Heal with Gold: 10 Golden Nuggets to Heal Your Mind and Soul

By Miriam Grunhaus

You are unique, not despite your circumstances but because of them!

Miriam Grunhaus shares how the Japanese art of Kintsugi – the art of mending broken pottery with lacquer and gold, catapulted her onto a healing path after her own irreparable heartbreak. For two years, she interviewed “Thrivers,” women who had faced tremendous and varied adversity, to learn the commonalities of their journeys from despair and brokenness to healing and wholeness. From those interviews, Miriam gleaned Ten Golden Nuggets, which are essential to uncovering joy in adversity. Miriam’s heart is healed, and she offers this book to provide the resilience tools you need to traverse valleys of life and rise up on mountains of joy.

You should read Heal with Gold if:
· You have felt broken by your experiences
· You are still healing from adversity
· You are ready to do the work to become more joyful
· You want to become more resilient to face any adversities life may bring in a more productive manner

There is no way around pain and suffering; it is as much a part of life as happiness and joy. How we react to our adversities is something we can control. If the goal is to rebound faster from life’s punches and use our gained wisdom for a good purpose, you will benefit from this reading.
Miriam’s Story
After going through many ups and downs throughout her journey, life brought her to her knees when she experienced a loss of the living. Not knowing how to overcome the deep pain, she went on a journey of self-discovery, interviewing women who had gone through deep pain and sorrow but were thriving. These women consider themselves joyful; they are not hiding in shame. Quite the contrary, they are vocal and sharing their experiences for the benefit of others. Miriam wanted to find out:
1.Is there joy after feeling broken beyond repair?
2.Is resilience something that can be learned, or are the women who overcame innately resilient?
Is there something in common between the women who are thriving?
Heal with Gold shares with you:
· Top 10 changes all the Thrivers interviewed applied to their lives to become joyful again
· Vignettes about the lives of some of the women interviewed
· Actionable examples in each area
· A call to action for you to start your own transformation

Endorsed by Tal Ben Shachar – New York Times Best Seller of Happier, Founder Happiness Studies Academy and most sought-after professor at Harvard:

“Inspired by the Japanese art of Kintsugi, Miriam embarked on a journey to find her own healing and ultimately joy. She has culled the wisdom of women who have thrived after tragedy and shares these lessons to heal others and guide them to a joy-filled life. This book is a gem!”

Pick up your copy of Heal with Gold and build your resilience arsenal to overcome any adversity life may bring because it is not a matter of if adversity will strike, but when. Live a Kintsugi life, and you will live a joyful one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miriam Grunhaus
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781636180090

Book preview

Chapter ONE

When a Heart Breaks

Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.

- Marilyn Monroe

It is interesting how we have a vision of ourselves and our future. Often, we think we know what we are here on Earth to do; other times we don’t, but we do recognize strengths and attach our purpose to those strengths. We also have predetermined thoughts about the right thing to do and be, and what is honorable. If we believe in these qualities and behaviors, we think we need to do them and be them.

But when life steers us in a different direction, it can come as a blow. The fact that we imagined our life a certain way and have expectations of the results we will get from living that way, and they don’t happen as we predicted or expected, is itself a hardship we must overcome.

Expectations

In a way, expectations are so closely connected to dreams and goals that they are generally what moves us forward in a growing trajectory. Unfulfilled expectations leave people disappointed, sad, broken, and feeling inadequate.

My life’s expectations were that I would work hard and succeed. I would build a beautiful family and we would all love each other and thrive together. I would raise my family to be strong and independent.

My husband and I would have the most harmonious marriage and we would grow old together, travel the world, and share many wonderful experiences. We would be healthy, in good shape, I would continue being relatively thin as I was growing up. I would remain active and joyful.

Small wins would be reasons for great celebration. I would work in the creative field and share my constantly flowing ideas with the world. My business would grow, I would have employees doing the work I didn’t much like, and I would be immersed in all that I loved.

When our children arrived, I would teach them the values of ethics and integrity that I had learned from my parents, so that they, too, would thrive and prosper. I expected to enjoy the grandkids when they came along, spoiling them as I should, and watching them growing happily.

Then there were all the dreams that I conjured in my youth at that time when you are in the zone, free to drift into ecstasy. In those dreams I would run long marathons, I would join a covert unit that saves the world and destroys terrorists, and I would save little children from doomsday. At one point, I thought my calling and mission for my time on this planet was to open an orphanage. I did not know how I would make what I thought was my purpose a reality, but these dreams brought me joy and kept me excited about all my possibilities.

A line is a compilation of little dots all so close to each other that they look like one continuous shape. Just like how life is: a bunch of little bumps close to one another forming our day-to-day. In between the dots is the space where we will be tested, and our character will be built.

I am a visual person and I think the easiest way to describe myself is as a vase filled with beautiful vibrant flowers, each representing my family members. My purpose was to be the vessel to contain the water that would sustain my family. I felt I was supposed to keep them close to each other, to support them and create an environment where they could flourish, adorn the world, making God, my family, and myself proud.

Then life happened.

It was as if my vase fell to the ground and shattered into a million little pieces. Some shards were so small that they might as well have been sand. The vase was no longer a tangible piece of pottery. My self-worth was shattered, my reason for being no longer existed, and I just did not know how to proceed. I didn’t know how to move to the next chapter when the current chapter of my life was so completely different than my visions and expectations.

