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When it comes to perceiving a woman’s beauty, the range of possibility is enormous. I have been lucky in this lifetime to have known several men who love all kinds of women—all types, body shapes, sizes, colors, races. Blonde, brunette, redhead. Short and round or tall and rectangular. It’s all good. Sadly, I have known far more who have such a narrow window for what is lovely that most women can’t even get an “acceptable” rating. They may be liked well enough as people, but they would need to change, sometimes drastically, to be perceived of as a beautiful woman.
One particular year, inspired by the men I knew who loved all women, I set myself on a course to learn more about this kind of openness.
In the several years between my two marriages, I dated a lot. A lot. I love men, and while I had my standards, they were not so high that I sat alone most Saturday nights. Even so, this one year, I really challenged myself. I decided that, for twelve months, I would not turn a man away because he was not good looking enough (nor because he was not as financially secure as I would have liked, since that is a more subtle but very real attractor factor to most women). I wasn’t going to force myself to into a relationship that had no merit, of course. But if there was a draw of some kind, the looks and money “magnets” that I had been culturally trained to gravitate towards were not going to be mandatory. In short, I made myself push past my knee-jerk criteria for courtship and experience whatever came.
It was a good year. I made some good love and some good friends. As I had hoped, I learned that a perception of beauty was not required for love or intimacy. Neither was sex, for that matter. But there was more. I also learned that once I got past the standard issue version of physical beauty I had been trained to see, I saw new levels of beauty I never imagined.
Beauty as A Whole Body Experience
When it comes to true beauty, the single greatest challenge I can think of is to actually see it, even when it hits you upside the head. We are so culturally indoctrinated into accepting common standards of what is beautiful, and what is not, that finding our own true perception of, and response to, a person or object of beauty is a fantastic feat.
Notice in the last paragraph that I wrote “to actually see it.” You probably didn’t pick up on that limiting language, because most of us don’t. We have been trained to think of beauty in terms of the visual. Yet what about the beauty that wafts through our sense of smell, trails the beloved through the fingertip touch, greets us in a bird’s chirp, or tastes like down-home goodness? Are these not aspects of beauty? Must we see beauty as a movie with no sound—not to mention no color, no popcorn, no friend laughing with us, touching arms as we huddle in the darkened theatre?
We have been so bombarded with stimuli to the visual senses, we seem to have atrophied in all the others experiences that beauty brings us. Yet when we stunt the visual (which is what I did when I decided to date men that in my visual perception were physically unattractive), other senses come alive. It is not unlike the blind who develop a heightened sense of hearing.
In that year, beautiful men who were physically unattractive (to me) taught me about this. I learned that you can close your eyes as the tongue is awakened with tiny bits of dozens of different foods, in order to reawaken the sense of taste. I learned that you can close your eyes as the nose is awakened with the scent of roses, oranges, and evergreen needles. You can also close your eyes as the body is stimulated with feathers, fabrics, and fingers. So much so, you feel your skin, your arms, even your toes, as if you have never really felt them before. I learned you can close your eyes and awaken to the voice of the violin, then the cello, then the bass, finding them within the symphony as it plucks at your heartstrings and begs the blood in your veins to come along for the ride. Maybe best of all, I learned that you can close your eyes and awaken to the still small voice that speaks of what is true, what is not true, and what can’t yet be known.
If we must judge our experiences of beauty, we can at least learn to judge them on a full-sensory basis. Dating men I found unattractive physically, I discovered that is not all that I found attractive. I found I liked the smell of one man so much, I would anticipate his scent all day before a date. I came to love the skin of another, not because he was a muscle-man, but because his skin was so soft. His hair too. The sound of one lover’s voice always kept me laughing (in a good way), for he seemed to perpetually have joy in it. And the way I felt sleeping safely next to one particular partner—a big, rough and burly bouncer at a bar who was ever ready to fight any problem character at a moment’s notice—is a feeling of beauty I will never forget. We had nothing in common in the outside world, but his soul touched mine, and he brought the woman in me to life in a completely new way.
We can never fully appreciate the beauty of another with only our eyes. They have been trained to look astray, to judge in the nanosecond the gaze is focused. Only through the full body experience can the beauty of the body be the wonder it is meant to be. Only then will our perception be acute, and our memories vivid enough to savor, again and again. That year, I learned to live with my eyes closed and my capacity for perception wide open. It is a beautiful way to live. But it was not all I had to learn.
