Looking our ugliness in the face

by Lian Brook-Tyler

Women’s wounds around beauty… our own beauty (or perceived lack of it), other people’s response to it, and that of other women’s… is a hidden-in-plain-sight doorway into our deepest wounds around the Feminine.

The places where we feel the most ugly…

excruciatingly painful,

terrifyingly shameful,

the last place we want to look,

…are also the very places we can find and reclaim our truest, deepest beauty.

I have guided many women from a place of feeling repulsion about their faces and bodies, recoiling from what they see in the mirror and what their photos reveal, to not just feeling comfortable in their own skin, but to being a living celebration of both their physical beauty and their unique shining soul.

Yes, they do *look* more beautiful, miraculously almost inconceivably so, but the healing alchemy means that deep below the surface, they also have a profound and growing sense of ease, acceptance and love for their whole selves, an inner beauty that goes beyond anything they could have dreamed of.

Let’s look at Vanessa, who once considered herself asexual, was told over and over that she was “too masculine”, and in a water-shed moment felt absolute disgust and shame when looking at photos of herself on the beach (including the one on the left), and then last week, after a year of being in the deepest work of Archetypal Feminine Embodiment with me… She was on stage, pole-dancing, sharing her glorious sensual beauty with an audience of hundreds (which was secretly an initiatory ceremony of embodying her most magnetic, wild, and radiant truth.) As testament to the depth of healing she’s undergone, upon looking back at the original photos, she can see herself with gentle, loving eyes, recognising the very real changes that have happened whilst no longer demonising who she was.

Or we might look at another story, that of a young girl who had sustained deep wounds around the feminine, violated at such a young age, that she hated anything to do with it, she became a tom boy who simultaneously understood she was never meant to be the “pretty one” (that honour going first to her sister and then to a cast of others ready to play that role). That young girl was me. And even in my teens, when I’d learned to play at femininity for approval and control, I still felt plain, at best, under the mask I’d perfected. At 18, I was told by the pretty friend of the time, “you’re not pretty; you’re striking.” As she also remarked upon the crows feet around my eyes. I believed her on both counts, it was further confirmation I would never be pretty, and the fact I couldn’t have possibly had wrinkles that young didn’t dawn on me until many years later, ironically when someone commented on how magically unlined my skin was (who knows… maybe the friend unintentionally cast some kind of reverse spell.) And now, here I am, completely and utterly devoted to the Feminine, and to beauty - the eternal, timeless embodiment and expression of it.

Soon, I’m guiding a circle of women into this deep alchemical work together… Which means the power and possibility will be magnified and potentiated because of the magic of circle and the reflections each will hold for the others.

It’s the healing, sisterhood, and guidance I needed many years ago.

I’d like to say that I would have jumped it back then but I honestly don’t know if I would have been brave enough or felt safe enough in a group of other women.

But I hope if I knew there was an alternative to the long, painful, and lonely path that I’ve walked, I would have found the courage to choose it.

And I hope you do too.

Join me and turn your Beauty Wound into magical, life-enhancing, healing, transformative Beauty Potion that works alchemically to reveal your unique Mythic Beauty… Which is to say… Your soul’s deepest, most precious, radiant truth.

♥️

Art: I present to you, mythic beauty, Vanessa. This was shared not only with her permission but with her soul-deep invitation to do so, along with her name and photos.

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