Красота – внутри или снаружи?

Every woman wants to be beautiful. As long as possible and as strong as possible. Remember children’s fairy tales – many problems began with the fact that someone wanted to be the most beautiful, and made great efforts to do this, including eliminating competitors.

All of us in pursuit of beauty make a lot of different efforts, spend enough time, money and nerves. Every morning we look closely at our face, looking for wrinkles, pimples, bruises under our eyes, signs of aging and withering. What to say, we are very afraid of this withering and try to distance as much as we can.





We may not like the way we look, and then we do something with our body and face. We go to different procedures - massage, beautician and even plastic surgeon. In the pursuit of the beauty and youth of the body, sometimes we are ready, if not for everything, then for a lot. We have imbibed with our mother’s milk the truth that beauty will save the world – and yet it always demands sacrifice. Many of our procedures are incredibly painful, but we are willing to endure it for the sake of our purpose. What's the goal? It's about meeting some standards of beauty. What are we doing for that? Artificial breasts, artificial lips, artificial hair, surgical lifts, Botox injections and more.

Why so many sacrifices and investments? We believe that beauty guarantees us love. They only love the beautiful, they only love the young. Appearance is very important. If I look young, I will be loved more. And now there is a generation of grandmothers who try their best to look like girls. Sometimes they even succeed. But is it for good?

At the same time, we lost a generation of grandmothers who know how to love and give warmth. Those who love without any conditions, who always have time for you, who want to pay attention to you, love to tell stories, are always ready to accidentally share their wisdom. There are almost no such grandmothers. Grandmothers can give a child a lot - gifts, guardianship, friendship on equal terms, but sincere and unconditional love - can not. She doesn't have them. And that's really missing.

I remember the stories of the older generation, our parents, who grew up in different conditions, who were raised quite often by their grandmothers. And this image in their stories is always similar - warm, gentle, caring, soft, calm, deep, forgiving, sharing wisdom. And now grandmothers are completely different, they and grandmothers can not be called publicly, they will be offended. They want to look like their mothers, not their grandmothers. Alas.

Lost the source of such an important love in a person’s life, maybe that’s why it’s so difficult for us to learn how to truly love. Because there is no one in our childhood to feed all this goodness and happiness?

Maybe all this is because we are so fixated on the external beauty, the beauty of our body, that we completely forget that there is also inner beauty, the beauty of the soul? If we spent even half the energy we spent on caring for our bodies to develop our soul and the beauty of our heart, what would we end up being?

I'm coming out of a beautician who gives me masks and facial care, trying to get me to Botox. I don't give up despite the obvious facial wrinkles on my forehead. And here they are, the women who dream of looking young all the time. A woman who is clearly over 60, and at the same time she has a flawlessly smooth, albeit immobilized, face, her age is betrayed only by her hands and neck. And maybe a completely different look - already quite tired of life and this eternal race, Yes, she has unnaturally elastic breasts for her age, too smooth face, voluminous lips, long thick hair. But it looks ridiculous and very sad. She's planning an operation, she's discussing it with the doctor as I walk by, and she seriously thinks it's the right decision. She really thinks it's beautiful. She needs the attention of young and beautiful men.

And my beautician points me at her and says, you'll never guess how old she is, and all the technology is Botox! Like, you're embarrassed, you just need a few shots and that's all. I'm smiling. I'm not arguing. But I know I won't do that. Yes, I sometimes want to find the twenty-year-old girl I once was in the mirror after a sleepless night. Hide wrinkles, bags under the eyes, have smoother skin. But at this moment I remember what beauty is.

Beauty for me is described in the poem Zabolotsky:

... What is beauty?

And why do people worship her?

Is she a vessel with a void?

Or a fire flickering in a vessel?

I think of women who really inspire me. When you look at them, the heart opens, expands and sings. Like Mother Teresa. For me, she's an amazingly beautiful woman, incredibly beautiful. Would she give shots of youth? Nope. Would St. Xenia of St. Petersburg rejuvenate her body? Would you worry about cellulite (which is actually a natural skin condition for women) Helen Andelin? Or Sandra Covey, the wife of Stephen Covey, who gave birth to nine beautiful babies – she must have experienced stretch marks – would she remove them with a laser and do belly plastics?

