The Art Of Kintsugi

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by using gold in order to highlight the cracks. Might we too learn to embrace the cracks from our own paths on our road to happiness.

Please note, this is lecture, not a guided meditation.

Transcript

Welcome to the Happiness Podcast.

I'm Dr.

Robert Puff.

Life has a funny way of turning out differently than we expect.

In our youth,

We have goals,

We have dreams,

We have desires of how we want our life to turn out.

But it just doesn't often turn out the way that we expect or hope for.

There's nothing wrong with these dreams,

These desires.

It's just there's so many factors affecting how our lives turn out,

Many of them which we have no control over.

So we may have a deep desire for it to go one way,

But then it goes another.

I mean,

Think about two people walking down the aisle,

Getting married with all their family and friends there to support them and love them.

And then 5,

10,

Perhaps 20,

Even 30 years later,

They're in divorce court and they went down a different path than they had hoped for.

Their dreams of living happily ever after are now shattered.

Or perhaps you've heard this story.

I think it's a lot more common these days,

But a person graduates from college or university,

They go off and get a job at a very good company and they work hard.

They put forth a lot of effort and they plan on staying there until they retire.

And then when they hit their 50s,

There's changes in the economy and they're let go and they're not asked to come back.

And now after having a very good paying job that they've had for years and only one job,

They have to start all over in their 50s trying to find a new job.

And at these times it can feel like our life has been shattered.

Or perhaps in the past when we were younger,

Perhaps not as wise or thoughtful as we are today,

We went out drinking with our friends and perhaps because we're younger,

We think we're invincible.

There's nothing that can get to us.

And then on our drive home,

We hit a tree and our friend is killed and we go to jail for many years.

Our lives again can feel like they've been shattered.

But today I really want to give us hope and a different way of looking at these shattered fragments of our life with so many of us,

If not all of us experience at some points in our lives.

And if we all are sooner or later going to have them where we do things or things happen to us that shatter our dreams and our lives,

Isn't there something or some way that we can perhaps find hope and even beauty in these experiences?

I believe we can.

And one beautiful way that we can do it is through the art of Kentsuki.

And the art of Kentsuki began in the 15th century in Japan.

The Kent part means golden and the Suki part means to join.

And the art of Kentsuki is centered on pottery.

If you've ever had a chance to visit Japan or a museum that has Japanese pottery,

It is breathtaking.

But sometimes,

Like life,

Things break.

And what do they do in Japan when these beautiful pieces of pottery break?

Well,

What they don't do is throw the pieces away and consider it trash.

What they do do instead is they gather the pieces together,

Every single one of them,

They put it back together with gold.

And something happens when they use gold.

You see,

Instead of the cracks becoming invisible,

Then the cracks are visible.

So they're not trying to hide the cracks.

They actually see the cracks,

The breaks in the pottery as now something beautiful because the gold is there to show,

Yes,

This has broken.

And yes,

This is still beautiful.

So the philosophy behind Kentsuki is instead of being disgusted by the cracks of life and just seeing that piece of pottery as a worthless piece of art now,

Instead treating both the breakage and the repair of the object as part of its history,

Something to be not only not hidden,

But something to be embraced and even seen as beautiful because it's part of the history of life,

Of the life of that piece of pottery.

So how does the art of Kentsuki help us find happiness in our lives?

Well,

To start with a simple example,

Think of people that have perhaps had a cut and now they have a scar in their life.

For many people,

Instead of being ashamed of their scar,

It's something that tells a history about their life and what's happened to them and what they've been through.

And something then,

Instead of being ashamed of,

There's a sense of pride.

I went through this,

I survived this,

And I have this scar to show what I've gone through.

And now think of life,

Our lives,

And the things we've been through up to this point.

Failures,

Things that didn't go the way we expected,

Our dreams that may have been shattered.

Most of us have had them,

But what can cause us deep unhappiness is when we hide from them or we're ashamed of them or the things that we attack ourselves about throughout the day or perhaps throughout our lives.

We tend to be very hard on ourselves when we have breaks in our past.

And instead of learning from them and growing,

Instead we're ashamed of them.

We hide from them and we criticize ourselves for ever making those mistakes.

What if instead today,

Because we want to be happy and find peace in our lives,

That we just see them as part of our history and we learn to instead of hiding from them,

Embracing them and putting them back together with gold so that our heart says,

Yes,

These are things that I didn't expect to happen,

Perhaps I didn't even wish to have happen,

But they're me,

They're part of my history and I can learn to love who I am even with these breakages from the past.

With the art of Kintsuki,

We learn to accept and embrace the breakages,

The failures from our past because they've shaped us.

They're part of who we are.

And instead of fighting them,

We say,

Okay,

This is part of now me.

I may have wished that wouldn't have happened.

