Kintsugi - Mending Broken Vessels

"I will use gold to heal my heart"

Kintsugi is a Japanese art used to mend shattered ceramic vessels with a resin made with a precious metal such as gold or silver. The art of "golden repair" was founded in the late fifteenth century by Japanese craftsmen. Kintsugi masters highlight repair by restoring broken clay pieces into a finished product more beautiful than the original.

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!

In Dedication to His Holiness Acharya Mahapragya (1920-2010), Mahatma of Peace for the 21st Century

“Seek Truth Yourself”

-Bhagwan Mahavira

His Holiness Acharya Mahapragya surpassed his role as the tenth supreme spiritual leader to the Terapanth Jains and contributed an integral part in the legacy for non-violence founded by his predecessor, Acharya Ganadhipati Tulsi. While Tulsi intuited the fast changes towards an increasingly globalized world and strived to place the Terapanth community on the forefront of peace initiatives, Mahapragya worked diligently to dig up the gems of wisdom from the Jain tradition that had been obscured by dogma so that he could present them to the world in light of modern problems. Acharya Mahapragya strove throughout his life to spread the message of non-violence and health to as many people as he could reach, and his activism through the Anuvrat movement for world peace and the Ahimsa Yatra movement (2001-2009) supported the great transformation of the Terapanth community into the twenty-first century. Furthermore his support of the Jain Vishwa Bharati University and of the saman order has enabled his message to engage dialogue with a welcoming audience of students, scholars, and truth-seekers in the West.
H.H. Mahapragya’s formulation of praxis for peace is unique because, while inspired by the central Jain teaching of ahimsa, it has the potential to harmoniously synchronize with other religious traditions and their distinct teachings regarding moderation, truth, and peace. While Mahapragya’s formulations of yogic systems including preksa meditation and the Science of Living spiritual curriculum have found most of their support among the Jain community, these systems are not founded with any political agenda and do not require any religious conversion. Because of this non-sectarian quality, Preksha meditation and the Science of Living curriculum has recently found a home in the West within academic institutions including the University of London and Florida International University.
Acharyashree’s call for the moral awakening of the individual was based on his deep conviction that each soul contributes to society and that the health of the individual is foundational to the quality of life for all living beings in the world. This great visionary scholar, and leader sought to identify the common essence within a divided and conquered humanity and found it in individualized religious experience. He defined this common individual experience of pure, unadulterated religion as the “perception of the soul”, and distinguished it from the more traditionally based components of religions, such as ritual, tradition, and ideology. His insistence that anyone from any religious tradition could fall prey to the misperceptions created by attachment to transient worldly things, to the violence that springs from such possessiveness, and to the intolerance that is bred by faulty notions of distinction and difference. His concern over the state of affairs the world over informed his oeuvre and inspired his social activism. Also, his relativist, or more precisely, perspectivalist viewpoint highlighted his authentic invitation to scholars, world leaders, and individuals to participation in inter-faith dialogue and cooperation.
Although we are all sad that our great teacher and guide is no more, his message remains a song of truth in our hearts and a light of inspiration in our minds.

Eating Jain

http://www.jainstudies.org/blog/way-of-life/jain-diet/

Symbolic Politics of Language

I will be presenting a research paper at the 2010 Annual American Academy of Religion Conference in Atlanta, GA, which discusses the issue of authenticity and authorship in indigenous self-representation to Western audiences.
I use academic sources on the Amazonian indigenous worldview as well as other case studies of struggles for indigenous rights in the Amazon to inform this current context. I also rely on anthropologist Laura R. Graham's research on indigenous self-representation and anthropologist Alcida Rita Ramos' work on indigenism in Brazil.

Gender Issues in the Madeira River Dam Project

I presented a paper on the issues of violence against women at the 9th Annual Women’s Studies Student Conference, “Cleaning Up the Down Economy: Women, Gender, and the Global Economy,” on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010, held at Florida International University. I briefly outline various forms of violence against women in relation to the UN Millennium Development Goals and posit that the inability to meet the latter disqualifies the view that the Madeira river dam project is sustainable development that represents progress and generates social capital.

Publication forthcoming in the Making Waves journal.

