Can healing the Beauty Wound actually change how we look?

Something that’s been coming up in conversations I’ve been having with women about the work of Beauty Potion is whether it only changes how we feel about the way we look (and by only that’s not to dismiss it), but whether this work might actually change how we look.

Whilst the deepest intention of the work of Beauty Potion is to heal our Beauty Wound, creating a union between our inner and outer beauty, allowing us to feel deeply at home in our own skin, and ultimately to have our outer beauty become an expression of the truth of our soul… in paradoxical and an undeniably magical way that can also bring changes in the way we look.

I’ll share two examples of this, and then a little about why these kinds of miracles are possible.

What is beauty?

Is it only skin deep… or something your SOUL chose?

In many of the spiritual communities and lineages I’ve been part of, it’s understood that the shape of our lives… including our nature, our fate, and our destiny… Is something our soul chose before we came into these bodies.

(If you don’t see it that way, this post is unlikely to be for you. )

But what’s spoken far less often, if ever, is this: What if the shape of our bodies was also chosen?

The lost parts hidden in your mirror

This morning, I happened across a brilliant quote by Maureen Murdock that I’d shared many years ago.

“When women work on reclaiming the lost part of themselves, they’re also working on reclaiming the lost soul of the culture as well.”

When I shared it back then, I thought I understood why women doing that vital work of reclamation might also be doing it for our culture, and maybe I did, but now I feel it differently, perhaps more tangibly.

I still see it through an archetypal lens (as I guess I would have back then, after all it’s the pattern that I’ve been looking at life through since childhood, long before I realised I was), but now not only energetically or metaphorically, but as something I witness laid bare in the face of every woman I meet.

My excruciating, enchanted journey with beauty

Last week for the very first time, I spoke about beauty in the way I’ve been holding back on for years (really, decades).

I recorded this episode on the topic last week live in the Be Mythical Facebook group with our members (thank you all SO much for being with me and for sharing yourselves as you did).

I had a rare experience of stage fright before we began, along with several technical challenges.

Then magically, as soon as we began, I felt in flow, feeling the hearts of the women present and allowing the Mythic Beauty Archetypes to speak through me.

The Underbelly of the Beauty Wound

How women speak to me about their tummies…

“It’s gross.”

“I can’t look at it.”

“I have to hide it.”

“It’s huge and bloated!”

I don’t just hear these kinds of things now and then… they’re the norm. Tummy-hate shows up in almost every group I run with women, and in most of our 1:1 work too.

I’ve often thought I could create an entire offering just around helping women go from hating their tummies to loving them.

“It’s alright for you. You’re beautiful.”

I was on a night out at a cocktail bar and got talking to a woman in the loos. I was reapplying my lipstick. She was telling me she only wears clear balm on hers now… She couldn’t find lipstick that worked for her “too-thin” lips.

I don’t know why, but I offered her mine. And then I found myself offering to do her make-up.

As I was bringing cherries to her cheeks, rose buds to her lips, and Cleopatra to her eyes, she was quietly listing her perceived flaws… the parts she thought made her unattractive, unworthy, un-beautiful.

The Enchantress

As I’m bringing each of the 7 Mythic Beauty Archetypes to life, I’m falling more deeply in love with them… and the women I see have their divine goldprint, however embodied or not.

(It’s also shown me why I’ve spent decades gathering images like classic art, such as my favourite Pre-Raphaelite, and more modern fantasy art, like the Frazetta below. These archetypes were speaking to me through art long before I knew their names.)

The Beauty Wound

Let us count the ways it bleeds…

Envy… The Queen sent Snow White to her death so she might continue to be the fairest in the land.

Objectification… Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr. Called “the most beautiful woman in the world,” she was also a brilliant inventor whose wartime technology laid the foundation for Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth - yet she was recognised for her genius only decades later, and even now is still known for her beauty, not brains.

Looking our ugliness in the face

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.

HOW TO MAGICALLY SPELL YOUR WORDS

A vital aspect of the work that we do at Be Mythical - both in our own inner work and the work we do with others - is about making conscious the words used to create ourselves and our world.

As Terence McKenna once said…

“The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”

Over the years, I’ve seen there are five stages that we go through on the journey of fully discovering this secret of magic, usually these stages flow in the order below, though sometimes 2 and 3 are switched depending on the path one has taken, and also many of us have echoes of previous stages still showing up in certain areas of our lives, even though we’ve largely moved beyond them.

True strength 🗡️

“The strength of a person's spirit* would then be measured by how much 'truth' he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.” Friedrich Nietzsche

This much-loved quote came to mind as I recorded a podcast episode - quite unexpectedly as the topic was AI and human consciousness.

And by ‘strength of a person’s spirit’, I see this as how ‘whole’ a person is - ie how far along the path of the soul one is.

What did your parents DO, not say?

