Today I stand here as a beauty-full woman. I look at myself and am blown away with who I see before me: a strong, confident, powerful and truly beautiful woman.
Not something I pictured for myself when I was a teenager. Riddled with insecurities and self-doubt, all I had to go by was how I looked on the outside.
Did I fit the picture of beauty everyone was looking for? Often not. But worse, I didn’t fit my own picture.
I felt miserable on the inside. Lost and unsure of who I was. There was a time I would look in the mirror and all I saw was pain and confusion. And often, an ugliness that I didn’t know the source of… who was that looking at me?
Today, I glow and radiate an inner confidence and inner strength of knowing exactly who I am – a truly beautiful woman. And more than that, I live the loveliness of that every day.
Recently I read an article that said only 4% of women feel they are beautiful… how truly sad. How is it that this kind of miserable statistic can exist when we are all truly beautiful… what happens?
You only have to look into the face of a child to know we are all truly divine and precious. How then is it possible for some of us to be able to look into a mirror and see nothing but ugliness and criticism?
So what changed for me?
Thanks to the work of Universal Medicine and Serge Benhayon I heard about the simple yet sometimes not so easy steps to self-care and self-love – both very foreign concepts to me at the time – however, they made sense, so I was willing to give them a try.
What I learned was I was being driven by a world telling me how to be, look, act and think. Thanks to being more self-loving and caring I was given the space to feel for myself what was true for me or not. So today I stand free of most of those impositions and as a result no longer feel ugly from living what is not me.
Today I stand as me… in the beauty and joy of that… and now show a different way, not ashamed or afraid to say I am truly beautiful.
As I have been inspired by Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine to love and care for myself and claim my own beauty, today I inspire others to also claim their beauty as they too will inspire another… and so on it goes, ‘til one day we all know how truly amazing and truly beautiful we are!
By Caroline Raphael, Goonellabah, NSW
773 Comments
An inspirational awareness that is essential that everyone gets… Otherwise we are all simply driven by pictures that can never be matched.
Truly inspirational Caroline and reading those statistics, we as women have to claim our beauty and I also say this to myself as there are days I claim my beauty and feel awesome but there are some days, and they are becoming less frequent where I choose to not feel and see how beautiful I am. I do not want to contribute to these statistics any longer and take my responsibility as the beautiful woman I am.
A beautiful sharing of what it is to love yourself, to have let go those pictures of how we think we should be and just be us, in the beauty we naturally are.
It is a total crime all the impositions laid on us to make us feel that we are not beautiful in every way. All the billboards and magazines that portray images and the pressure to look a certain way or be a certain weight. There is nothing more beautiful than someone totally connected to themselves free of these images that are so important to those only concerned with outer appearances.
It is so true that children have a freedom of expression that is just gorgeous, they allow themselves to be seen and express in full- they know their loveliness and this radiates from them. It is only when they are imposed on that this is no longer held in the same way.
‘Today I stand as me… in the beauty and joy of that… and now show a different way, not ashamed or afraid to say I am truly beautiful’. Caroline this is such a powerful claiming of your Divine essence, it resonated my heart very deeply. Thank you.
When we let the world tell us our worth, then we are reliant on the current state of the world – which is in disharmony. If you look at any other animal species, we know something is up when it gets overweight or underweight. We are quick to sort out our dogs if they are eating too much but not ourselves. The body shape comes in so many sizes and yet we don’t live to be vital and the right size for who we are. We strive to look different and in that we cause a disharmony. So for us to start to confirm who we are – without the world telling us how to be but rather confirming the amazing person we are first, we start to set a new foundation of love and appreciation.
“Who was that looking at me?” This is a very telling line. Sometimes it’s as though the person looking at us in the mirror is not ‘us’ at all but an imposter tormenting us. When I see my own beauty I feel present and at home in my own body and there is no room for imposters.
If we truly appreciated just how loving, beautiful and awesome we are it would change everything!
Before finding the simple steps to being at-least self-loving there is a key and that is to start with gentleness. Then we can build a platform or foundation that will support our way of living towards being more loving.
When you know who you are inside nothing can come along and take away that shine, nothing can deny your gorgeousness – you can only choose to forget. Difficulties, complexities come when we do – but it’s just a matter of time till we return to the truth. Thank you Caroline for sharing your sparkle and spunk here.
Striving to live up to the images of what beautiful means from the world around us for most of my life, always left me feeling anxious and never enough. Yet as with you, I also now know the truth to be that the essence of who I am within is agelessly beautiful and living from this connection is a joy that is too much to contain. When we live our innate beauty the truth is known for all to see that this is who we are as such our right to live.
Inspiring each other is the true way forward.
When I stop the self critique thoughts and just let myself be and move in a way that is lighter in my steps it changes how I feel about myself and I can reconnect back to the beauty and grace that I am.
It is a big support if we stop to compare ourselves with other women or pictures the world puts around us how to look.