Since my story is not only mine, and out of respect for all involved, I will not spend too much time in its details. Frankly the details don’t really matter or change the big picture. I learned that from all the women I have interviewed. The path to Joy doesn’t change by the adversity experienced but rather by our reactions to it.

I can share with you that our family broke apart, and I experienced, what I call a loss of the living. Being that all were alive and well, I did not even know how to grieve. I was shocked. I was falling fast into a deep dark vortex of pain and hurt. I have learned that this type of grief is experienced by people who are disconnected from their loved ones by any number of reasons like illness, addiction, politics and others.

My grief spiraled into many other losses as those around me did not meet my expectations of supporting me emotionally. They did not rescue me or help resolve the situation and in some instances made it worse.

My family was torn apart. Misunderstandings turned into painful words, disagreements, fights, and finally distance and disconnect. I was the one who was supposed to keep us together, happy and flourishing, and I alone had failed at my self-appointed purpose.

Like the vase, I was shattered and believed that I would stay sad and broken forever. The failure, the sadness, the anger, the despair, the loneliness was deep, palpable and I didn’t know how to fix it. I sincerely thought that this was it. I would not rebound this time, because there was no way to put that vase back together. There was no healing, no mending, and no hope.

I felt that losing a living loved one was worse than death. There was no closure, there was a living soul, one that I loved more than life, that was continuing their journey and I was not a part of it, I was not welcome. I had failed. I was a failure. I had a simple job and I couldn’t complete it.

As I was going through my family ordeal a neighbor lost her 12-year-old daughter to a skateboarding accident. I thought about how that mother would never laugh again, smile again, feel joy again. I made a judgment about myself and about others. I really believe that when you are in the darkest of places you cannot see the light, not even a flicker.

I was seeing despair everywhere. My brain was creating a stream filled with sadness. I was feeling more and more depressed. I did not believe I could ever heal.

Like many women, I am the caretaker of my family. I am the one who fixes everything and I set out to repair this rift. I set myself up to solve, explain, and talk to people who were more qualified and more spiritual than me, but I was not managing to resolve the discord and reduce the distance. I was not fixing anything. This time it seemed that my desire to fix was creating more issues.

It was that walk on the beach with my husband that finally made me understand that I could not fix this problem. I understood the only way to resolve the pain was to experience it. Until that day I did not know that the point of grieving was really to feel and to go through and not around my circumstances.

I felt defeated. At the same time, once I accepted that I was not in control and I could not fix the problem and really, all I was able to do was lean in, I felt that I had a job, a purpose, and a reason for being. And right during that time of my life, the purpose was to feel and live the pain and not to fight it. I needed to believe in the process.

I still felt broken, a shattered mess. Days passed, weeks passed, and I wanted to mask and numb the pain. I had to find something to distract me, something that would keep me sane, alive, and productive. So, I started a new business, a fashion brand, working almost 18 hours a day. While immersed in the creativity and the demands of building my brand I could barely feel the pain that had a choke-hold around my heart. The rest of the time was hard. Until something happened that would change the trajectory of my life forever.

Chapter TWO

Kintsugi and All Its Glory

There is a saying in Tibetan, ’Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.’ No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that’s our real disaster.

– The 14th Dalai Lama

Sitting on my bed on a Sunday afternoon pondering my life and my new business, I received a WhatsApp message with a video from a friend. Frankly, I hadn’t heard from him in a while and deep down I was resentful. I felt he hadn’t been there for me during my time of pain.

I decided to watch the video and it was more than just a thinking of you message, it changed my life. That video planted a seed in my brain that gave me a purpose, some direction, and hope.

Kintsugi

In the video, Sean Buranahiran¹ explains the art of Kintsugi and how it relates to human beings. The Japanese art of Kintsugi is the art that mends pottery with lacquer and gold, the gold highlights the breaks, it is not meant to fix in a way that hides where the pottery had been broken; rather, it emphasizes the breaks.

As art, a pottery that is fixed in Kintsugi becomes more expensive, more valuable for the gold, and for the time and artistry that it took to fix it. The piece becomes more beautiful, unique and stronger than before it broke.

As a philosophy, Kintsugi teaches us so many lessons. To begin with, everything can be fixed and mended. It shows that just like the mended Kintsugi pottery we also become more valuable, unique, and strong.

The art is time-consuming and requires much skill, patience, vision, and commitment. The art celebrates imperfection, it teaches us to be proud of our scars as opposed to being embarrassed by them. By highlighting the breaks, it demonstrates how those breaks are actually what is interesting and special about us, not something to be ashamed of, or that should be hidden.

When a piece of the broken pottery is lost, it can be filled with gold or with another fragment from a different piece of pottery, even if it doesn’t match. It is not about blending and hiding; rather, it is about highlighting. It visually shows, to the visual learners like me, that when we break and even when parts are broken to dust, we can always be repaired, and there is always hope.

That video filled me with hope, and I became curious about, even a bit obsessed with Kintsugi, I needed to learn more about the art, how and why it was conceptualized and developed. So many inventions happen by accident and I needed to know more. I started consuming everything I could find on the