Two extremes.

In our relationship with the body, we have two extremes. We either deny the external beauty, and only deal with the internal. Our figure is blurred, we can not even fill the skin with cream and especially do not go to any massages. It's not spiritual. I'm not a body, I'm a soul. Only for some reason this soul is often turned away, including close ones.

The second extreme is that we think of ourselves exclusively as a body that may have a soul somewhere. And then we try to stop the passage of time, because if the body is getting older, then so am I? Then we are even ready to take loans for some operations, to endure the pain from various injections and not only. And in this race, we're willing to go so far that sometimes it's embarrassing.

Where is a healthy attitude towards beauty? Who are we really in all this? The Vedic scriptures say that we are immortal souls. Not bodies, after all. But we are not just free eternally young souls, we are conditioned souls. Souls who live in this world in this body are in a bundle like climbers. Through the sense organs of our body we perceive the material world. With the help of this body, we can express love, build relationships, have children, experience happiness and pleasure. The body helps us do that.

Then it is obvious that the importance of the body is high. But the most important thing is inside. And the true beauty is also inside. And it would be worth doing this beauty more often and more deeply. It would be worth paying attention and time to this as consciously as applying creams and masks. Can you imagine if every day we not only washed and applied makeup, but also read the scriptures, pray, do good deeds? If we consciously built relationships with people and consciously filled the world with love?

What would we be at fifty and sixty? Would we be alone and useless, unhappy and disappointed in life? Is it possible to leave such a woman voluntarily? It’s like turning away from an oasis in the desert, the only place to find clean drinking water.

If the soul is a part of God, then the body is the place where a part of God lives. So the body is a temple. We need to take care of our bodies like a temple. To monitor its purity so that the body is as beautiful as possible now, maintain its appearance, do not run, be sure to decorate and decorate. The temple itself is more important than what is inside. The temple is only a temporary abode of the eternal soul. And the main attention should be paid in the temple, after all, not to the beauty of the walls and not to the painting of the altar, but to the very communion with the Lord.

There are many examples of women whose fate was so difficult that they could not get married. Many still came out, and in this family faced cruelty and injustice. But these women have turned their "ugly" fate into their own charm, love and riches of heart.

Radhanatha Swami once told about a woman in India. Once upon a time, her wealthy husband beat her up and kicked her out of the house. She survived by some miracle, she had nothing left – no money, no home, no children left with her husband. She was thrown out on the street, humiliated and unhappy.

She could have stayed that way for life. But she made a different choice. Next to her, she saw those who suffered no less than herself. There were many children on the street who had no parents, no roof over their heads, no food. And then she decided to take care of them. She became their mother. She had nothing to give them, only love and tenderness from her heart. But the children were drawn to her, they became more. She taught them as much as she could, and together they tried to organize their lives.

Years later, they were given a house so that she and her children could live there. Her children grew up, some of them went to schools, some even to universities, they got jobs, and already tried to take care of their mother and all the orphans she continued to care for. Orphans have already found her. Among them were very small, and even adults. They were all her children.

Over time, her own children found her and began to live with her in this shelter for those who need love. One day an old man knocked on her house. He was sick, poor and infirm. And she recognized him as her ex-husband. He was hungry and she fed him. He was poor, and she gave him shelter in this orphanage. And he was amazed that she didn't get angry with him, she didn't take revenge, she didn't hate him after all he'd done. And she just accepted him as much as anyone who needed her care.

In this story, Swami mentioned several times how beautiful this woman was, who shared her story while speaking for an organization. But he did not describe her hair, eyes, hands. He spoke only of her heart, and everyone who listened to the story could not hold back tears. And I believe she is one of the most beautiful women of today. Much more beautiful than any top model or young pop singer.

Which beauty to strive for - each of us chooses for ourselves. And in any case, we get some result and some pleasure. Which is temporary and which is long-term? Which of them is a struggle with the natural course of events, with time, and which is in tune with nature in its diversity?



Author: Olga Valyaeva, head of the book “Healing the female soul”



P.S. And remember, just by changing our consumption – together we change the world!



Source: www.valyaeva.ru/krasota-vnutri-ili-snaruzhi/