For all those who’ve ever felt broken

When the Japanese mend cracked or broken ceramics, they mend it with gold laquer. This is called kintsugi or kintsukuroi. This style of mending pots embraces the flaws and imperfections, even highlighting them. There is a belief that when something has suffered damage and has a history, a past, it becomes more beautiful and more valuable than before it was broken.

This is a wonderfully philosophical way of thinking about resilience and learning from negative experiences. When we learn from our experiences, the mental scars are precious.

If you’d like to embrace flaws, kintsugi repair kits can be bought online from all sorts of retailers, including Amazon. There are also several self-help books about this philosophy too, for example, ‘Kintsugi: Embrace your imperfections and find happiness – the Japanese way’ (2018) by Tomás Navarro, which is available as a book or audiobook.

This metaphorical mending helps us to see our beauty shine through during hard times. For more information on this centuries-old tradition of celebrating our past challenges click here .

We learn more about the value of metaphors, how to write and use them to help others, in our NLP Practitioner training,  for details click here