The past is one of the main reasons why people fail to succeed. I hear this countless times in my seminars. Some people, for example, have very violent stories from their childhoods. The good news is that there are some great exercises for making peace with what has gone by. Much more important, however, is your attitude toward what has happened to you in life.
One of my favorite ways of thinking about the past was learned from my Japanese host family in Tokyo, whom I stayed with more than twenty years ago when attempting to learn Japanese. I lived in a traditional family home. My host father (Oto-san) cultivated bonsai trees and worked for hours with these remarkably maintenance-intensive plants. My host mother (Oka-san) was a tea ceremony mistress, and taught me about patience and age-old customs. I was particularly impressed by the precious tea bowls made of thin porcelain, all of them hand-painted. If such a bowl breaks, it is not thrown away, but fused together again using gold. This creates a new treasure with beautiful lines, and means that every bowl is unique. By doing this, the Japanese highlight the beauty of broken things. They believe that, once broken, a thing becomes even more valuable. They believe that if something has suffered damage and has a story, it is all the more beautiful as a result.
The same applies to humans. The things you’ve gone through do not make your life “uglier” or “worse,” as much as it may seem like that to you. It’s up to us to make our scars and tears golden again. To go further with the metaphor: you have not been broken for good, but repaired with gold and actually made better. The gold represents your friends and family, who are there for you even in the darkest of times. The shards are your painful past experiences, and the bowl is your life.
You can get back on your feet, learn from the past, and become a better person as a result of all your effort and pain. Better yet, you can become an illuminated path, a lighthouse for others, so they do not have to go through the same. Your experience is not in vain. You can wear your scars with pride and as a badge of honor. You can say, “Look at what I’ve been through. It’s made me who I am today, and I can face any challenge.”
Nobody has ever had a perfect life, and nobody will ever have. It is up to us whether we suffer or choose to share our knowledge with others. There is no need to be ashamed of what has happened to you; everything has a reason. This is something I strongly believe in. If, for example, I had not spent so many years in a sect that forbade me to communicate with the outside world, my current sense of mission would not be so great. I say this despite my suffering and the fact that my will was broken.
The more we resist, the more we complain and object to what has happened to us, the more likely our path is to remain in the dark, for all our experiences are deeply rooted within us. In contrast, the moment when we accept these things and find use and purpose in our struggle and pain can be very healing.
In doing this, we transform something that may be ugly to us into something beautiful and inspiring to others. If what we have lived through can serve as an inspiration to those around us, this makes the pain and suffering worth it. Each chapter of our book requires a new version of ourselves. Until we’ve accepted the importance of being broken, we won’t be able to turn the page.