’ve been told “you’re too sensitive” throughout your life.
These experiences can lead us to believe we are broken or scarred. We might believe we are somehow damaged.
This doesn’t need to be our experience. How we see these challenges…the meaning we make from the experience…influences how well we cope and move on.
I invite you to consider a different meaning.
What if the difficult times in your past (or present) were not designed to create struggle in your life but to show you your greatness?
What if your brokenness was something to behold, like an object of beauty?
The Japanese have a philosophy of embracing the flawed or imperfect. They created an art called Kintsugi which fixes broken pottery with lacquer resin dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. It speaks to breakage and repair becoming part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. Japanese aesthetics values marks of wear by the use of an object. They keep an object around even after it has broken showcasing the cracks and repairs as witness to the history rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage or breakage.
Consider our culture where we toss out items because they are not the latest technology or fashion. We often don’t wait until they break and we seldom repair an item but opt for the newer, shinier version. This “toss away” attitude has bled over into the view of our lives. If we don’t see ourselves as perfect, shiny or new we attempt to hide the scars and our history.
When we hide our scars, we also hide our authentic selves behind a mask that creates pain and disconnection from others.
Like broken pottery, we all have wounds and scars from our life experiences. Some are closed down by their wounds and fail to heal. Others will ignore the wound and yet unhealed it will continue to weep through their life patterns and choices.
For those of us who allow ourselves to heal, who honor the journey, especially when it is difficult, we become stronger, wiser and more compassionate as a result of the healing.
Like the broken vessel when we honor the breaks and repair them with the gold of love, the silver of patience and the platinum of acceptance we become a beautifully authentic being to be cherished and admired.
Beautifully said. It brought tears!