One of the many challenges we have culturally when it comes to understanding our inner world, and especially that of our inner child, is that we focus so much on what is most obvious and conscious - for example the words we remember someone used - we can miss what happened decades ago (and is maybe still secretly happening in patterns that echo their origin) in more subtle or water-you-swam-in ways, especially if they were non-verbal or preverbal.

As Jung said in his essay The Psychology of the Child Archetype in his book The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious:

“Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.”

But it can be very difficult to recognise the experiences we were immersed in and most educated (and shaped and wounded) by, particularly as we have a whole cast of inner characters whose very job depends on preventing us from remembering them, and this is why we benefit from approaching it in indirect and non-verbal ways… in other words, speaking the psyche’s own language.

Dream work, shamanic journeying, divination, ritual, movement and dance, myth and story, nature connection, drawing and painting - all of these (and many more) are ways we can converse with and explore our inner worlds.

As we journey deeper with the Inner Child in this month’s UNIO Mythical Quest, the revelations and realisations are coming thick and fast, even for those of us already long and deep in this work.

There’s something about focusing on a particular aspect of ourselves for a dedicated window of time, especially when questing with a group of others doing the same, that brings a potency and intentionality to the work that allows hidden wounds and gold to be brought into the light that otherwise might remain lost to the dark corners of our psyche.

So coming back to the title of this post… “What did your parents DO, not say?”… this, and conversely “What did your parents SAY, not do?” and many other enquiries, when attended to with curiosity, compassion, devotion and attention, following the call deep into our dreams, our bodies, and twilight liminal spaces, can show us the way to remember and re-member ourselves into wholeness.

All my love,
Lian

P.S the details to join us in UNIO are below - and if you join before the end of December, your first month is free, as a Christmas gift from us to you...

Mother and Child by Gustav Klimt

Maybe whatever is showing up is the thing

Over and over, clients come to a session saying... "I have these three things I want to look at but they're completely unrelated. And maybe I'm using Thing 1 to avoid looking at Thing 2. And maybe Thing 3 isn't really important."

And then as the conversation unfolds, it often turns out those things are entirely related, and sometimes incredibly, magically so.

Trust yourself.

What's showing up for you is important.

If you hold it that way, with care and reverence - like a bird in your palm - its significance, meaning the breadcrumbs it offers on the path of your soul, will be shown.

And maybe the things that seem most unrelated, unwanted, minor, and irrelevant can provide the most meaningful signposts of all - if only we can hold them gently and long enough so that they can reveal themselves.

P.S. I wrote this years ago and it just popped up, and I realised it’s been applying to events in my own life this week, more than ever… it’s all perfectly, geniusly connected.

Image: Bird In The Hand Painting by Marjorie Atwood

A picture speaks a thousand wounds

This is a rediscovered photograph from many moons ago, from when I was helping out a photographer with his portfolio.

I’m around 18 here… Almost still a girl.

Although I’ve shared others from that shoot, I’m not sure I’ve ever shared this one before now.

Reluctance and pride all mixed up with clothes that weren’t mine, and a body that I was in the work of claiming as mine.

What would your childhood self be happy to know?

Although much inner child work understandably focuses on the wounding of the child, the deeper our relationship with our little one becomes, the more their joy, play, curiosity, and creativity sparkles through our lives once again.

As part of our monthly UNIO Mythical Quest, I sometimes invite members into a deeper Star Quest too, journeying astrologically, as well as with other spiritual and magical traditions.

This month’s quest is the Inner Child Quest, and so the Star Quest weaves between our natal sun and moon and their places on the Kabbalah tree of life which can be seen as our inner child and sovereign adult.

Neglect the inner child, neglect your soul

If ‘The Work’ doesn’t include and honour the inner child, it’s almost always an abandonment and denial of the inner child - which can bury vitally significant material even more deeply into shadow.

It’s never too late. And yet…

“I’ve been thinking and talking a lot lately about death, ancestors and fathers... The grief and the gifts. I was fortunate in so many ways, and in some ways I’m only really seeing now, 9 years after we lost him.”

“My mother, Sandy. I’m remembering my ancestors and re-membering myself. It’s sometimes better sooner but it’s never too late.”

I wrote these posts years ago on this day (and years apart), shared along with these photos… My mother and my father.

Where are you on your soul path?

In both our Academy of Soul, UNIO, and The Rose Quest, along with animism and shamanism, we’re also questing with our astrological placements placed onto the Kabbalah Tree of Life, as seen here.

Three ancient traditions weaving together (there’s more too but keeping it simple for now).

Ancestors, ladybirds & maybe miracles

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Albert Einstein, or was it?*

We are embarking on an Ancestral Quest in our Soul Academy, UNIO, this month, and it brought to mind a story from a few years ago.

I’m going to tell you the story, and you can decide if it’s about miracles or not.