Sacred and Profane Uses of the Ganges

Geilt posted an interesting blog entitled, "Worship- Imposing Vanity on the Supreme Being" where he pointed out the self-serving function of ritual (that is, the divine does not need it, we do it for ourselves). Swami Agnivesh's comment regarding the religious component of pollution in India's famous holy Ganges River, which he made at the Climate Week (TckTckTck) event I attended came to mind (see article).  Water is considered a sacred natural element in so many of the world's religious traditions and often plays a central role in ritual.
In Daoism water is considered the strongest of the natural elements because it embodies  the principle of wu-wei (non-action): it is strong because it yields incessantly. Water is often revered for its ability to cleanse, to embody, to carry intentions and prayers in its flow.
 However, in many cultures the sacred and profane use of water is complicated by the fact that one source is used for both functions. This issue is illustrated in the case of the Ganges River, which is the source of spiritual liberation as well as the community bathing and laundry site and the drain for industrial runoff.

Here is a photo of the Ganges taken from my hotel room in Varanasi,

Swami Angivesh (Arya Samaj) calls for the refurbishing of Hindu rituals such as the Asthi Visarjan Ceremony, where one's ashes are scattered in the Ganges as a final act of moksa, or liberation. Many partially cremated bodies are thrown into the river and this is a cause of pollution as well as an example of the misunderstanding about how to revere the spiritual power of the river known as Mother Ganges.
Other Hindu leaders, especially the coalition of Hindu leaders known as Save Ganga Movement, do not identify ritual pollution of the Ganges as the central problem, and point instead to the governmental lack of regulations regarding dams and industrial waste pollution.
There is a need to recontextualize the way humans treat non-human nature in both ritualized and non-ritualized contexts, which both serve their own ends.

Please share your thoughts, comments, or any relevant news on this subject in the comments section below.

Religious Leaders Join Together for Global Climate Change

Imagine churches, temples, synagogues, ashrams, and mosques all around the world calling their followers to prayer with the sound of a ticking clock to remind them of the urgent need to address climate change today. "Tck, Tck, Tck" is the central slogan for this year's Climate Week NY˚C because time IS of the essence. As part of the campaign this year to push for real CHANGE in global climate policy at the upcoming COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 in Copenhagen, Religions for Peace, the oldest multi-religious coalition, brought together religious leaders from diverse traditions to express solidarity and urge government leaders to take action for improved global climate policy. I had the honor of attending the Religions for Peace "High-Level Consultation of Senior Religious Leaders on Climate Change," co-sponsored by the Global Campaign for Climate Change and hosted by the British Consulate General.

The main theme of this dialogue was environmental stewardship, and each religious leader's statement re-energized this classic religious concept using their own traditions. His Holiness Tep Vong, the Supreme Patriarch of the Buddhist Sangha of Cambodia integrated the Buddhist teaching of karuna, or compassion, as the necessary change of heart that will inspire us to love nature and change our over-consumptive lifestyles. Roman Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, John O. Onaiyekan, focused on the Christian model of stewardship that sees creation as a gift, "God gave us this planet as our habitat … that we keep it well" and highlighted the common ground shared by all religions as members of "a global village." Indigenous Priestess Beatriz Schulthess of the Kolla Nation (Argentina) emphasized the native teaching that all of nature is interconnected and drew the vital link between massive poverty, ecological devastation, and unjust resource allocation, "it is the ones who are poor who actually feed the big cities." Swami Agnivesh, Hindu leader of the World Council of Arya Samaj, called for more ecologically sound rituals to replace religious practices that pollute natural reserves such as the Ganges River because, the "Creator is [in] Creation." French-Tunisian Muslim Religions for Peace activist Mehrézia Libidi-Maiza critiqued the Keynesian economic model of scarcity and insisted that "we have to work together to find the resources" that manifest a religious model of abundance.

Why should secular government leaders listen to religious leaders? In the case of climate policy, it may be more a matter of dollars and cents than faith. United Nations Assistant Secretary General, Olav Kjorven, pointed out that religion remains central to government policy even if the focus of climate policy remains largely economic because religious institutions represent the "third or fourth largest actors in the financial world." As the clock continues to tick towards COP15 this December, how will faith-based communities activate the grassroots message of their members to affect environment and social justice for a climate policy worth believing in?