Excerpt from Sacred Circles: A Guide to Creating Your Own Women's Spirituality Group
"There could hardly be a hotter topic for a group of women then beauty. most of us are obsessed with how we look and how far we deviate from how we think we would like to look. Addicted to perfection, we have become merciless self-critics. We have heard a million times the old adage that "beauty is only skin deep," but we have never really internalized it. Instead, we believe that our self-worth is directly correlated to our waist size or the amount of cellulite in our saddlebags. What other adages and myths concerning beauty are we under the spell of?
It can be very liberating to hear other women share their obsessions, thoughts, and feelings about beauty. We begin to hear ourselves in others---others we know to be perfectly beautiful. only then do we see a glimmer of the absurdity of our self-delusions. Bettie is our bonafide college beauty queen---Hopskinsville, Kentucky, 1952. To hear this still gorgeous sixty-plus-year-old woman describe her negative feelings about her body is to see the real insanity of the obsession. Listening to her discuss this un-winnable dilemma of never-thin-enough, never-young-enough, never-(place your favorite self-recrimination here)-enough makes us all want to wriggle free of our old skins---too tight now, too made up, too coiffed---and enjoy the gift of who we really are. Truly, there is no ugliness in a circle of happy women, especially when lit by candles!"
Do you think you can wriggle free of your un-winnable obsessions? Wouldn't it be empowering and liberating to just enjoy ourselves how we are right now? Why can't we? What is really standing in our way?
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