And we start to honour and appreciate ourselves. Also all our forms of the body, the face. And to enjoy all our differences, the unique beauty each of us brings.
It is so true that ‘You only have to look into the face of a child to know we are all truly divine and precious’. How come we decided to travel so far from this point that we end up with so much disregard for who we are? We have lost a sense of God in our lives living in a way that discounts all that is truly magical and wonderful.
‘And more than that, I live the loveliness of that every day.’ How gorgeous is this to live our loveliness everyday without needing permission or to measure ourselves against some ideal that isn’t even possible or real!
Caroline – this is such a scorcher of a blog – it should be handed out to every girl in schools and youth clubs. You are the epitome of a beautiful woman because of how you choose to live and move each day – thank you for shinning so brightly.
Self-love is like a miracle. The relationship with self is the foundation of our relationships with others and allows us to be love in relationship, not seek it. It is a simple and yet deeply profound shift – one that can turn that 4% in to 94%…or actually 100% in truth.
Self – love is a true medicine for healing and one that when embraced can heal so many in reflection.
It is so true, when you look at a child, all children are beautiful, what is it then that makes this changes as women can often judge and critique each other. When does this come in and why? Why do we let go of this knowing and sell out to ‘pictures’ of beauty without determining the quality that comes with it.
I did not know that statistic, that is truly shocking and it also tells a story. We are so busy looking at what is supressing women that we overlook the fact that we are supressing ourselves with a lack of true self/love and care. This blog may seem simple but with that statistic in play, it is actually quite extraordinary that you love yourself so deeply and wholly as a woman and that you are able to share that with us all, thank you, it is a wakeup call for me to step up my view of myself.
We will and do feel ugly when we look outside of ourselves, turn that gaze inward and we are always beautiful.
This is a truly inspirational sharing Caroline. I agree that the stats. on women who see themselves as beautiful are very low. I love that you share that your natural way of being is joyful and loving , all of which shine through when one meets you.
“Only 4% of women feel they are beautiful” – Wow that is shocking. Imagine this headline on the front page of every newspaper, because this statistic really stops you in your tracks and makes you realise that you can either add to the pool of women who don’t love being who they are or you can be someone who shows the world something different.
Remove or detach from the ideals and beliefs that push us to live in a way that is not who we truly are and we create even more space to be ourselves.
Yes Caroline you have inspired me today. I know I am the most gorgeous and lovely woman and yet sometimes I let things, thoughts, get in the way of this absolute knowing I have of knowing and being the glorious woman I am.
It is a travesty that only 4% of women see themselves as beautiful, but I was one who also added to the 96% who believed I was anything but beautiful. If you could see bruises from the incessant thoughts that can come in about how ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ or ‘ugly’ we are, many of us would be black and blue all over…. awful picture to consider isn’t it but that is what is happening. It is time to change the way we talk about ourselves, and to each other, and also pull each other up by reflecting our gorgeous inner beauty and not hide it away.
Yes Aimee, the mental bruises we inflict on ourselves every time we have negative thoughts about ourselves add up to a very damaging relationship and one that we would do well to pay close attention to. Today there are many role models like Caroline who are building a loving relationship with themselves, knowing that we are all truly beautiful despite the many pictures we are fed to make us feel ‘less than’.
That only 4% of women today think they are beautiful is an appalling stat – my question is what are we all going to do about it and how are we going to correct it? Because to leave it as is it is a blight on our society that caps the potential of far too many of us.
When you come to know the truth that every woman and every man is beautiful it is a shocking statistic that only 4% of women think they are beautiful and if you were to explore what those 4% of women really found beautiful about themselves the chances are that they are just talking about the superficial surface level, not the deep inner beauty that we all hold.
It is also beautiful to look at the above photo and see a woman who knows her own power and glory.
It is beautiful to see a woman claim herself.
The other day I was feeling quite off, and I looked in the mirror and I saw ugly. Then later on, I was feeling much more connected to myself, I looked again in the mirror and I saw my beauty. What struck me, is that I had not changed, I was physically the same, but the energy in my body of how I was feeling about myself had changed, and that was reflected back to me by the mirror. It is how we feel about ourselves, and take care of ourselves, that we reflect.
Sarah I’m often still shocked by the difference I see in myself depending on what I am letting through me. Sometimes I can see ugliness but often I see such beauty and forget that other’s must see and feel this too.
A woman who claims her beauty is an inspiration to us all.
I remember feeling beautiful as a young child. It wasn’t until I got towards 8 or 9 that thoughts of ‘I am not beautiful’ started to creep in and at the same time thoughts of comparison and jealousy also started. So this proves to me that we are all born absolutely beautiful and we already know this from day one. But as more and more images and pictures of a false version of beauty creeps in and perhaps from seeing people around us not fully appreciating true beauty that we can easily fall for a false sense of beauty that constantly tells us we are not good enough. When in truth we are all beautiful and already enough just the way we are.