Knowing Beauty by the Way It Greets You

You know it when you feel it. Beauty is direct in that sense. It makes its presence undeniable. You bask in its warmth, recognizing it because it is a part of yourself, and you hope that it never slips away from your grasp.

Though, unless we are careful, beauty can slip away – or if not beauty itself, then our acceptance of it, our familiarity with it, and our understanding of its true nature.

Think about all the many ways that people go looking for beauty, in places and with artifices that crumble under scrutiny. There are so many things that do not encapsulate beauty, so many things that we confuse with the sublime gift of beauty, that it is worth reflecting on how we recognize and conceptualize it.

Is it something that you have to go out into the world to find?

Is it something that you have to learn – a trick that you must master?

I don’t believe that it is. I believe that beauty is innate to all of us. It is a characteristic with which you are born. You took your first beautiful steps, and as you grew and evolved, your beauty expressed itself in countless other ways. Beauty is like an external instinct: it is always available to you, if you accept and embrace it.

Beauty glows through our entire lives. It shines a bright light on all our best moments, there to support us, uplift us, and keep us steady, even when the earth underfoot is shaking. Beauty exists across multiple planes, not just in your face. Beauty is in all the connections that link one part of the self to the other parts. I have witnessed this truth echo throughout my practice. Beauty is an aspect of the mind, the body, and the skin, and most importantly, it is found within the bonds those aspects form with each other.

You hear that and intuitively, you know it to be true. You may never have studied the science of beauty or looked into the research. Still, you understand that beauty must take place within the connections between the mind and the body, the body and the skin, the mind and the skin. It is a phenomenon so powerful that it is impossible to break one part of it free from the whole.

To understand beauty completely is to understand the self as a flowing entity. When you think something, that thought is traveling through your body, out through your skin, and into the world. Likewise, all of the energy to which you expose yourself is entering through your skin as well.

Now that is beautiful!

As a medical doctor, I have merged Eastern holistic sciences, like Ayurveda and yoga, with cutting-edge modern science. This is, after all, what the complexity of beauty calls for. Your absolute peak potential, the beauty that you have always suspected yourself capable of, is within your reach through a combination of Western and Eastern medicine modalities. When you draw upon these tools with an open heart and a free mind, you go beyond the level that either alone would touch, transcending down deeper into genuine self-actualization.

This too, is when you hear your intuitions affirm. If it’s self-actualization that you desire, you can’t decide upfront which tools to use and which tools to throw away. There is no decision like that for you to make. You need to use every tool within reach, to harness the full power of all that scientists and spiritual guides alike have given to us.

We can take this approach even further. Consider astrology, for example. Through astrology, you get to see yourself from a wider, more expansive point of view. You catch glimpses of yourself as you are, an infinite being on a single life’s journey, and then beauty feels more natural and self-reinforcing. That is the great wonder of astrology; it is a source of truth that we can all tap into to gain some perspective when life becomes stressful or when we just need a nudge in the right direction along our path.

Inevitably, these nudges bring us back to the same ideal, to the goal that we should pursue relentlessly each day.

That goal? It’s self-love. At a time when cosmetic enhancements are only a few button clicks away and social media has ensured that we are always aware of that fact, self-love can serve as a sort of seeing glass. You look through it and get an idea of who you are, what makes you amazing, and how you can accentuate the beauty that is already yours. In that moment, you may need to remind yourself that the beauty is already yours. That may be what self-love is for you, whatever you need it to be.

Self-love is, you then see, both the goal and the process. It is the journey and the destination. When you love yourself, you understand that you are stardust. You are remnants of the cosmos that have spun out and come together in a grand, eternal dance. Looking inward to get to know yourself, you are expressing all the limitlessness that your beauty encourages you to feel.

Then, you can’t help but see the connections between your mind, your body, and your skin. Those connections are you; they are worthy of your time and attention, because when you observe them, you can then act on them. This is a precept of what we call “vibrational cosmetics.” It is the crossroads of accepting yourself completely, as the timeless entity you are, and also accepting your desires lovingly, celebrating the cosmetic tools that modern medicine has made available to us.It is possible to reconcile these two ideals, that of the infinite spirituality you sense within yourself and that of the magnificent beauty cutting-edge science has to offer. You deserve, because of your nature in this universe, both ideals simultaneously.