Afraid to be Beautiful

Hello my favorite peeps,

Welcome Curious Peeps, today we’re wandering into a personal story:

Once upon a time, I was afraid to be beautiful.

It took me many years to realize that.

My Story

I noticed this pattern in myself slowly. As it often happens, it first appeared as fleeting, unconscious messages. Over time those messages took up more and more rent-free space in my mind until eventually they spilled into my conscious awareness.

When I look back, I can see that the seeds were planted early. Even in my preteen years I struggled with my body, including experiences of body dysmorphia.

But it has only been within the last five years that I became consciously aware of this deeper pattern. Once I noticed it in myself, I began to see it everywhere: in the women I mentor, in friends, in family members.

We have a shared fear: the fear of letting our inward beauty radiate outward.

Our Shared Human Experience

Now this struggle is not unique to women.

Men and people of all genders wrestle with how they see themselves and how they believe others see them. But women often carry a particular tension around beauty. Inside many women lives a quiet question:

• Am I safe to allow my beauty to shine?

And beneath that question are the shame stories we’ve been told and the stories we repeat to ourselves:

• Am I too much?

• Too loud?

• Too bright?

• Too bossy?

• Too shy?

• Too active?

Or perhaps the quieter fear beneath them all:

• Am I not enough?

The shame that shrouds these figures make us shrink from taking up space. It uses our energy. We hesitate to extend ourselves outward and touch the world around us.

Beauty as Life Force

But beauty is not merely cosmetic. Beauty is an expression of life-force. It is an expression of our Soul and ultimately of the Universal Soul itself.

The paradox is that our beauty is interwoven with our vitality, our aliveness, and our erotic nature. When we cannot express our beauty, because of the shame we carry, it thwarts the expression of our erotic life force. And when that channel of our life force is blocked, it does not disappear.

Energy never disappears.

Instead, our flow gets redirected. Like a river forced into new terrain, our expressions become muted, misdirected, or distorted.

Detours and Masks

When our erotic flow moves through alternative pathways, it masks our truth from others and from ourselves. At one time these detours may have served to keep us safe. But eventually we long for the authentic expression of our erotic nature to move with full force.

As our life-force detours, over time those pathways become overused. It is as if a barrier forms between our authentic selves and the belief that we were somehow never “just right.”

Shame becomes the gatekeeper.

It shrouds the shadow realm. And when shame covers the shadow, no one can see through it to the authentic feelings and knowing beneath. Shadow figures are our allies. We just do not recognize them thru our shroud of shame.

So instead, we present the world with a mask of our choosing.

The Masks

One common detour shunts erotic energy into the comic or clown mask.

Rather than experiencing the full intensity of our sensual presence, we create distraction: we laugh, we joke. We do this instead of radiating our essential essence, our erotic natural beauty.

Now laughter and play are wonderful things. I am not suggesting we eliminate them. What I am pointing to is the habit of diverting our sensual aliveness into constant humor, so we don’t have to feel the intimacy or intensity of our own presence.

Another common detour is intellect: thinking, editing, analyzing. Everything moves upward into the head. This head trip journeys far away from the core seat of bodily feeling. All the way from our gonads to our heads, the farthest we can get while still technically remaining inside our bodies.

Another detour is spiritual bypassing: pouring ourselves into a group or belief system like a cult, where individuality dissolves into the norms of the group. Accountability disappears, replaced by conformity.

Some diversions happen internally. Others are external.

Hiding in Plain Sight

There are external ways we disguise our erotic expression. I know this one well.

I can wear sacks of clothing over my figure so others cannot see the sensuousness I carry inside. Big clothes. Big bodies. A silent message to the world:

“No beauty to see here.”

But over time we begin to believe the diversion story ourselves.

The Neuroscience of Habit

Over time these habits become neurologically reinforced.

Neurons that fire together wire together. Repeated patterns carve well-worn pathways in the brain. Gradually we lose track of ourselves, the original form we arrived here with.

We may see ourselves as ugly, or fat. Or we pride ourselves on being extremely smart, endlessly productive, or entertainingly clownish.

Some people numb the tension between their authentic self and their mask through substances. Trying to escape the internal conflict.

We intuit we are imposters, yet we don’t know how to remove the mask.

All the while our libido fades, our vitality fades. Our sense of purpose fades.

Reflective Questions

Laugh it up. Eat it up. Cover it up. Get away from it.

• But what is your “it”?

• What shadow is shrouded in shame?

• What keeps it hidden from your awareness?

• What old stories are you still carrying?

• What beauty are you hiding — from me and from yourself?

Invitation

Which brings me to the playful wisdom of April Fools.

April feels like the perfect time to burn the shrouds of shame and release the gifts our shadows bring, so that the energy we have spent distorting ourselves can finally return to us.

So, that we can freely channel who we came here to be and share us with the world.

That kind of honesty can transform us. Why keep fooling ourselves?

The world needs our beauty right now. Let it pour forth. Let us feel your beautiful erotic libido for life. Let us feel beautiful together.

Beauty, I argue, is fun. Beauty is funny. Beauty is intelligent, because it is connected to our universal soul and our nature. Therefore, our natural Beauty is Spiritual.

Beauty is magnetic and revealing. It is powerful. I know that walking the Beauty Way takes courage. That is exactly why we need to share our beauty with each other.

So let’s stop fooling ourselves. Let’s stop hiding.

Our culture warns us about being a fool in love. But the real fool is the one out of love.

The one who refuses the courage to be vulnerable. The one who exiles their own beauty.

Closing Thoughts

Instead, let us share our shadows and let us shed our shame.

And ultimately let our beauty shine like a true April Fool.

Curious Peeps, thank you for wandering through this question with me today. Please Stay curious. Blessings, and may you find something here for you.

Blessings,

Afia