CHALLENGE TO ACHIEVE KINTSUGI

By Sharon Joag

“Turmoil & Trauma will create cracks in our body and soul and through the force of Resilience our broken spirit is transformed into a beauty unlike any other.” – Sharon Joag

We each have our own unique suffering in grief. Grief is a loss, and death is what we often think about when we think of the word grief, but grief can also be a loss of something in our lives that was and is no more. Grief can be found in a divorce, or an empty nest when a family is torn or broken apart and what was a dynamic system, is now tattered pieces of a once fluid structure. Grief can also be the loss of a pet, the loss of a job, or the loss of a dream.

The five stages of grief, also called the Kubler-Ross Model, and described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969 describes emotional responses to grief. These are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. But as we learn more about grief, we have also learned that the stages are not in any specific order, and jumping around through these stages at various times in our lives is normal. In fact, there is no time line as to when we will “get over” a loss, and some people may or may not experience any or all of the above emotional responses. Each person is on their own path and time line when it comes to the emotional response to grief in their lives.

As I continue to work with people who have gone through and are on their journey in grief, I have come to realize that not only does grief come in different forms, but that we will all be subject to grief at some point in our lives. We all will inevitably have some form of a loss that we need to grapple with. Maybe thinking about grief and loss as not just something gone and missing, but as a positive and dynamic force of change, growth, and transformation in our lives.

Thinking about grief as a change force is thinking about our lives as an experience. Each person having to experience grief in one form or another; each person as “Kintsugi” (a Japanese art form where beauty is found in broken pottery), where each loss, each trauma, is like having another crack in the clay pot and with each crack and each experience the pot is transformed into a more beautiful version of itself, as a person becomes a more beautiful person of themselves.  

Each person through their own story of grief is like a broken piece of pottery, cracked in some places, missing pieces of themselves with their loss in other places; utterly shattered by life’s force. Once a beautiful bowl, bottle, or piece of pottery, hand made with love, with elegant designs embedded in the   clay, now a sharp-edged broken shadow of what once was. Yet, Kintsugi Art takes these broken pottery pieces and fills in the cracked areas with gold, silver or an alloy metal, creating a new piece of pottery that is made even more beautiful by virtue of the cracks that are in the body of the vessel.
Kintsugi teaches us and challenges us to live each day as a new experience knowing that this grief, this loss, this pain will be what defines our strength and beauty in this world.