Musings from a Kintsukouried Mind: Briding the Gap Between

Translated from Japanese, the word kintsukuroi means "to repair with gold." Kintsukuroi is the art of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.Many people don't recognize that often mental collapse and crisis are the initial stages of a transformational process. Too often people going through mental crisis and spiritual transformation are not well served by the mental health industry. In addition, the process is often not recognized as potentially valuable. The opportunity of growth and greater value as an outcome of such a process is dismissed and ignored. This often causes greater difficulty to the person whose mind has "broken" or "fractured" into pieces in the initial stages of a kintsukuroi-type process.Penni Kolpin describes elements of her journey when she endured a "severe stress breakdown" many years ago. She and presents tools and concepts that helped her through that journey and other concepts that would have helped had she known of them at the time. Penni's musings address concepts including "ego collapse," Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, spiritual emergency and awakening, quantum, and the relationship between mysticism and what often is named "psychosis."