I may have wished have done that differently,

But they are me and I am going to celebrate me even with the cracks and the breakages in my life.

Let me use an example that perhaps most of us are going to face,

Not all,

But most of us listening to this podcast today will probably face this breakage.

What happens in life is we work,

We do our best to get by.

We make choices.

Sometimes they're silly choices,

But then when we reach the golden years when we're going to retire,

We haven't saved anything.

And now we have to live on governmental support like here in the U.

S.

Social Security.

And yet for many of us,

When we were younger,

We had hoped to retire well,

To travel the world and have endless supply of income so that we could just do whatever we wanted.

But for most of us,

That is not going to be the story.

And so what do we do when this happens?

Are our lives over or can we embrace the art of Kentsuki?

And at its core,

What this means is we don't shame ourselves for what's happened.

We embrace it.

It's part of who we are.

And we even use gold to remind us this is our history and it is something that we can embrace instead of be ashamed of.

Now I would add this,

So there's two things with the art of Kentsuki that we need to do in order to do it really well.

When it comes to the goal filling and embracing and highlighting our mistakes,

Our breakages in the past,

The person that's going to matter the most is ourselves.

Because the truth is,

Even if the whole world loves us or hates us,

Though these are important,

What matters is what we're thinking in our thoughts throughout the day.

That's the most important thing.

That's why you see people that are so much loved and yet they die of suicide and others that you would think would be very much embarrassed by who they are,

That seem to be okay,

Even though others may hate them.

So in life,

What we want to pay attention to is our own thoughts.

And what we don't want to do is avoid not thinking about who we are and our past,

Our history.

Instead,

We want to embrace the art of Kentsuki and use gold to highlight these because they're part of our history,

Not something we need to be ashamed of.

And that's why our thoughts are key here.

And the art of Kentsuki allows us to embrace who we are instead of being ashamed of who we are,

No matter what we've done or others have done to us.

There's a sense of,

This is who I am.

I cannot change the past,

But what I can do is make it part of who I am and still see the beauty in who I am,

Even with these breakages.

And then the second thing we need to keep in mind is when it comes with the gold,

We only want to show this to people that will love us and support us.

I mean,

If a person were to look at a repaired piece of pottery that had gold running through it,

They may think,

That's ugly,

That's disgusting.

We don't want to be around the energy.

We want to be around people that will look at our gold and say,

That's beautiful,

That's who you are,

And I love who you are.

So it's really important that we surround ourselves with people that are supportive,

That are loving,

That the people closest to us are the ones that we let them see our breakages and still feel their love.

It may only be a few,

Because a lot of people can't accept the mistakes that we've made,

But those few are beautiful souls.

They're gifts from God.

Be with them,

Embrace them,

Find them.

They always exist.

There are always people out there that will love us no matter what.

Always.

Just don't give up on that.

But the other thing then is don't necessarily show your gold to the whole world,

Because a lot of the world may judge very harshly,

And most of us are affected by that judgment.

So the gold that we have that's part of our breakages that we're letting shine forth now and embracing is only shown to those that love and support us and see the beauty in that,

Because they see the beauty in us.

But with these two things in mind,

Making sure that we accept the breaks in our lives and that we are showing these breaks with the gold to people that will also celebrate who we are,

Then we'll find that the art of Kintsuki can be something very beautiful and very helpful on our journey through life and finding that peace and happiness now.

Thank you for joining me on the Happiness Podcast.

Until next time,

Accept what is,

Love what is.

Reviews

🙏🏾

Thank you Dr Puff

Love yourself for what you are, good and not so good, it's YOU, unique and shining! ✨💖😊

Thank you☺️ありがとう✨

Accept what is & Love what is 👏🏻🙏🏻😊

This podcast has endorsed what I have been working on via the Mindfulness Meditation Practice🧘‍♀️.

We all endure mishaps and pains in our lives and what we must DO is to accept, embrace and love what we are made up of. The journey is bumpy and smooth however we must always heal our discomforts and pains with grit, meditation, and appreciation of how we cruelly ARE 🙏🏻 .

Life is testing us and the answer us living within our deepest Core - so we must not abandon such a gift 🌕💫🌞.

The healing process begins once we Embrace the Pains and admire what has happened.- This is our life’s schedule and all events makes US WHO WE ARE and Never Despair or Give Up, because the outcome lives within YOU - We all been gifted from Birth with the healing power🤗🙌😇 🙏🏻😊🕊️😍🎉.

This is a helpful and beautiful concept. For myself, I choose to shift the second caution slightly: not everyone needs to know how you are cracked or broken - why you needed repair with gold. They can see the gold/beauty without knowing the history. Some breaks are better off keeping between you and god or maybe a good therapist.

Wonderful...
To listen it always
Thank you

Is it really gold, what they use to fix it??