"I will use gold to heal my heart"
Since my early days in college, clay has been an artistic channel I use to tune into myself and produce creative expressions from my spirit and imagination.
Reflecting and researching how Kintsugi is a metaphor for spiritual healing, I found an essay by Pui Ying Kwan on the increasing culture of disposable (goods and people) and the potential for designers to focus on emotional durable design, "design that has stronger emotional links with users." According to Kwan, Japanese culture values the historical aspect of a piece, so that it is not mended to its original form, but instead to a new form that emphasizes its brokenness while restoring its original function. Kintsugi can be seen as a personalized object, made more valuable by its restoration to a unique new whole.
Jeannine Cook, an art blogger, shares these lovely images of Kintsugi along with this beautiful reflection, "kintsugi is a wonderful metaphor for dealing with daily life. If disaster or adversity strikes, how can each of us use the equivalent of gold dust to repair the cracks in our life, at least to some degree, and create something new and viable, if not beautiful, out of what has happened. In other words, how can we turn a negative into a transformed but luminous positive?"
My spiritual journey has brought me to a place in my life where I am looking for ways to heal my heart and Kintsugi offers a beautiful metaphor for this process.
Most people know what a broken heart feels like. It's an overwhelming aching, a sense that a vibrant space in the body is emptied out and hollow. It's the deathly reverberating sound of loss or dissonance when what you let into your heart was not love after all. It's a drowning sense of floating in pain where you can't breathe. It is the sense of loss of safety inherent in being abused. These are all ways I have known heartache over the years.
But my most recent experience of heartache, one that has brought me to a new landscape in my healing journey where I must find a way to heal my heart, is not a sense of pain. For the last few years I've had anxiety attacks that manifest as literal sharp pains in my chest, accompanied by an experience many people have heard of as "fight or flight" but which, from my humble experience, utterly lacks the dynamism implied by this term. Anxiety attacks as I experience them make me wish I could run or put up my dukes. Alas, anxiety attacks shut me down on lots of levels, threatening my ability to do so many of the things I love to do like eat, write, exercise, explore the world...
This experience of being physically paralyzed by pain has redefined heartache for me. Once I experienced this new version of embodied heartache, I realized that I actually used to relish in heartbreak version 1.0. You see, when it was a psychological and spiritual sensation of emptying out, breaking, or soaking through, I knew it was a spiritual experience that would pass and that I could control or even sublimate (by letting someone new into that space).
There is NO narcissistic moment of pleasure to gain from the chest-pain embodied heartache 2.0. I haven't found a natural way to control it. Anxiety attacks humbled me and exposed my heart as a shattered vessel. My body's message became loud and clear,
"You have gone too far. You have to stop and heal me now."
I have acknowledged that my heart is broken. Layers of experiences where I felt violated or abused by people who were responsible for my well-being such as my parents, where I felt betrayed by people who entered into relationships with me and did not honor our established rules of engagement, where I did not know any better and put my heart in unsafe hands. But my goal is to move forward and mend my heart so that it can contain all of the well-being, trust, safety, honor, and love that is its ultimate and eternal song.
One step I have already taken is to realize that everyone is broken and blaming others for the pain I experience is futile. When I reach back deeper behind the pain others "caused" me, I see that they are not to blame because there is pain behind the pain. They, too, are in pain. And all I can hope for is to figure out how to mend myself and just do it.
To memorialize the experiences and people I associate with my heartache, I created a beautiful cemetery inside of me. There are dedicated spaces of rest for the people I knew heartache with/through. I can visit this space in meditation and shed healing tears. Sometimes, I even dance with the ghouls and poltergeists like so:
That takes care of honoring a space within me where the past can be laid to rest. But there is still work to do putting my heart back together so that it can know love as I have not yet known it in this life.
Mythologist April Heaslip wrote a fascinating article on bricolage, where she calls Kintsugi an art that "amplifies the evidence of wounding, re/minding us that we have been places and have histories. Yes, we have been broken, and yes, these scars are beautiful."
Beautiful scars. Beautifully restored vessels. I know I will find more members of what Jungian story-teller, Clarissa Pinkola-Estes, calls the scar clan. Warriors of the heart all Kintsugied out!
