To even understand ourselves and our relationship to beauty, I think we need to first understand how beauty is defined, within our own mind and body.
The Oxford dictionary gives the following definitions for beauty:
"a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight; a combination of qualities that pleases the intellect or moral sense
And the Merriam-Webster:
1. the qualities of a person or a thing that give pleasure to the senses ; 2 · a lovely person or thing ; 3 · an outstanding example .
Hmmm...pleasing to the senses seems to be a general idea but it seems we have skewed that to become how we physically appear to bring pleasure to someone/something outside of us, rather than about how we experience something of pleasure through our sensory body.
But is this a surprise, given that our beauty and our conditioning around it, has become a huge industry where our insecurities are turning us into consumers for the booming beauty product industry (globally over $500 billion annually!).
So perhaps take a few moments to contemplate what is your definition of beauty?
Do you instantly create a checklist of criteria that you must physically meet before someone/something outside of you deems you as beautiful? Is your definition dependent on what you do to attempt to please other’s senses, of which we can never truly know?
Do you hear old voices of others and how they affected your own thoughts around beauty or how you look?
So then we need to ask where do your beliefs about beauty truly come from? We might not even be aware that our beliefs truly aren’t ours, but from years of conditioning and advertising – social media boom and the prevalence of social influencers only warping our sense of self sovereignty even further….
And we are not taught to think our own thoughts regarding body image, nor are we rarely given a chance to even understand our own conditionings, yet alone how to begin to create more positive conditions or beauty body thoughts...
For this reason, I created an audio journaling prompt/meditation practice to help understand our own thoughts regarding beauty, where these beliefs might be held in our body, and a simple way to start working to shift these beliefs. Because after all, YOU ARE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CREATION IN ALL OF THE UNIVERSE; Indeed, you are the stuff beauty is made of....
Listen to the Beauty Beliefs recording here.
Ever an ongoing process to understand ourselves, be ourselves, and live life as our most beauty-full self. Keep on keeping on, beauties!