A recent visit to one of my fave boutiques on South Beach proved a wake up call in my self concept and the need to defend inner beauty.
I’d ventured over to Washington Avenue where lie a few small boutiques housing rather affordable feminine digs from Rio to Rome, one selling jeans from Brazil that feel like they’ve been laundered 20 times, embroidered with feminine designs that are just very me.
Yet no sooner am I in the dressing room than I zero into my roots. Very grey. Very in need of new hair color. And within moments I was doing the whole size myself up again—more mentally than in the mirror. “Woman you need an overhaul. You’re hair’s a mess, your body’s tired, you look like you haven’t slept in weeks.”
In just a few moments an enormous mental warfare ensued. My thoughts became filled with this heaviness, disgust, anger, and frustration completely beat up by these attacking hissing voices horrifically sabotaging me, calling me an idiot, an ugly mess, negligent toward self care, falling apart, an entire waste of existence who’s letting herself go to pieces.
There were a load more of condemning thoughts nothing short of self abuse and sabotage.
Before I knew it, these heinous attacks paralyzed me and I couldn’t do anything except bend over and try to regain some semblance of peace. I was overwhelmed, depressed and angry….less about the condemning accusations–more about allowing my thoughts to entertain any of them.
Stuck in this mental warfare I knew I had to arrest these attacking thoughts in order to reclaim inherent peace.
So right there in the dressing room, I grabbed a hold of my heart and became my own spiritual defense attorney. I vehemently defended my true worth, my spirituality and true substance—not defined by my weight or appearance, not measured by when I’ve let my hair go, when I need my roots colored. My arguments went something like this:
“You are whole this moment. You are not a mistake, you are not a wasted life. You are not a disshelved mess. You are this moment the immediate expression of the one Being and you have this moment every ounce of grace, purity, beauty, innocence, and light you will ever have. None of these heinous lies have any bearing on your individuality and can not attest ever the true worth of your being. You do not need to pay them any heed and they do not have the power to control your thoughts or actions.”
This is how I engage in the mental warfare—working from the standpoint of my spiritual substance that is unshakable and undeniable and not about the clothes I put on or the haircolor. Surely not.
Sometimes women are most vulnerable to these mental attacks when we’re shopping or getting clothes or trying to do a simple errand. And yet, if you’re aware of the tendency of thoughts to wander, you become very aware of the need to defend or advocate for your innate goodness 24/7.
None of us need to be victims of mental condemnation nor are any of those heinous attacks ever coming from our own thinking even though they are dressed up as our own thoughts.
Time and again I find that whenever I’m aware of such a mental battle the only thing that matters is denying the very thing being argued however I can and immediately–whether this means pulling the car to the side of the road, getting offline, or leaving a dressing room.
But time and again, I find that if I arrest these vicious attacks on my individuality right as soon as they’re trying to engage and absorb my attention, they eventually fall away.
The point: my substance and worth is never going to be defined by a body weight, a jeans size or the length and color of my hair. Nor is yours.
The worth of any of our individuality is already set….already established. It is our very inherent nature and already secure.
So back to my dressing room experience. I chose at that moment to walk out of the store without making any purchase. The jeans didn’t fit the way I wanted and I was not yet free of the condemnations.
Just around the corner from the store is the beach. And I took a long walk, staring out at the currents moving the waters to crash as waves upon the shore. Concurrently I was still engaged in this mental battle defending my true worth, my individuality, my completeness. It took a few hours, but eventually the sabotaging stopped.
And it really doesn’t matter how long it takes–so long as each one of us doesn’t fall victim to the attacks.
The truths of any of our individualities is already established. None of us are lacking in the substance of true beauty: patience, joy, innocence, lovingkindness, purity, grace, tenderheartedness or childlikeness.
Often I find that to the degree I strive to exude any one of those qualities that feeling of pure beauty comes over me.
So I simply offer this post in hopes of holding hands with anyone who finds themselves stuck — sometimes or often–in that mental warfare.
You don’t have to be so victimized. You can stand up and defend your true worth and real beauty. You are never alone in this seeming struggle and you can learn how to squelch the condemnations time and time again.
Lemme know what has worked for you…and how you’re striving to live your peace and inner beauty.
Leave a comment or send an email to evolveserenity at gmail dot com.
Thanks Eliz for bein’ so honest. It’s hard in a way…in another, those negative attackers are never YOU…so you don’t have to feel victimized in the sense that you are the one attacking yourself. They only have truth to the degree we pay them any attention. I know it’s hard. But you have to ignore them, shun them, negate them. They never speak truth. To the degree you shut them down, they cease babbling. And it gets easier and easier to laugh them / shun them/squelch them into their nonexistence. 🙂 holler back if you want help w/ how :).
This is a great post. I wish I could stand up to that voice that yells at me that I am too fat, need to wear more makeup, etc. It’s hard.