How Can You Look and Feel More Beautiful?
By Recognizing More of What Lies within You!
After one of our Power of Yoni Workshops a group of participants headed out to a local restaurant to celebrate 4 days of empowering self love, nurturing and discovering pleasure. It so happened the local race meeting was on the same day and the bistro was full of very glammed up ladies who could easily have won “Lady of the Day”. Surprisingly, it was obvious that however glamorous their exteriors were they couldn’t compare with our gorgeous Goddesses who were spilling over with a glow and a vitality from deep within, making them beautiful both inside AND out!
This difference raises the point, what are we actually doing when we simply focus on (or obsess about) our external appearance? Focussing on our outsides rather than accessing and accepting our beauty that comes from within? A beauty that can only enhance the best outfit and beauty routine whilst giving us confidence to burn? I believe what we’re doing is actually abandoning ourselves, or at least abandoning the little girl inside of us that longs for love and acceptance…no matter what age we are…
Read on for ways to connect with our inner beauty and bring our little girl in out of the cold…
Challenges to Looking Good
When it comes to looking good (and loving and approving of ourselves in the process) I‘ve noticed that we as women come up against 4 main challenges:
- Every time we look in the mirror we’re holding our own image up against the ones we carry in our minds, of the impossibly perfect (and unreal) body images displayed in almost every advert we see, magazine we pick up, dress shop we look into and movie we watch.
- We face a vast array of publications with articles screaming about how we can “improve” ourselves. Treatments including everything from weight loss programs, breast enhancements to genital reductions. Not to mention enough products to cover ourselves from the hair on our head to the toenails on our feet. All aimed at telling us we’re less than perfect so we will buy, buy,buy!
- A lifetime of conditioning telling us how we “should” be, what rules we need to follow and what good girls do and bad girls don’t do in order to be approved of, accepted and loved that doesn’t leave us now matter how old we are, unless we let it go.
And finally there is the shadow in our sisterhood, which receives unending satisfaction from us putting ourselves, or our potential female competition down, and giving us the sympathy vote in return for our “insult-athons” on our bodies.
We Hate Ourselves Too Often
As a result, several surveys report that over 91% of women have regular days of “hating their bodies”. It seems as if when things aren’t going right in our world, if we’re unsatisfied in our relationships or our jobs, if we’re having uncomfortable emotions such as stress, loneliness and boredom we’re more likely to criticize our bodies than deal with what is actually behind our dissatisfaction or negative feelings. So how we perceive we look is based more on how we “feel”, rather than the physical reality of how we “look”. When we perceive ourselves negatively we abandon the little girl inside of us that longs to be loved for who she is…
Have you ever looked into the mirror and judged yourself as looking that supposed worst of all body sins, “really fat”? Only to have something good happen in your life and then catch yourself looking in that very same mirror shortly after thinking you look “pretty fabulous”? Where nothing has changed except your perception?
Even more interestingly, have you noticed how much pleasure you feel when you’re body shaming yourself vs when you’re feeling beautiful and appreciated?
Neuroscience has shown that whatever you focus on shapes your brain. So if you focus on how defective your body looks it actually translates into a numbing down of how it feels. And the opposite is true, if you focus on how wonderful your body is, so it will become!
How to find Instant Beauty:
Make a radical choice to think and do things differently.
- You’re as beautiful as you tell yourself you are, so tell yourself you’re beautiful often!
- If someone else tells you that you’re beautiful, let it in and say thankyou!
- Find one thing to appreciate about what your body can DO each day, taking the focus off just how it looks. Put your full attention on this body part and stroke it for a moment with love, baby!
- Notice something you find beautiful about the women around you and tell them. Drop the need to compete and see yourselves simply as a reflection of each other. (You may want to omit the stroking part unless you know each other very well!)
- Use beauty products with the mindset of enhancing the beauty that is already there, rather than fixing any problems.
- Avoid participating in body shaming conversations, even choose to express something you like about your body instead.
- See the abundance of treatments and products as a money making device for those making money from them, not necessarily something that you need.
- Dress with the primary aim of expressing and feeling good about yourself rather than trying to fit in with the latest fashion.
- Avoid trying to “fix” yourself. Instead, do things for their enjoyment value. Find an exercise that you love and it will be a joy rather than a chore.
- See your body as your temple and choose to nurture it by attending to its needs as a good servant would do for its master.
- Follow this link and listen to our Self Loving Meditation.
- Do 3 pc squeeze and releases (pelvic floor contractions) then take a deep breath, enjoy the feeling. Do this often.
- Learn to feel more pleasure and you won’t care how you look because you’ll feel so great! And consequently you’ll look more beautiful as a result of your inner glow…
So if you’re looking for even more ways to get your inner glow on and love yourself from the inside all the way out click here for details of Annette’s upcoming workshop just for women the Power Of Yoni Nov 10-14 2016. Contact her for a chat to see how this workshop might work for you!
Kim Gonsalves says
Thank you Annette. Lovely
Annette & Graeme says
My pleasure, beautiful lady! Annette