, Awareness, and Healing: The Language of a Table
Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper represents more than a sacred scene; it reveals the fragile balance of human relationships. Trust, betrayal, realization, and acceptance exist side by side.
This essay transforms that long table into life itself, inviting the reader to step inside the painting and take their own seat. Because every life is a table and how we choose to sit determines the course of the story.
Leonardo Da Vinci
Making Space for Yourself at the Table of Life
Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper is not merely a religious narrative, but a map of the human psyche in its most fragile, contradictory, and authentic forms. Painted in the late 15th century on the wall of the Santa Maria delle Grazie monastery in Milan, the work is now read as a symbolic stage for human relationships; trust, betrayal, and awareness unfolding together. Its copyright has long expired, and the masterpiece belongs freely to our collective memory.
Now, close your eyes.
Imagine that long table.
Jesus at the center; disciples, companions, fellow travelers surrounding him…
Yet the true crowd is made of unseen emotions: unspoken sentences, suppressed fears, sensed fractures.
As you read, place yourself inside the painting.
Sit quietly among the figures.
Because this story is far more familiar than you might expect.
Artwork: Tugba Yazici
Life as a Table
I think of life as a banquet table. Not exaggerated, not overly ambitious, just profoundly real. Imagine a long table:
Changing plates, changing faces, chairs that sometimes feel too tight, sometimes unexpectedly spacious.
At times crowded, at times lonely.
When we think of a banquet, we imagine flawless splendor.
Yet the table of life is never fixed.
Sometimes a dish arrives looking exquisite, but as you draw closer, it has spoiled. Other times, a plate that seems ordinary surprises you with its richness at the very first bite. As art therapy reminds us, the experience itself matters; but so does the state of mind with which we approach it. My understanding of life begins right here:to see every plate that arrives not as something personal, but as part of the journey. Because what defines the taste is often not the food itself, but the mind that encounters it. How I sit, how I look, what I feel, all of this changes the flavor of what is before me.
Sitting at the Table with the Shadow
The Shadow at the Table: Judas
Now let us turn to another figure at the table:
Judas.
There is a Judas at every table.
Sometimes someone you trusted, sometimes a disappointment, sometimes simply a traveler playing their role.
It is easy to demonize him.Yet perhaps Judas is an inevitable part of the table.Because great gatherings bring great confrontations.Judas may be the one who serves life’s most bitter plates.But art therapy teaches us this: pain and betrayal are forms of knowledge.These plates do not teach us to leave the table,but to remain seated.Not to throw the dish away, but to recognize its taste,to stay in contact with pain and betrayal, without denying them.
Meeting Yourself Within the Silent Crowd
The table of life changes.
It transforms.
It surprises.
Sometimes it nourishes, sometimes it leaves us hungry.
But above all, it teaches this:
the fate of the table depends on how you sit.
Artwork: Tugba Yazici
When you make space for yourself within the silent crowd of The Last Supper, you realize something profound:
Perhaps you are both Jesus and Judas.
Both guest and host.
This is the table of life.
We prepare the feast.
We are the ones who give meaning to the plates.
A Mini Analysis from an Art Therapy Perspective
From an art therapy perspective, The Last Supper symbolizes the individual sitting at the same table with their inner parts.
Jesus represents the conscious self placed at the center; Judas represents the suppressed, denied, or blamed shadow. These figures are not opposites, but parts of the same whole.In therapeutic language, healing does not begin by banishing the “negative” part from the table, but by recognizing and understanding it.Judas does not disrupt the table; he reveals the truth. Likewise, disappointments in life do not appear to remove us from the table, but to deepen awareness. This work reminds us of something essential: The human being is whole; both wounding and healing at once.
Art allows us to witness this wholeness within a safe space. And sometimes healing is not about changing the plate, but learning to look at it differently.
I would like to close this piece with a line of street writing I deeply love:
“I never left anyone halfway; they simply got off at a place that suited them.”
Until the next piece; may we stay healthy and happy.
Tuğba YAZICI
Multidisciplinary Artist
Instagram: @tugbayaziciofficial
Facebook: Tuğba Yazıcı
Website: www.tugbayazici.com.tr
