I had a conversation with my teenage daughter recently that saddened me. As women, we are raised to believe in certain “truths” about beauty, standards that emanate from society’s warped perceptions and ideologies. This results in a collective neurosis of body shaming women. Our minds becoming servants to our bodies and not vice versa.
I adopted this mentality too. And as a result, I have taught my daughter, by default and by my example, to question every aspect of her physicality. As a nation, we have taught our daughters to never accept compliments graciously. To never admire another beautiful woman without questioning our own beauty. To judge other women or girls based on external attributes. It’s a destructive thought pattern that gets handed down to girls in every generation.
We need to learn that we are spiritual beings having a human experience and we have to accept that we are not the amalgam of our hips, legs, thighs, hair or skin. We are the content of our characters, the goals that drive us, the spirit within. We are beautiful and desirable not for the way we look but for the spark of life within us that propels each of us to live meaningful lives.
Beauty is not in the shape of the vessel, it is the volume of the soul it carries. The only reason we have a physical body is because no soul can come to Earth without manifesting into a body. Teaching our children to believe we are physical beings alone sets limitations on them, because the body has no power. It is the divine thing inside of the body that makes life possible. That is what makes us experience true beauty in this temporary plane.
Today, go home and tell your daughter, wife, sister or mother that they are beautiful. Not for the way they look, but for who they are inside.