Artwork: Hilma af Klint
Good morning beautiful people,
I do hope that you are safe and healthy, wherever you are in the world.
I was recently reading someone else’s newsletter which at the start said “ Hello beautiful people” and it somehow bothered me. I thought, maybe I need to say something else than beautiful, it sounds kind of cheesy?
Beautiful is so vast, and it goes without saying that external beauty is subjective and complex as there are so many components to what makes someone look beautiful; the size and shape of our body maybe beautiful for one and unattractive for another. But, what is at the core of true beauty is how beautiful we feel internally. It reflects and shows on every cell of our body, from our smile, to our posture, as we welcome our flaws and our strengths, with equal warmth.
The core of meditation, is actually to investigate and be inquisitive about ourselves, learning to welcome all that we are; the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chaudron says in her book The Wisdom of No Escape: “the path of meditation and the path of our lives altogether have to do with curiosity and inquisitiveness. The ground is ourselves, we are here to get to know ourselves now, not later.”
“This involves being gentle, precise, and open. Precision is about being able to see very clearly, not being afraid to see what’s really there. It’s about finding our own true nature and speaking from that, acting from that. Whatever our quality is, that’s our wealth and our beauty; that’s what other people respond to.”
On this note, I am going to invite you to take a deep inhale, feeling the air move through your nostrils. As you feel your chest expanding and your belly widening, how about slowly breathing out, anything and everything that is in the way of the full acceptance of who you are.
Your hang ups, your brilliance, neurosis, wisdom, juiciness, spiciness, craziness, confusion, kindness are all part of the same bag, where everything is all mixed up inside. So the goal here, is not to focus on getting rid of your draw backs as you will likely get rid of your brilliance at the same time. As we breath in, we take in all in, and as we breath out, we let it all out.
What a relief to know that showing up is with all of our being, not just for the good days only. So we are all beautiful, whether we see or not, beauty lies inside of all of us.
May you feel it,
May you see it,
May you dig it.
With love and respect
Vanessa
