Let’s fix all our broken and struggling parts with gold, shall we?
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I don’t know about you, but I feel rather cracked and broken these days. I’ve been trying to hide and I’m done hiding. I know there’s a way to fill the open places with gold rather than cheap glue; to take what is broken and make it even more beautiful through its repair.
At Love and Making It, everything connects with the most intimate parts of life – even ancient Japanese pottery repair.
Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of using a mixture of gold dust and adhesive together to repair breaks in a piece of pottery. The philosophy is that by making the repair visible, one honors its history and makes it even more beautiful than before.
Doesn’t that sound good? To honor your history – to honor yourself – by drawing attention and love to the broken places rather than trying desperately to make them invisible?
Kintsugi-style sex is the idea that intimacy, care, and passion can mix and repair broken parts of us. You can honor your history and repair broken places to create an even more beautiful version of yourself and your relationship.
If you are a familiar with the Bible, it is a lot like the redemptive idea of forgiveness and God’s grace in 2 Cor 12:9:
“My grace is enough to cover and sustain you. My power is made perfect in weakness.”
As I mentioned at the beginning, I have been hiding and covering my pain rather than allowing love and grace to have direct contact with it. I am trying to fix the broken pieces in secret – with cheap glue in the dark – rather than with gold in the light.
Maybe you’re like me… maybe not… but I have noticed myself covering up more and more. I eat more numbing foods. I flick past more social media. I am cocooning for safety. … and I’ve been doing those things long enough now that my unhealthy choices are stacking up. It’s one thing to have a day of comfort-numbing but it’s another to have months of it.
How do you numb and hide your failures?
This affects my entire life and especially my sex life.
So, maybe you’ve heard of Kintsugi before, but perhaps you’ve never connected it to the intimacy of sex. Maybe you’ve read 2 Cor. 12:9 before but never connected it to the intimacy of sex… but there are truly helpful applications for this philosophy.
Here’s a simple Kintsugi process to having beautiful, healing, passionate sex. Through loving attention to our broken places, we can find even more beauty. (This process assumes a trusted Lover. Do not try without trust.)
- Mix the adhesive: This is a change in perspective: a belief that sex can be the area of life where we heal both body and soul. This is gold. Discover the rich energy of loving, playful, and vulnerable physical intimacy. (Keep coming back to Love and Making It. Read more here and here.)
- Take ruthless inventory: Courageously collect all of your broken pieces so they can be reconnected. Where are you struggling? What do you wish was different about your body? How are you failing? We often spend most of our makeout time trying to hide the parts of our bodies and selves that we feel ashamed or embarrassed about. If instead of hiding them, we were awake and aware to them, then they could be repaired through loving attention. I cannot stress this enough. If I know the exact part of myself that feels the most broken, and I allow it to be seen, touched, kissed, loved – truly loved – it can heal. If not, it will always feel like something to hide. Where we are most forgiven, we experience the most joy and love. It may sound strange to let your spouse forgive you for your thick stomach or ugly skin, lack of skill or past activity, but try it. Name it. Ask them for tangible love through specific sensual touches to that very spot.
- Apply with words: Use words of assurance and affirmation to help everything come together. Many of us need to hear words that back the actions up. “I love this part of you.” “I cannot get enough of you.”
- Apply with action: Take action. Kiss, lick, hug, touch with intention and affection. Put the pieces back together by giving and receiving love directly to the broken parts.
- Let it set: After taking action, spend time letting the gold adhesive set. Lay together. Sit together. Do not pick up your phones. Do not do anything but be together and safe for 10 minutes. Maybe say a simple and profound “Thank You.”
We cannot magically fix each other through sex, but we can make intentional choices in our intimate moments to share our deepest fears and broken pieces so that they can be directly, physically, and openly loved… and repaired in the process. It may take years to finally all come together, but this change of mindset and expectation is the key. No matter how long it takes, gold-laced cracks left by our healing kintsugi-style sex will leave us more beautiful than ever before.
No matter how long it takes, when all our cracks are mended and laced with love and gold, we will be more beautiful than if we had never needed repair.