#14 Blind To Your Beauty
~ 10 minute read time ~
“We are taught by people who are already blind to their beauty. Therefore we learn to become blind to our own beauty.”
Do you realise how beautiful you are? Have you checked yourself out lately? I mean, properly looked and I don’t just mean a cursory glance. Equally I don’t just mean how you physically look, but how you ARE and FEEL when there’s no-one else around to see.
How do you talk to yourself? Is it with a kind, gentle and encouraging voice? The way you’d speak to a child who is just finding their way around this world. Or is it a berating and angry voice - “Stupid! Why did you do that?”
Be honest. Would you say you’ve taken yourself for granted all these years? I know I have. If I were to sit and appraise how I’ve treated myself, it wouldn’t make for very comfortable reading. I could probably call myself an ‘abuser’, ‘emotionally manipulative’ and just downright mean. What a bastard!
The main culprits are judgement - why judge anything? It serves no purpose. Sure, check your progress and hope to do better and see if you can measure any improvements - that’s healthy. But judgement for the sake of labelling something is unhelpful. Try a little experiment. Sit quietly for 5 minutes and allow your mind to wander, allow the thoughts to come and go. Now, do this without judging those thoughts. Allow the thoughts to wash over you, don’t label them as good or bad, happy or sad. They’re just thoughts.
Andy Puddicombe from Headspace does a guided meditation that says our thoughts are like traffic. Imagine you’re sitting on a grass verge watching the cars go by, you might say “blue car” or “red car”, instead just watch the traffic and don’t attach any values to the passing vehicles. Now, treat your thoughts in the same way.
If you can create some space for these thoughts to come and go, without attaching any judgements to them you’ll soon realise that the mind is just a chatterbox. The skill is in learning not to listen or give any undue credence to the mind. It’s like that annoyingly talkative person in the office, who just won’t stop spouting off on every subject under the sun.
Eventually, you might turn them down or maybe you put in your earphones to allow you to continue working unhindered. You can do the same with your thoughts.
By learning to be mindful and just becoming a witness, you stop identifying with those thoughts. You can attenuate the chatter of your mind.
By this I mean, when you have a bad thought and maybe another one, you stop grouping them together and spiralling into negative thinking, so you then reduce how often you feel bad and react negatively to your thoughts because you have told yourself that those thoughts are WHO YOU ARE.
“You have cultivated your own little Zen Mind Garden.”
You are not your thoughts. Thoughts are something that the brain and the mind create to keep itself busy, why should you feel bad because the mind keeps throwing out bad thoughts? Learn to create that little bit of distance between yourself and the overactive mind and you’ll create a little slice of peace for yourself. You have cultivated your own little Zen Mind Garden.
Over time, you then start to think - “Ok, if I’m not my thoughts and if I’m not my mind, then who or what am I?”
“You’re the Being sitting in the back of the cinema watching your life movie.”
This is the beautiful moment. This is when you realise you needn’t be blind to your beauty any more. You gain an awareness, an understanding that you are the witness, the soul who sees, feels and intuits life. You’re the Being sitting in the back of the cinema watching your life movie.
You know this is true when you’ve made a decision with your head, yet something deep down still doesn’t feel right? You’ve analysed all the options, you’ve decided - you’ve made up your mind. Decision made, done. But, there’s a nagging, niggling feeling deep down somewhere - you can’t put your finger on it. Is it my heart? My gut?
In that situation, you may need to look at the decision again. Often a head-led decision is not what’s required. Sometimes, a big question that’s been nagging away needs a WHOLE BODY decision - you need to FEEL what the right course of action is. You need to follow your heart. Your intuition is much wiser than your intellect, even if you’re super smart - there’s a universal wisdom available to you. You just need to quiet that big brain and tap into it.
You can then be better at decision making, because if you ask yourself a question and the answer isn’t a full-bodied “Heck Yes!” then it should be a “Heck No’.
Try it.
Next time you need to make a decision, if you can’t commit yourself wholly to a positive YES, then logically it must be a NO. Saying NO and standing by your NO is a powerful thing. When used well you give yourself permission to say NO to things and relationships that don’t serve you, it’s freeing.
NO is a complete sentence in itself.
Although I’ve heard some crafty sales people say that “No is actually the start of a negotiation!”.
Nope, if you ensure that NO means NO then you’ve freed yourself from a time and energy sapping interaction. This then frees you up to say YES to something better.
Alongside this you need to see your own value. Look at how wonderful you are, give yourself credit. It’s about balance though, you need to be your own biggest fan yet still be encouragingly critical to keep that ego in check. The difference is in the nuanced feeling of being ok with the way things are, how you feel yet hoping and striving for better. You can review what works and what doesn’t, but you can be kind with the criticism. You don’t have to shout yourself down.
This is what I needed to learn.
Your ability to be kind to others is equally as important as being kind to yourself. Once you truly see your own value and the beauty of your soul, you then think and act differently. It’ll emanate outwards and you’ll notice that people will treat you differently as a result.
The trick is by treating yourself well and with respect, you teach others how you want to be treated and then act accordingly. If you can show up for yourself in this way, you become less swayed by how others treat you because you genuinely like and love yourself. When you spend time on your own, you feel contented rather than lonely.
People who are happy and comfortable in their own skin are hugely attractive to other people. As humans we are drawn to positive energy, we like being in the presence of someone who helps make us feel good. They help us see our own value.
Humans tend to act out how they feel. We’re emotional beings, which probably explains why some don’t seem to care about the environment, or why some may be cruel to animals. They probably don’t love themselves due to some kind of emotional trauma, therefore they don’t see the value in anything else. As the saying goes “hurt people, hurt people”.
It needs to start from within. Do it for yourself first, then do it for others and see how the positivity and beauty spreads. It sounds simplistic, but if enough people become satisfied and happy with themselves and help others do the same then that’s how we can heal the world.
That’s how we can raise the level of humanity and start addressing many of the human-made issues.
Don’t be blind to your beauty.
Love
LP x
Resources
Jay Shetty’s new book ‘Think Like A Monk’
Headspace app for guided meditations
