Carrying on with some of the ideas of last week’s blog - that only the details of life change - and it is clear that some things never change. I just finished reading The Women’s Room by Marilyn French which has just been reprinted to celebrate its 25th anniversary. This passage jumped out at me:

‘If a woman has to encase her body in a constricting corset, wear tottery high heels, spend hours dressing and powdering her hair and making up, just in order to go out, that says something about both the position of women and the class structure of a society.’

This was written more than 25 years ago, what can we honestly say has changed? The details might have changed, we might not wear corsets as such

  • today they are called ‘body-shapers’ - and there are other options in terms of flat shoes etc, but no woman could genuinely argue that there is not the same pressure today, as there was over a quarter of a century ago, to conform to society’s notions of feminine beauty.

Now it’s a truism to say that true beauty comes from within - Ashton Kutcher has even made a reality tv program about it. Most people acknowledge this, at least intellectually, but in practice it’s not how we seem to live our lives. Just take a quick walk down my local shopping precinct where so many of the shops have been taken over by salons for hair, nail, weight loss, teeth whitening, fake tanning, waxing, plastic reconfiguring.

Beauty and women’s appearance remain a gender political issue used to wield power either for or against women. While women are attached to the idea that their self-esteem both as women, and even just as human beings, rests on what others think about their outward appearance, then nothing will ever change.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not making a judgment about all of this. Heck, the same loops of insecurity and anxiety about my looks run in my head as they do in most women. It is one of the major patterns of females. My aim, rather, is to point out why only the details change when we cling to the same old overall patterns of thought and behaviour.

I was playing tennis last week and after several months of coaching, the penny finally dropped. I just realised that the strength with which one hits the ball comes not from the arms, as one would naturally assume, but from the legs. If one pushes off strongly from both legs as the racquet connects with the ball then it is not necessary to swing hard at the ball. The person who has never played tennis would struggle to understand this.

Because it is the arm that swings the racquet it seems logical that the arm would be the source of strength. The physical connection between arm, racquet and ball makes this assumption reasonable, on the face of it. But things in this world are rarely as they seem.

As in sport, so in life. We think beauty is sourced in the material because the body reflects and manifests beauty, creating a physical connection between them. It does not occur to most of us that the physical is merely the purveyor of a spiritual quality that is available to all, regardless of their physical attributes (and an understanding of this can actually transform our physical attributes to reflect more closely the beauty that is potentially inherent in all of us).

Beauty may not be manifested in the same way in us all - after all, spiritual qualities are infinite - but when one understands the eternal and universal *principle *of beauty, we enable that principle to operate in our bodies and our lives.

The physical is merely a reflection of the spiritual. The true source of all things is in the realm of the spiritual, and that is why all our physical attempts and efforts to control issues like beauty (as well as truth, power, peace and love - which are also spiritual in essence) fail. No matter how much we do to capture, harness and control these qualities, if we only ever deal in the physical, they will always elude us.

I am sitting in my local coffee shop as I write this and there is a perfect example of what I am trying to explain running around happily. She is a smiling, little curly red-headed toddler who, totally unconscious of her absolutely transformative beauty, makes everyone smile when they see her.

She doesn’t tick every box of conventional toddler beauty, but that’s not what delights us. It is her total commitment to joy without any thought to what others might be thinking. That joy just shines through her eyes and her smile, lighting her face with an intangible exquisiteness that cannot be bottled, packaged, or marketed by any cosmetic company. Her joy springs from her unconscious and innate love of life, and love is synonymous with true beauty. Those who love are always beautiful.

Eileen McBride
Eileen McBride is the author of Love Equals Power 2, a spiritual seeker and teacher. This article was published on April 13, 2010.