Love and Inner Beauty

On Valentine’s Day, love is in the air.  It’s what makes the world go round. We all crave it, we all need it, and we all suffer at times for it. We forget that love and inner beauty go hand in hand. When we forget, we need to write ourselves a new script.

A friend once wrote a book called How To Make Yourself Irresistible. Loving yourself was a good way to begin. I was reminded of this when I read the wonderful blog post: Beauty of a Woman Blog Fest by August McLaughlin. If you go there, you’ll find other posts on what beauty is and how, as women, we need to hang on to what that truly means.

Last year, I wrote a guest post, that speaks about inner beauty and letting it shine through. It was for Paula Renaye, a life coach and author of the Hardline Self-Help Handb0ok. Here it is again.

The Body Beautiful

                    Reflection, A Bronze Sculpture by  Robert D’Arcy Stevan

Every time I go to the supermarket, I’m visually assaulted by some magazine heralding a new weight loss diet or the latest photos of a celebrity who looks fabulous after losing pregnancy pounds, or a series of before and after shots of obese people who’ve successful trimmed down. I’ve known women, who’ve seen these photos and rather than be encouraged to lose weight, they eat more out of frustration. Try as they might, it’s hard for them to reach the ideal manufactured by popular media. If they would only consult health charts, they would see that normal weight is more than what popular culture is promoting.

So I have to admit, I was shocked when I first met Luce, a Mexican Indian woman, who was a life model for art classes in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Without saying one word, she taught me more about self-confidence than any Oprah show, People magazine, or pop psychology book.

When I met her 16 years ago, she was in her late twenties, a heavy-set woman with large hips and thighs, layers of fat on her stomach, and a face that, by North American standards, would be described as plain. And yet, she radiated confidence. Perhaps it was no accident of birth that she was named Luce, meaning light.

What struck me, was her comfort with her own body. She would pose naked for us, and then after a twenty minute pose, she would stretch and walk over to our canvases in all her nude glory, and see what we had captured. Her face was lined from the sun but she didn’t worry about how she looked, or the fact her body jiggled when she walked. She was proud of what she did for a living—proud and confident with herself.

Where and when did we lose sight of being comfortable in our own skin? The one God (or Nature) gave us? Where and when does it start, the lamentations about this inadequacy or that? My nose is too big, my hips are too wide, my arms are too flabby, my stomach sticks out, my thighs touch, my breasts are too small, my bum is too large (the latter, maybe not, given Jennifer Lopez’s beauty).

Today, we have an obesity epidemic and a rise in anorexia and bulimia, two extremes, that didn’t exist in these proportions two generations back. What are we doing to our children, when we continue to admire falsehoods? With airbrushing, makeup, and face lifts, stars and models peer out from magazines portraying some unattainable ideal. No wonder we give up and eat too much junk food to ease the pain, or try too hard and eat too little.

If I could’ve, I would’ve bottled Luce and brought her home with me to Canada. I would’ve bottled that self-confidence and passed it around. Luce was painted, sculpted and appreciated. Her light shone for all to see.

Despite what popular culture has taught us about beauty, Luce reinforced for me the old lesson, beauty comes from within.

What do you think about the messages in popular culture? Are you as upset with them as I am?

Related posts:

A Writer’s Passion Writing a Guest Blog For The Love Of Books Looking for Love in a Mad World

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