September 2024 Week 4

Do you remember the Japanese art of repairing broken objects with gold which I have referenced in the past? It is called kintsugi, which translates to "join with gold". The art form involves: 
Repairing: Using a glue-like tree sap to reattach the pieces. 
Adorning: Decorating the cracks with gold, silver, or platinum.
Highlighting: Embracing the flaws and imperfections of the object instead of hiding them.
Creating: Creating a new piece of art that is more beautiful than it was before.
Valuing: Encouraging people to fix rather than discard objects.
Treating breakage as part of the history: Treating breakage and repair as part of the object's history, rather than something to hide.

Can you see how this can be a metaphor for our lives and how we treat ourselves and others?
Let start with ourselves - we are certainly all broken in one way or another (and if you don’t think you are, please go back and do every meditation I have archived along with the yoga classes and read every dharma lol). Can we treat our breakage as part of our history? Can we do the work to put ourselves back together, but even better can we highlight our brokenness rather than hide it and let it catapult us forward in our lives?
How about our relationships with others? Again, there are certainly breakages in each relationship. Can we treat those as part of history and not only repair but embrace our difficulties and move forward in a freer way?
I think our tendency when we do personal growth work is to “secretly” work through our broken parts of our lives, put ourselves back together and then conceal that part of ourselves and show the world the “improved” version of ourselves. This process of Kintsugi brings up an interesting idea - what if we highlighted and decorated our flaws instead of hiding them? Could we create a more beautiful version of ourselves? I actually think, yes! There is a freedom in embracing our flaws and imperfections rather than hiding them and living with “Kintsugi” is a tremendous act of kindness. I am kindness can be very freeing if we choose to do the work to explore, repair, decorate and embrace our full selves and our lives.