Beautifully Unadorned

You're beautiful.

As you are, you're amazing. You don't need anything adorning you to make you worthwhile or better. You can enjoy things, there's a lot of things to enjoy in life. That's really the purpose of stuff. It's there for us to get pleasure from. But as far as needing a thing or a person or a situation or a particular way of thinking or ANYTHING...you don't need any of it to be valuable.

Advertising companies don't want you to know this. They want you to think that something's wrong with you and what they offer is an antidote. Not a perfect antidote, because if you got it once you'd be fabulous the rest of your life; it's an antidote you need to keep giving yourself.

The thing is, there's no peace of mind in that approach. I think we end up believing that there's always going to be something wrong with us. We don't even question it, we just believe. Ads are constantly telling us there's something wrong with us as if it's an alert, "Oh my God, you need to know this!" But they're wrong, and that's the thing that's important to know.

For instance, last night I saw an ad for makeup for women. They showed a number of photos of different women with blemishes on their faces. When I saw the blemish pictures I didn't feel like "that's terrible," I just felt like that was a normal person's face. I didn't see the problem.

Then they showed the "after" pictures when their faces were coated with makeup. It looked like they were airbrushed; painted. In that instant I felt that they had lost their vulnerability, the vulnerability that I had originally found so appealing.

I think in some way we're taught that this side of ourselves, this vulnerable aspect, is wrong...and we need to do something about it. But I think that our vulnerability is the really, really attractive part of us.

When I work with clients and they begin stripping away the layers of things in their life that aren't truly supporting them, it's as if they are peeling away makeup that was never doing anything positive for them in the first place. They feel more alive than before, and they look beautiful. It's the vitality that shows through when a person is unencumbered by WHATEVER kind of clutter they used to have. That is the most satisfying and powerful feeling a person can experience.

I think that's what we're looking for all along.