What Does Beautiful Mean to You? - Healing Touch Center

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Linda Marrical, ABT
What Does Beautiful Mean to You?

What Does Beautiful Mean to You?

A couple of weeks ago I was a speaker at The International Congress of Esthetics and Spa at the Philadelphia Convention Center. I took some time to walk around the convention floor and I could not believe the number of ways to spend your money to look younger, better and brighter. I was lost among the rows of vendors selling machines, treatments, cosmetics, serums, creams all guaranteed to make me look beautiful. I sort of felt like I already looked good, guess not? After maybe the third person stopped me to tell me how I could look great I asked myself, what did beautiful mean to me?

I did feel good about how I looked. I also felt good about the information I presented and who I am professionally. I feel good about who I am as a friend, wife and mother but I can not say I feel beautiful. 

I notice that the spring season brings a marketing blitz of diet programs, Botox, tanning sprays, hair products, Cool Sculpting which is freezing the fat cells so they fall off or something like that, teeth whitening, clothing catalogs with bathing suits modeled by 16 year olds… its endless. I find it hard to feel beautiful looking at all of that yet I suspect that even if I lost 10 lbs., bought a tummy flattening and butt lifting bathing suit, Botox my forehead and whitened my teeth I would still not feel beautiful.

I believe that like everything else in life being beautiful is something that must come from the inside.  There are so many critical parts of me that work very hard to help me be what the world expects. I truly appreciate them and I am inviting them to take a summer vacation. There is a picture of me when I was about 3 or 4 years old standing on our front porch wearing dungarees, the 1950’s version of jeans, my winter coat and plastic, play high heels. I remember those high heels, I loved them and I felt when I had them on. That is what beautiful means to me.

Perhaps an interesting approach to looking great is finding a time in our life when we felt beautiful.  Maybe it was when we were wearing a special party dress or suit, going to a prom, a wedding day. As you think of that time connect to where you feel that in your body, what it feels like.  Connect to that part of yourself where being beautiful if a given and wear that as you go about your day. Beauty like truth is not something we can find or create because we can not get something we already have.  So Beautiful, what does it mean to you?

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