The ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi is all about the beauty of brokenness. When a vessel is cracked, or even smashed to bits, Kintsugi is about piecing it back together with gold. Far from being perceived as flawed, the vessel, in its brokenness, is then considered better than before, even luminous.
What if mindfulness could help us to approach our own brokenness in this way? Just imagine the light...
The ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi is all about the beauty of brokenness. When a vessel is cracked, or even smashed to bits, Kintsugi is about piecing it back together with gold. Far from being perceived as flawed, the vessel, in its brokenness, is then considered better than before, even luminous.
What if mindfulness could help us to approach our own brokenness in this way? Just imagine the light...
Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call #324 on November 4th.
I mentioned last week, that this past week was the 7th Annual Law & Social Change Jam. We completed the Jam yesterday. It was amazing. Today I’d like to talk about Chapter 8 of the Dhammapada, Thousands, where we left off a couple of weeks ago, plus the Law Jam, plus Kintsugi, the ancient art of repairing vessels with gold.
Chapter 8, I think, is inviting us to be less concerned with our own aspirations, and more appreciative of others, or, offering humility as a practice. I love that.
Then the end of the chapter is a series of verses that says things like, Better than one hundred years lived with an unsettled mind…is one day lived with insight. Better than 100 years lived lazily…is one day lived with vigor and exertion. Better than 100 years lived without seeing the arising and passing of things, is one day lived seeing that, and so on.
To me the verses seem not only like reminders of the importance of practice, but also lessons in imperfection. They’re not saying, better to practice for 100 years than to be unawake for 100 years. They’re not even saying, better to practice for one year, or one month, than to live without awareness. They’re saying, better to practice for one day. Just one day.
For me this goes against my perfectionist strain big time. I think, “What is one day of practice?” How can that matter? I should be practicing diligently, every day. Yet sometimes I don’t, like this past week, during the Law Jam. So I’m encouraged to read, in this beloved text, that better than one hundred years lived with an unsettled mind…is one day lived with insight.
I’m not letting myself off the hook – I still want to be diligent with my practice. I’m just saying there’s a way of reading this that, to me anyway, invites an imperfect practice.
This idea – this reality – of imperfection, came up for me the Jam. Imperfection in the form of brokenness.
Like I said, I was reading Chapter 8 as saying, your practice doesn’t have to be perfect: one day of being awake is better than none. And since perfectionism runs so deep in the law – and is one of the Four Perils I’m always talking about – the idea resonated with me. It felt like permission.
Then at the Jam I had the thought, or the insight, that maybe I have permission not only to have an imperfect mindfulness practice, but to just flat out BE imperfect. This is not a revelation, of course. I’ve talked about it here, I’ve done plenty of therapy about it, it’s something a lot of folks are talking about in the law these days, or at least paying lip service to.
But what if it goes farther than that? The thought I had after the more predictable and maybe well-accepted thought of not being perfect and that being ok, was, what if my imperfections are the most important thing. In other words, just like in the ancient art of Kintsugi, where cracks in the vessel are filled with gold, what if it’s my imperfections that I have to offer? And what if that’s true for all of us? What if it’s our imperfections, even our brokenness, that can help others?
When this first popped into my mind, I thought, nope. I’ve been through a lot: sexual assault, two divorces – one which was violent and put my child at serious risk – and other things, too. And maybe you’ve been through things, too. And maybe you can relate to the idea I’ve had all this time, which is that yes, these things have happened, and now I need to heal them. Because it’s that healing that I have to offer, not the brokenness. I think I would even go so far as to say that I have had the understanding that I can’t legitimately offer much to the world, to the legal community, even to my family, unless I first heal myself. Until I’ve done the work, seen the therapists, examined the trauma, and cleared all the things.
This week I realized that at least for me, that’s wrong. First it’s wrong because it’s not going to happen. I’m not going to completely clear anything, in this life, no matter how much therapy I do. I’m not going to become someone who is “truly clear.” I’m going to stay on a path towards healing and wholeness, but the person on that path is fundamentally broken, cracked, flawed. And yet I see now that that brokenness, which I’ve always, my whole life, thought was something that needs to heal and be gone, is actually what I have to offer. That like the art of Kintsugi, repairing with gold, it’s the gold, and the brokenness, that is the beauty, that shines through, that is the healing.
Because I don’t come to the Wake Up Call or to any other spaces from a place of unmitigated love. I don’t come without the physical trauma that was visited upon my young body, or the emotional trauma that was blasted into my cells. No one can have me like that because this human doesn’t come that way. And also, I don’t come without decades of missing plenty of days on my cushion. I come with all of that pain, all of that suffering, all of that brokenness. I come with all of that imperfection.
And if it’s my brokenness that I have to offer, then I think it’s the same for all of us: it’s our brokenness we can offer one another. Our broken hearts, our broken bodies, our broken families, our broken communities, our broken political systems, our broken eco systems – all broken. All deeply imperfect. And all, also, luminous: repaired as best we can, expertly and inexpertly, day after day and year after year, with veins of gold.
When I think about these last verses of Chapter 8, that one day of insight is better than one hundred days of delusion, I also think that maybe one day of insight into my own brokenness, and our collective brokenness; one day absorbed in meditating on - and learning to love – all of our imperfections and brokenness, one day seeing the arising and passing away of brokenness – or maybe that the “arising and passing” is, in itself, brokenness – is better than 100 years of thinking that first, before we can offer ourselves to the world, we have to be perfect. Because I think we can’t be, and even if we could be, we don’t have to be, and maybe we shouldn’t be. Maybe we should offer our brokenness, instead.
Let’s sit.