All Mirrors are Fun House Mirrors
My experimental year was not all lovely, for it revealed to me just how harsh a judge lurked within my own mind. Becoming conscious of my “judging” whether a lover was worthy of my attention or not, I also became acutely aware of how stringently I judged myself as to whether I was worthy of them. It was nice to perceive of myself as being on the upper end of the scale—the “beautiful woman” I imagined my date must have felt so very lucky to be with. But it was all the worse when I found myself perceiving myself to be the one on the lower end of the scale.
Becoming awake to my judgments, I became conscious of the fact that there were certain very attractive men I would never directly flirt with, for fear they would find me unworthy and be cruel in their rejection. I even had a few lines that worked wonders to relieve the tension. I became especially fond of this one: “Okay, so you are beautiful. Let’s just get that established and out of the way. And don’t worry, it is a compliment, not a come-on.”
It is not easy to admit, but it is true. Even though I was willing to play on an open field by accepting men I felt were not particularly attractive to me, I was not able to allow men I deemed more attractive the opportunity to do the same. I watched myself shrink away from encounters, painfully aware, yet unable to risk.
Enter The Trickster
Of course, as life would have it, my second marriage happens to be to a man who is absolutely gorgeous. Not average, or above average, but stunning. Even after a hard days work in the woods, he looks like he just stepped out of a J-Crew catalog. Women stare at him, and not a few men do, too. Once, at my daughter’s back-to-school night, I watched three very attractive, perfectly accessorized young mothers stare at him as he walked past, all three turning their heads in unison. And when his teenage daughter decided on a lark to put his photo up on a “hot-or-not” website that rates you solely on your looks, he got a 9.8 out of 10 (that is even with the mean people voting low just for spite).
To make matters both better and worse, he doesn’t experience himself as excessively handsome. It tickles him pink to know when others are looking with approval, but he never uses it as an ace in the hole. He is a happy person and warm to others. It makes him all the more attractive.
I assure you, the problem with his beauty does not arise when watching him cook dinner (yes, he cooks, too—organic food that he grows himself). It arises when I find myself judging myself as less beautiful than he is on a “real-world” scale. However lovely I am, in my own way, I am not a standard issue “9.8” J-Crew model-type. I never have been and I never will be. Watching those three mothers turn their gaze to check me out after Mr. Beautiful had left the room, and seeing them register a surprised and almost confused “this doesn’t compute” look on their faces, pushed all my beauty buttons.
In time, and with my partner’s unending adoration of my physical and non-physical beauty, I learned a vital truth about the perception of beauty. We can accept unlovely lovers and feel wise and open, but until we accept truly lovely lovers and face our own fears and insecurities, we have not accomplished so much. Nabbing a great looking lover may be a great coup in the world, but perceiving ourselves as beautiful standing next to him or her is a far greater victory.
Ultimately, of course, throwing out the yard stick altogether is the ideal. Which brings me to the most wonderful truth I learned that year…
To Transform Versus To Transcend
There is a story of a professor teaching religious philosophy to a class of college students. He shared a lot of different spiritual teachings, citing the most profound words of many great leaders, gurus and masters. At the final exam, the written essay asked “If an Enlightened One arrived at a black tie affair with only jeans to wear, what would he do?” Though most of the students gave long, elaborate answers about the master’s reaction, only one realized that there would be none. The student wrote: “The Enlightened One would not notice.”
If we are in our body, in this moment, without judgment, we’ve arrived. That’s all folks. We have done it. Nothing more to do. Nowhere else to go. Not even a need to teach anyone else. What for? No one is out of order, out of line, out of integrity or in need of enlightenment. That was just the voice of judgment talking. We see that everything is what it is, and it is perfect in it’s imperfection. In fact, we find that everything is really One Thing. We arrive at this true simplicity by way of complexity and for this moment, we rest outside the limitations of time, space and even gravity’s pull.
And then, for all but the most adept, we leave again. We go back to being in our mind, reliving the past or pre-living the future, finding ourselves separate and alone as we swim in the positive and negative judgments that are the blessings and beasts of our existence. For most women, I have found that nothing pulls us into this limited form of being faster than our body and beauty issues.
