Today we are going to start breaking spells. How fun is that?

The first spell we will break is the curse of culturally fluctuating beauty standards that put us into a conditional relationship with our appearance. Let me repeat that. You are going to unbind yourself from a trance-like culturally-induced belief that your well-being and happiness has any relationship to how your body looks. 

In truth, you are a sleeping beauty and what I want you to wake up to is your essence….your very being—your soul—is who you really are.

Yet all the focus on appearance (yours and the appearance of the world of phenomenon itself) is a lot like the kind of forgetfulness that happens when you are absorbed in a really good movie. You forget you are the watcher and for a spell bound moment, lose a remembrance of that truth to the riveting action and characters on the screen. A really good movie transports us temporarily into the movie itself.

Similarly, a really good cultural story about what an acceptable body looks like can be as mesmerizing as a good movie. We can be transported into the realm of conditional body-love by virtue of the trance of the cultural editors found in our media-saturated environment.

At the deepest level, what I am pointing you toward is discernment. I want you to begin to “meta-observe” your own thought and feeling process, so that you can tease out the real from the unreal and thus be free to be joyfully yourself.

Back to your body then. What is it really? To truly impact your body at a lasting and transformative level, you have to realize that your body is:

1. Not who you are because who you are is eternal.
2. Is a aspect of who you are in the manifest and temporal realm.
3. Is a not a source of but rather a reflection of your true identity. Your true identity contains the body, but is not limited to it.

Try this analogy. Your body is like the moon to the sun. The moon appears to shine and if you did not know better you’d say that it emits light. But in reality the moon only reflects the light of the sun.

In the same way, your body is a but a reflection of the light of your consciousness/soul. It’s existence and appearance are reflections of the real you. Therefor when the focus is on fixing, changing and healing the body directly, you are mis-directed. Why? Because the body is a reflection not a source.

Look at it this way. Would you apply your lipstick to the reflected face in the mirror? Or to the actual face from which the reflection derives its existence?  Guys, would you try to shave the reflected face on the mirror’s surface?

This is a bit of an enlightenment lesson but it’s crucial. Because waking up from our body-shame-blame spell, means waking up not just FROM the spell, but TO THE TRUTH. All real and lasting transformation that appears in reality happens at the level of your soul/consciousness/infinite self. The infinite self does not change. But the forms that reflect it do—this is the phenomenal world. Your body is one of these passing phenomena and it is influenced but the non-phenomenal core of who you really are.

I know that was just some serious philosophical heavy lifting and I hope I did lose or confuse you. But as we head into the last seven days of this 22 day course the focus is going to go deeper into what is real and away from the unreal.

Miracles don’t happen at the level of the reflection…they are engineered from the level of the source of light itself.

Assignment: 

Take a look at your answers to yesterday’s three questions. How many of your replies were at the level of the reflection in the mirror instead of the source of that reflection? How many of your sentences ended with things like “when I am less fat, lose weight, have less wrinkles, look fit” etc.

And how many of the three replies where internally referenced versus external. What I mean by this is how many replies were about states of being versus qualities of appearing. Did you mention how it FEELS to be happy with your body or was the focus on how your body looks?

The last question, if I could change one thing, is the most likely to elicit an appearance issue. If your answer was to change the body appearance in some way—as opposed to function or comfort—ask yourself this question: What am I making this appearance issue (belly fat, wrinkles, cellulite etc) mean about me?

Really sink into that question…..

In the meantime, here a video that always amazes me about the way our culture editors define beauty.