Image by StockSnap from Pixabay
Kintsugi is a beautiful image of how the broken places of grief, loss, trauma, and pain can be transformed into beautiful, golden art as we heal. The actual process of the performing kintsugi repairs even offers lessons about what that healing process might look like, and I’ve written about those on many occasions before.
While this image can be a wonderful inspiration and encouragement as we’re going through hard times, kintsugi only offers the barest hint of a map for what the journey through that process of transformation and healing actually entails.
Why does that matter? It matters because a map can be an incredibly powerful tool for helping us stay with our focus on transforming our broken places into gold when the going gets rough.
A map assures us that we’re on the right path when things seem hopelessly lost and confused. It can help us recognize key turning points in the process to keep us moving ahead with our focus on the right things. It’s also handy for reminding us just how far we’ve come and where we’re headed.
In the middle of the tangled mess that the broken places in our lives leave behind, I’ve found that kintsugi does a beautiful job of offering hope of a better outcome at the end of it all, but a map of the actual journey through transformation is critical for making sure I don’t give up or lose my motivation along the way.
Given that commonality of these kinds of experiences of brokenness, transformation, and healing across time, there are many such maps available to use.
One of the most simplistic (yet still very effective) maps I’ve used is that of the journey of the caterpillar through the chrysalis to become a butterfly. I’ve written about these before and have personally found the descriptions of what happens inside the chrysalis from the “melting down” of the caterpillar through the beginning emergence of the features of the butterfly to be quite helpful.
Another very well known map is that of the Hero’s Journey, which was popularized by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, though there are other version of this particular map out there. As a map for transforming brokenness, the “call to adventure” that starts this journey would be whatever brokenness we are experiencing that pulls us out of our everyday lives and thrusts us into a new adventure (willing or not).
Personally, I find the Heroine’s Journey, initially described by Campbell’s student Maureen Murdock in The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness, to be more helpful. Where the Hero’s Journey focuses more on venturing “out there” for answers, the Heroine’s Journey focuses on going deep inside ourselves instead, and that tends to be a better mirror of my own experience (though both are valid maps).
The ones I’ve found to be most useful and detailed, however, is that of alchemy. While we tend to focus only on the quest of the alchemists to turn lead into gold, that’s only an outer version of the inner map they were following. Their external experiments were really designed to be secret maps of their inner journey to transform the lead in their own lives into gold.
This particular map is full of complex symbology that can be challenging to unravel, but Robin Rice is doing a beautiful job of laying out the steps of alchemy in a clear, easy-to-understand way in a series on LinkedIn. (You do not need a LinkedIn account to access it.) In particular, she’s using the current COVID-19 situation as an example of how alchemy can be a map to our experience and how engaging in the process the map offers us leads to transformation. I highly recommend it!
Transformation (of which healing is just one form) is always a messy, confusing process, but using a map to help orient yourself and keep yourself on the path moving forward can help ensure that succeed in moving from whatever broken place you’ve found yourself in to the gold that is available in healing.
Have you used any of these maps during times of healing and transformation in your life?
How did they help you navigate the process?
Are there other maps that you have used and found helpful?
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