SEEING MORE BEAUTY

EPISODE #181

In this week’s episode of Confidence on the Go we’re chatting about:

• How we are surrounded by beauty – in ourselves and around us – and how to train your mind and your eye to see and savor more of it than you currently are
• 7 simple ways to live more beautifully, every day, starting with today.
• How to change how you see your own beauty – exchanging the warped, circus mirror for the real mirror.

Just a quick hello to all of my Keep the Faith listeners out there – thanks for being part of the community of contagious encouragement.

SPONSORSHIP NOTE:

I am proud to be an educator and consultant for Beautycounter, a B-Corp company on a mission to get safer products into the hands of everyone.   The lack of regulation in the personal care and cosmetic industry is astounding and it is harming our health in very serious ways. We need more voices to join up on our mission. If you want to put your passion to purpose while being generously compensated, then I would love to start a conversation with you about what it means to be involved in the #saferbeauty tribe that is Beautycounter. Join the movement of #betterbeauty and message me via email to make your voice really resonate for a cause.  Shop Beautycounter and learn more at www.beautycounter.com/trishblackwell

QUOTES ON BEAUTY:

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. –Confucius

The beauty of a woman is not in a facial mode but the true beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul. It is the caring that she lovingly gives the passion that she shows. The beauty of a woman grows with the passing years. –Audrey Hepburn

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express. –Francis Bacon

A woman whose smile is open and whose expression is glad has a kind of beauty no matter what she wears. –Anne Roiphe

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

THOUGHTS ON BEAUTY:

The moon shone, painted with the lipstick of the sun’s goodnight kiss. Full, it glowed with a lustrous halo of canary yellow that extended its full circle even more majestically in the navy blue sky.   Clouds that appeared like illustrations from a children’s book stretched themselves out poetically, dancing around the radiant light of the moon. Making the scene even more magical, ocean waves crashed methodically and melodically on the shell-covered sand where I stood frozen, toes in the sand, entranced by the resplendence. As my eyes drank this beauty into my soul, my ears absorbed shouts of glee that felt like little pinches, proving to me that this wasn’t a dream, but in fact reality.   The seagulls balked and made circles above my head as my husband and one-year-old daughter chased them with our puppy in the sand. My daughter’s pigtails waved in the wind as they jumped, swirled and chased these sea birds, her arms thrust into the air in full belief that she could either join them in flying or that she would succeed in catching one.

The beauty of life is hidden in the small moments. The art of slowing down to find gratitude is the key to unlock more moments and more beauty.

I am obsessed with beauty. Maybe not the beauty you assume I talking about but beauty nonetheless. The beauty I am pursuing has changed because I needed it to change. I needed to have beauty in my soul, but I looked in the wrong place first. I thought that the beauty I craved was an unattainable beauty in myself, and that if I reached that fake standard of beauty that I would then feel beautiful and would then be able to see the world around me as beautiful as well. We spend so much time trying to be what we think the world will call beautiful, when really we could be spending that time just being beautifully engaged in the beautiful world around us, or, in other words, drinking up the beauty that is available to us. I’ve noticed that, when focused on beauty that is natural, beauty becomes more real. Whatever it is that we focus on minds on is what we will get.

This.

This moment is life.

This moment is beauty.

This moment is what I want to drink up.

It is a moment where the beauty you see becomes a beauty that you can feel.  And that is why we pursue beauty in many ways, isn’t it? So that we can feel differently?

You know those moments when you want to freeze time? When you blink your eyelids with deep intention as if they were permanent camera lenses captured precious memories you wish to etch into your memory forever?

7 WAYS TO DRINK UP MORE BEAUTY

I associate drinking with great pleasure, which is why I wanted to create a metaphor connection to beauty with this concept. You drink beauty and absorb more of it into your life by doing the following:

Slowing down in a way that time doesn’t matter and where you can be in tune to know that all you have is right now and right now is all you need or want or could want. To really do this well, typically you must unplug and disconnect from distractions and agendas and allow yourself to just be.   The easiest way to re-learn this skillset is to watch a child play – we were all children once, which means we all know how to live in such a connected and intimate way with the world.

Savoring the surroundings around you. Slowing down enables you to practice savoring. Think about coffee, it’s hot, you need to drink it slowly, which is often why people say that they savor their coffee. To savor anything, you must be slow with it, but, to want to savor something you also need to know why you want to savor it in the first place, and the truth is that savoring anything gets more of out it. Concept of “speed” reducing intimacy – false connection, which makes sense to us in terms of human relationships, so why wouldn’t it also make sense in terms of our relationship with the world around us and with life?

Simmering over the smallest of details. When taking the time to savor, you are then given time to simmer in your mind and mull over what it is you are seeing, touching, feeling or experiencing. This creates an additional layer of beauty and connection to the beautiful thing you are absorbing.

Smelling the moment itself. Smell awakens our senses to new profound levels of appreciation, and it’s no coincidence that the old adage, “stop and smell the roses” includes the action of smelling. Smelling allows you to invisibly imbibe something, allowing you to take the tangible in and intangible way.

Sipping the experience by choosing words to describe and take ownership of it Once you have slowed, savored, simmered and smelled, sipping with intention and in bite sizes allows you to really notice what it is that is beautiful about what you are doing or about what is surrounding you. Specifically, each metaphorical sip occurs each time you can associate and identify a word to match what your mind and heart are exchanging.

Sampling words and mental dialogue to paint the moment in your memory. Once you have sipped a variety of words and worked to describe the experience and beauty, sampling the experience by talking about it with others and verbally expressing it with gratitude and awareness makes the beauty not only permanent in the collection of your memories and experiences but it shares the beauty with others. Beauty is special in that it replicates itself when shared — there is no scarcity in beauty, but rather abundance for the more it is shared, the more it recreates itself.

Swallowing the goodness, allowing it to go down and being confident that there will be more moments like this to come (resisting the temptation to buy into the fear of the scarcity mindset. Being okay to know that beautiful moments will end, but that, like a sunset, a new beauty will come in the rising of the moon or the reflection of its light off the cloud covered sky, and then that beauty will give way to a new beauty in the rising of the sun the next day.   Every age of life has a unique beauty to it.

So, my friend, slow down, savor, simmer, smell, sip, sample and swallow the beauty that makes up the tiniest details of your most mundane day, and in doing so, you will be all the more capable of absorbing, containing and retaining the abundance of beauty that flows through the small details of your day to day.

HOW TO CHANGE HOW YOU SEE YOUR OWN BEAUTY

Except from Detox #17: The Mirror of Insecurity Detox, the book.

LISTENER OF THE EPISODE:

This was the first time I have ever listened to you, and very very imformative, wow… so much like what I am carrying and always have..thank you for this information, i am gonna wanna get your book when I can afford it. thank you  for this information, i have written alot of highlights of this down so I can go back and study them and learn myself how to let my baggage go which is so much i swear i will be going to the dump rest of my life, but i hope with your help when I listen to your podcasts, these things will help me

-Angela

EBOOK GIVEAWAY

I started this confidence coaching journey because originally I wanted to help people find freedom from body image issues – I wanted to share strategies on how to learn how to have body confidence; now, this has obviously morphed into more than that, but I have a heart for my core … body confidence.

For a limited time, until I reach 2000 copies given away of my book, I’ve pulled it from sales and am offering it to you, my tribe, because I love you and because I know that this book can change the way you feel about yourself and your body!

Get your copy at www.trishblackwell.com/ilovemybody