Body by Suzanne

Happy Friday my lovelies,

Ideals of female beauty attainable only through long and painful processes of physical training and ‘improvement’ have always existed, from using toxic lead face powder to whiten the skin in the 1700s, to wearing corsets that deformed the ribcage in the 1800s, to binding the feet of Chinese women to keep them ‘tiny.’ The 21st century has seen the rise of new forms of visual self-improvement that go hand in hand with the success of reality TV and social media.

Last week I went on the beach with my family. And while I was there, two young women showed up and they were young and slim, wearing string bikinis, but they weren’t outstandingly attractive other than, I guess, youth. As you know, youth brings beauty.

What they did after though on the beach a bit surprised me…

These young women went over to these rocks and one started taking picture of the other and they were posing and all of a sudden these skinny women, who really weren’t voluptuous or someone you would look at them and say: “OMG, they are stunningly beautiful”. In these pictures, the way they were holding themselves and sticking out this part of the body and stretching this part of the body, touching their hair, they became these creatures of beauty and it was all contrived. They were taking picture after picture of one another, in front of everyone on this crowed beach. An abrading display of contrived vanity, creating an image that really wasn’t true in public, completely surprised me…

In front of my very eyes I saw real people become a bit unreal in how they were displaying themselves for pictures. It helped me to understand that so much of what we see is very deliberately engineered and is not necessarily REAL what we see in real life. It reminds me of what Dalai Lama said is that key to unhappiness. The key to unhappiness is comparison. So, just be careful of what you are comparing yourself to and if you can avoid comparison all together, I urge to do so.

In my classes I’m bringing to you a real image (I apologize if I’m shocking, but at least I’m real 😉, right in front of you, so you can see and just enjoy your faces, enjoy your bodies, enjoy your effort and the commitment that you are making to healthy, natural beauty, rather than artificial, contrived portrayal of a woman or a man.

Enjoy your bodies and thank you for reading this and for following me and for attending my classes.

❤️Love, Suzanne