Kintsugi, To Repair Your Life After It’s Been Broken

Kintsugi (‘golden joinery’) is the ancient Japanese art of repairing what has been broken. When a ceramic piece breaks, the masters of kintsugi repair it with gold, leaving the reconstruction highly visible, because, for them, a reconstructed piece is a symbol of fragility, strength and beauty.

Ceramics are fragile, strong and beautiful at the same time, like people. Just like our life, they can break, but they can also be healed if you know how. In this book I provide the details of a method for repairing your life after it has been broken, to heal your emotional wounds. We will start by understanding the role played by adversity in our life, how we react to adversity and what consequences it has for our life and our health. In this book I explain what the art of repairing your life consists of, using simple and efficient methods.

Throughout the book I narrate different situations I have come across in my professional practice. I have decided to share them with you, so that, if you ever find yourself in that position, if you are experiencing that situation or if you want to help someone who needs to repair their life, here is a guide to help and inspire you.

In Kintsugi I will help you repair different situations with three objec­tives. In the first place, I want you to see that what you are experiencing is not unusual or rare. Sometimes we stigmatise ourselves, or other people stigmatise us. But this is not the case. Throughout my professional expe­rience, I’ve seen repeated over and over the same problems. I’ve isolated the common factors and I have developed, analysed and explained them. When we understand things, we can overcome them.

My second objective is for you to be able to show the people around you what is happening to you and how you’re feeling. Sometimes we are prejudged offhandedly and we feel unable to defend ourselves, or even to explain what we are going through. But it is precisely when we are struggling that we need greater doses of empathy, understanding, support and compassion.

Finally, my third objective is to provide you with tools and strategies so that you can overcome adversity and rebuild your life as an authentic kintsugi master. After reading this book you will be stronger — as you will have overcome adversity, learnt from it, and feel capable of coping with what life has presented to you, whether it is challenges, problems or setbacks.

In this book I encourage you and help you to live intensely, to rebuild yourself and to repair your life. Do not forget that ceramics and life can break into a thousand pieces, but this is no reason to stop creating beautiful objects or to stop living life intensely. Far from avoiding living, we need to learn to repair ourselves following adversity. Much is said about resilience, but I have decided to go beyond that and provide you with a method to rebuild your life, so you can move forward positively.