Hello Beautiful!

I watched a video over the weekend that a college student posted on YouTube. As she explains, she did a little social experiment in which she called different young men and women ‘beautiful.’

Seeing their faces transform at her words, I was reminded of the same thing happening to me not so long ago.

As a girl and young woman I never felt especially beautiful.

From the time I can remember, I struggled with being overweight. My parents were always on my case about what I ate, how much I weighed and, being sensitive, even a drop of criticism was too much for me.

I saw myself as flawed.

It didn’t matter that I had a pretty smile or wavy hair. I was fat, not as smart as the rest of my family and… simply, not good enough.

My lack of self-love and acceptance sent me down the slippery slope of drug abuse and uncontrollable binge eating until I decided to begin the work of healing myself.

First, I quit drugs at twenty. Then I began to tackle why I was emotionally eating. And guess what? It was to give myself love and nurturing.

After many years of working on this, I successfully healed myself by twenty-six. I got to a healthy weight without dieting, without “white knuckling” around food, without any addictive need to eat or check out from life.

But I still didn’t feel beautiful.

By the time I turned thirty, married and with one child, I began feeling undesirable. Slowly and overtime, my love life had grown stale and I was emotionally distancing myself from my husband. I actually began to feel old and unwanted.

A few years later, as I deepened my own inner growth and spiritual commitment, my marriage completely collapsed. At that point, I thought I would be single for the rest of my life.

The internal work I was doing, opened me up to a greater sense of love - of myself- and feeling beautiful in the eyes of God.

Around this time, I began a new job working for a kind and gentle man. We became colleagues, then friends, and then we fell in love.

He told me I was beautiful.

Those words woke up something inside of me. It was as if I'd forgotten that I was beautiful to people, too, and not just to God. But I had to believe them for myself.

I mean, I had to really believe them and not just hear them. This can only happen if we push judgment aside and open up to love, to self-love and to total self-acceptance. 

I share this story because many of us – both men and women- don’t believe we’re beautiful.

We compare ourselves to movie stars, judge ourselves against photo-shopped pictures in magazines and see every flaw, every wrinkle, every stretch mark.

His words helped remind me that I am beautiful both on the inside and out.

Now I tell myself how much I am loved, how much I love myself and how beautiful I am, every day!

How about you? Is there someone in your life who needs to hear that he or she is beautiful? When was the last time you said it?

Tell her.

Watch the smile spread across her face as she takes in your words, as she sees herself as if through your eyes, beautiful, whole, loved. See how her eyes radiate from within as she lights up, knowing that she is beautiful.

Words have the power to change lives.

Do you agree?

Leave me a comment below.

Watch the video on my Facebook page. Click Here

You - The Only Relationship That Really Matters

I woke up this morning, checked my email and found one from my 19 year-old daughter, Ayu, with the subject line PLEASE READ. Of course it was the first thing I did. 

My gorgeous daughter, Ayu.

About a month or so ago, she and I'd been on the phone when she'd started crying telling me about the inner work she'd begun, trying to understand herself better and address her "issues." In the journal entry/email she'd forwarded to me, I could see her honesty right there on the page. She was indeed delving into areas of discomfort like self esteem, body image and negative habits. But what she said that really got my attention was:

People my age are obsessing about their relationships with other people: friends, lovers, family, professors, coworkers, etc. But the relationship I am most interested in right now, is my relationship with myself. Sure, we go through rough patches. Sometimes I’m a little more judgmental than I should be, and sometimes I get mad at myself. But hey, that’s normal. What’s important is that I’m in a committed relationship with myself, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make it work, because I’m worth it.    

And I realized that she was absolutely right, our relationship with ourselves is the only one that really mattters.

Recently I was working with a woman who just retired. She'd been looking forward to this for quite a while but was being undermined daily by her high level of anxiety. In our talks, she realized that throughout her life, she'd allowed herself to be so "busy" she never had time to deal with herself. Suddenly, her all consuming job had dropped away and she was left face to face with herself.

Why is it that we spend so much time, like Ayu says, focused on our relationships with others or like the retired woman, on our jobs while avoiding our relationship with ourselves? Is it that we are afraid? What do we think we might find? If I look in the mirror of my soul, what will I see?

I first started doing this internal work in my early twenties, when I was trying to release myself from an eating disorder. It was through this inquiry that I began to see my eating was just a symptom of something deeper. As I delved into that, I learned that I ate to give myself love, to be nurtured and to quell my anxiety. But inner work, the real work of our lives- to understand and love ourselves- is on-going. I have heard it described like peeling away the layers of an onion, spiraling back around again and again. 

We are all afraid of what we are going to see when we look into the mirror of our souls but the truth is, if we are wounded, what we see is a little girl (or boy) desperate to be loved. As we open our hearts with compassion and love to that "inner child" we allow ourselves to be healed. The old wounds fall away and our true beauty shines through. We release the pain and it sets us free.

It's easy to avoid ourselves and focus instead on a family member, job or numbing out with drugs, alcohol or too much TV. We're all inclined to run away from understanding who we truly are and what we are doing here. But if we can pause long enough to be with ourselves, we might discover that contrary to what we were taught or what was modeled for us, we are all profound, capable of loving and of being loved and can be our own best friends. This is truly the relationship that matters most and deserves our total commitment.