Cultivating Beauty

In December, I attended the winter performance of my friend Lisa’s dance troupe. Her performances are always a delightful celebration of embodiment and life, but what I remember best from this particular performance was a simple statement and a profound feeling. “Never underestimate the power of beauty,” Lisa said in her introduction. I felt her words land in my body as I enjoyed the graceful and playful movements of the dancers throughout the evening.

My personal relationship to beauty has been evolving for a long time. As a young person, I felt pain and anger as I tried — and, at five feet tall with curvy hips, inevitably failed — to measure up to stereotypical definitions of beauty. In feisty defense of my own spirit (and later in defense of the spirits of other girls and women), I challenged media representations of women that perpetuated stereotypical ideals, objectified female bodies, and exploited women and girls’ humanity in pursuit of a profit. In the process, I rejected the notion of beauty itself, at great cost to myself.

My journey of yoga has really been, at its heart, a journey into a new kind of beauty. However, even yoga is full of ideals. The media image we see over and over again of yoga shows tall, thin, flexible women in ‘perfect’ alignment. It has taken me time to accept that image as beautiful at the same time that I have authored a new definition of beauty that includes me and my body type. Opening to the currents of grace within me and within others, I have discovered that beauty from the inside out doesn’t mean that beauty must remain only on the inside. It means that the beauty also gets to be expressed on the outside. When I connect to my inner wisdom, my internal light, the currents of grace within me, and then express that through a yoga pose or some other movement, I am making beauty and art. Oh! What a joyful discovery! I can create beauty with my movements, with my expression, with my body. It doesn’t have to look like someone else’s body. My body doesn’t have to be a certain shape. And while I am working toward physical alignment, which allows me access to greater freedom, I do not have to be able to obtain the ideal shape of a pose before I get to be beautiful. I am not just a witness of grace and art expressed through others’ bodies — I am a participant in the expression and creation of grace and art, too!

When Lisa said, “Never underestimate the power of beauty,” this is the kind of beauty she was referring to. And what her words said to me was that beauty — true, deep beauty that is an expression of the heart — has the power to heal, feed, and transform us. We need it as we need air. To cut ourselves off from beauty is to starve our spirits.

At the beginning of this Spring, I set the intention — inspired, in part, by my dear friend Lisa — of cultivating beauty in my life. I have kept a flower garden for the past three years, but I tended it with conscious attention this year, aware that I was growing more than flowers. My flowers are blooming now. Wild and free, they dance together in bright colors. Their blossoms open in glorious brilliance and then they die away. And new blossoms open. Some of the flowers only bloom for a few weeks during the year and spend the rest of the time storing up food and sun and water for their beautiful expression the following year.

I love the teachings of my flower garden: the investment of time into tending the seeds and the plants and the gentleness and patience I must have as I cultivate beauty. And I am also very aware of the incredible joy I feel as I watch the flowers open their tender petals to the sun. I am cultivating beauty inside of me in this same manner — with gentleness and patience, and I am allowing myself to meet it with ecstatic delight. Every now and then, I bloom and make an incredible expression of beauty for others to behold.