The Awful Truth
After all my attention to the matters of beauty that experimental year, and all the years in which I have worked with myself and others on beauty issues, I still catch myself judging what is beautiful and what is not by standard definitions when I am in a standard (which is to say unconscious) frame of mind. Maybe I always will.
Even so, I don’t consider the work a failure, because through it I have discovered the greatest treasure, which can only be found in the pig’s trough of the culturally conditioned mind. It was not in discovering the true beauty of my “unattractive” lovers or my own true beauty. It was in learning that I could use my perceived lack of beauty and the pain it brings as an alarm.
This alarm, which I have set to go off any time I’m judging the beauty of myself or others, awakens me to my mind’s “trained monkey” shenanigans—all the ideas, judgments and preoccupations about the body that make me feel separate from others and my true self. Like most of us, that alarm needs to ring loud and clear for me to hear it. Since my beauty issues are so prevalent, they are the easiest to witness, catch and re-set.
Any of us can set our “alarm” to go off whenever we hear the voice within speaking to us with words such as “You’re so ugly…your breasts are too small… your hips are too wide….your feet are too big…your belly sags…your arms wag…your eyes look like scratchy crows feet…you are losing your hair….” And we can set a response to it as well. We can create a reminder that says, very simply and plainly, “Hmmm….well…there I go again…caught in the trap of my own beauty fears.”
When we do that, the “I” that we are witnessing becomes distinct from the “I” that is doing the watching. We see ourselves reacting to ourselves, and must ask: “Who is this?” This is the Bingo! of enlightenment, and as such, it is the key to awaking to more and more of those amazing, illuminated, culture-free moments I wrote of earlier.
On the Road To Enlightenment
Though we find these painful judgments helpful in waking us up, that does not mean we cannot respond to them along the way. Once we have caught them in the act, we can decide to treat them as we might any two-year-old that is throwing a ridiculous tantrum. We can approach them kindly but firmly, so that when the dark voices within speak unkind words, the wiser “I” can speak back with words such as “Ah, well, maybe that is true. But maybe not. Or maybe other things are also true. Or maybe I’ll just think about it tomorrow, because today I am not in such a good mood, and tomorrow I will be in a better one.”
I once heard a man whose entire life was devoted to consciousness offer a few final words of advice on his deathbed. “Try to be a little kinder,” was all he said. If we can start with kindness to ourselves, we will have a very good start.
March’s ShapeShift
I often wonder how much the positive vibrations on our planet—which the new age thinkers all agree is critical to our very survival—would actually increase if we simply stopped hating our own bodies. For that matter, if only we women stopped hating our own bodies. Forget fighting war, poverty, injustice. What if we just refused to believe the cultural myth that our beauty will never be enough to warrant being truly accepted, celebrated, and loved?
I also wonder, if thought really creates reality, are we not polluting all of nature’s space with our “I hate these thugging thighs” and “God, I look like shit today” inner commentaries? Could there be a connection between these thoughts and actual, physical pollution in the air, on the sides of our streets, and in our streams? If so, couldn’t we clean up our own inner-mind landscape in a way that would, in turn, naturally affect the human being’s unconscious habit of throwing our cigarette butts out the window at seventy miles an hour? By the way, even if you personally are not throwing out the butts, your sisters and brothers still are. And if we are all connected, that says something…
So try this inner-mind shapeshift (or, simply imagine it as you read, allowing it to sink in, creating a shapeshift in this moment): As you go about your days and weeks this March, and as spring begins to return us to green grasses and newly-budding trees, become aware of each negative perception of beauty in yourself and others. As each negative thought arises, ask your mind to wake you up to the pain this creates, both in yourself, and in the world.
Then, engage your imagination to create a change. Don’t fight the thought. Simply imagine it as a piece of trash floating down a lovely river. See yourself swim out to it, gather it up, and bring it back to shore. Find a trash can to put it in, and then look back to the pristine, clear, safe water. Smell the wonderful, watery, blossom-filled spring air. Hear the birds twittering a “thank you” and imagine the fish swimming joyfully free beneath the surface (your unconscious). Imagine that the river—your mind—is flowing freely, beautifully, in harmony with all of nature.
Do this each and every time the negative thoughts about your body, or that of another, arise. I guarantee you, done often enough, they will stop arising nearly so often.
Namaste, my friends.
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