Beauty isn't skin deep -- it's soul deep

Women's wellness visionary Victoria Moran offers inspiring advice and practical suggestions that will make any woman look and feel more radiant. Each compact essay contains a tip you can put to use today to heighten your awareness of your own inner beauty, illustrating how true sparkle comes from a sense of wholeness. Women of all ages will relate to Victoria's reflections on her journey to a deeper understanding of inner radiance -- beauty that is soul deep.

This sane, sensible approach to a strong self-image and loving self-care is firmly grounded in spiritual common sense, the marriage of body and soul. You start by lighting up your life -- and before you know it, you're lighting up the room.

Lit from Within

A Simple Guide to the Art of Inner BeautyBy Moran, Victoria

HarperSanFrancisco

ISBN: 0062517341

Chapter One

Let Your Exterior Reflect Your Interior

The first step toward bringing out your inner beauty is to
have only one goal for your physical self: that it be an
accurate representation of your spiritual self.

When the light of your spirit shows on your face and in your life, you are a beautiful human being, a beautiful woman. For this to happen in an enduring way, you need to take exceptionally good care of both your body and your soul. You just have to get the order right: the soul came first. A new theory edging its way into science is that of "enformy," the notion that something -- what religious people have long known as soul -- exists prior to the formation of a physical body. This immaterial essence "enforms" matter, resulting in something magnificent -- you, for instance.

In opting to take on physical form, your spiritual self didn't make any mistakes. The body you've got is the one you're supposed to have. From the vantage point of your soul, it is the perfect body to carry you through this lifetime and accomplish what you came here to do. And whether your body type is the delicate ectomorph, the curvaceous endomorph, or the athletic mesomorph, you're "morphed" just the way you're supposed to be.

This can be hard to swallow in a culture that suggests -- no, shouts -- that certain bodies are acceptable and others are not. The message these days is that women are supposed to be tall and thin and have large breasts. When I was a teenager, they were supposed to be tall and thin and have no breasts. When my grandmother was young, Clara Bow was the "It Girl," and five-foot-two and curvy was the ideal.

Whatever a particular era's "perfect body" is supposed to look like, its purpose (detailed in Linda McBryde's The Mass Market Woman) is to sell things: clothes, makeup, beer, movie tickets. Your body, however, has a higher calling: to give your soul, your light within, a way to show itself in the world. This undertaking is supposed to entail more ecstasy than agony. The Vedic scriptures of ancient India say that human bodies were engineered to experience bliss and that even the angels envy them.

The first step toward bringing out your inner beauty is to have only one goal for your physical self: that it be an accurate representation of your spiritual self. Unlike the defeatist goals of the "lose ten pounds" school, this one is freeing. You're giving yourself permission to be precisely who you were meant to be, externally as well as internally. Once you let go of all objectives for your body other than to have it express your essential self, you allow it, along with your mind and spirit, to work for the good of the whole. If being ten pounds lighter is part of that overall good, it will happen. And it will last.

When you are committed to showing the world who you really are, you will start to play up what makes you special. Actress Bette Midler has been quoted as saying, "If only I'd known that one day my differentness would be an asset, my early life would have been much easier." If you celebrate your differentness, the world will, too. It believes exactly what you tell it -- through the words you use to describe yourself, the actions you take to care for yourself, and the choices you make to express yourself. Tell the world that you are a one-of-a-kind creation who came here to experience wonder and spread joy. Expect to be accommodated.

Continues...

Excerpted from Lit from Withinby Moran, Victoria Excerpted by permission.
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