Feel like “Everybody is a sexy baby, and you’re the monster on the hill?”
When you think of beauty, what comes to mind?
Maybe certain images of shape, form, colour, light and shade?Perhaps memories or stories of things you've been through? Or you might feel sensation in your body, a visceral reaction to what beauty is and how you encounter it?
“Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby,
And I'm a monster on the hill…”
(Anti Hero, Taylor Swift).
Beauty can be a tricky thing to navigate. It's been hijacked, co-opted, taken from its original meaning and shoved inside a box of something it was never meant to be and still isn't.
There are so many standards and bench marks and rules - unspoken, cultural, and otherwise - it’s hard to know where the lines are. The idea of what beauty is has been a source of pain, torment, and violence for many.
Discovering beauty is the act of untangling ourselves and each other - because beauty is something that is woven through all of us - from the chains of what we've been told is beauty and how we've tried to live up to and maintain that damaging standard.
The ancient Hebrew mystics had a word for beauty: tiferet. It's the same word they used for glory. And interestingly, it wasn't the state of something; tiferet had a function, a productive energy to it. Beauty and glory are the synthesis of kindness and strength, compassion (Chesed) and judgement (guvurah). Not a compromise between two seemingly opposing entities, but the integration of them both.
Chesed, which is the ancient Hebrew word for loving kindness and compassion, is the energy of giving for the sake of giving; giving not based on merit or deservedness, pure generosity that believes in its capacity to create abundance and more and beyond. Guvurah is the ancient Hebrew for judgement and is the energy of fairness, doing the work, reaping what you sow, an achievement due to merit.
Tiferet is the synthesis of Chesed and Guvurah; beauty is the integration of compassion and justice; of grace and work. It is inclusive of it all because it knows that when you hold the tension of joy and pain, work and grace, compassion and justice, judgement and mercy together, in both hands, it takes us somewhere whole and true and good.
The goal of tiferet, of beauty and glory, is human development, growth, transformation, becoming. Beauty is found at the centre, at the point of integration. This week in The Practice Co App, we’ll deconstruct beauty, and hopefully find some healing for all the ways in which false beliefs and ideas of it have damaged our lives, bodies and relationships.
There are no standards, there are no lines. Or better said: The standard is not static, the lines are many and varied. Beauty is deep, not two dimensional, it doesn’t have a face value.
CONSIDER THIS: "And isn't that the meaning of life? To find beauty in ourselves, in the world, and in others? Beauty has the power to change us, and in turn, our lives." Risa Mickenberg.
Join me in the App as we decide beauty for ourselves.
Liz Milani xo
Instagram: @thepracticeco
From this week’s series titled "Beauty Beyond Standards," with a subscription in the App. Hope to see you there.
