Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Welcome to Star Being. I'm Tara, your guide. Blending the wisdom of the stars, philosophy and soul centered conversation. Here we question, remember and reconnect with the stars, with self, with true being. I hope these conversations ignite within you resonance, awakening and a deeper knowing. Together we open to more truth, more magic, more you.
[00:00:26] Welcome back to Starbing.
[00:00:28] In my episodes, if you are a regular listener, you'll know that I always ask my guests at the end of the episode what beauty means to them. Because I feel as a woman it is something that I've always been interested in women's philosophy on aging and because I have spent so much of my life trying to conform to some kind of beauty standard and sometimes I wasn't even aware of it.
[00:01:03] And the reason that I feel it's really important to speak on this topic is I feel that with Star Being I want to bring light, the illumination on these topics.
[00:01:22] And it's interesting because I've been wanting to do this episode and I have decided to call it Impossible Beauty. And I have done that because when I sat with it, I really think that beauty has become this moving target that we can never actually reach. Like because the goal posts keep shifting and if that is always changing, it's like the algorithms of social media are always changing. If it's always changing, then there is no standard, there is no algorithm. You need to follow your own.
[00:02:01] And hopefully that is not too of an out there concept. But I really, when I was thinking about this episode and I was thinking about what I'm seeing with the beauty standards and it truly fascinates me. I come from a fashion background and, and yeah, it just always, always has fascinated me, the pressure and the, and the changing standards. So as soon as one standard is achieved, another one appears.
[00:02:37] And I think that there is a reason so many women feel exhausted by this beauty culture.
[00:02:44] And it runs deeper than unrealistic standards or social media.
[00:02:50] When I was thinking about it's rooted in shame. And shame is considered the lowest emotional state on the vibrational scale.
[00:03:02] Dr. David Hawkins, the author of the Map of Consciousness Explained, I highly recommend, I've just finished reading this book.
[00:03:10] He describes shame as an energy of self rejection, humiliation and the belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with oneself.
[00:03:22] It often carries a desire to hide, withdraw or become invisible.
[00:03:29] And I feel it is this low grade persistent shame of you are not enough as you are not young enough, thin enough, not beautiful enough.
[00:03:42] And shame is one of the heaviest emotions we can carry because it tells us that there's something wrong with who we are. And over time, many women begin to relate themselves through this lens, believing their worth, that their desirability and even their lovability are dependent upon constant improvement.
[00:04:05] And so I feel that beauty was once this sacred, has now become really transactional. It's been stripped from its connection to vitality, from presence, from life force. And it's been turned into optimization and correction and consumption.
[00:04:24] And we are encouraged to scrutinize ourselves before we have learned to truly see ourselves, before we have learned to love ourselves.
[00:04:36] And I feel that the tragedy in this is that when we think of shame, it can never create beauty.
[00:04:43] It can create a feeling of, you know, perfectionism, us wanting to consume, this compliance, but it's not creating that radiance that we know from the ancient.
[00:05:00] That radiance and ojas is what emerges when a woman feels at home within herself. And so the intention behind this conversation is not to judge beauty or adornment or self care.
[00:05:16] Women, when we look throughout history, have honoured that. And so that isn't the problem. And I love beauty, I'm not anti beauty. I love beautiful gardens and homes and books and clothes and ritual and adornment. And I think beauty really matters. And that beauty elevates consciousness.
[00:05:38] It reminds us there is something, you know, really sacred. And it also softens the nervous system and it gives us this, you know, it's part of the feminine experience.
[00:05:52] And so the problem, problem is what beauty has really asked us to carry.
[00:05:58] And it has really, I feel, stopped being this expression of life. And it's more this form of protection now. Protection from rejection, abandonment, loneliness, aging, insignificance. And this protection from not feeling enough.
[00:06:22] And it feels like this burden.
[00:06:27] And I have been thinking about this deeply because over the last few years I've watched the beauty conversation become increasingly extreme. Women are injecting younger, they're beginning preventative procedures before they even have wrinkles.
[00:06:46] And, and this, you know, at an age where I was not thinking about this, women are now younger. Women are starting to think about this before and it is actually shocking to me.
[00:07:00] And I'm seeing this trend more than ever. Women are documenting surgeries and they're calling it empowerment.
[00:07:07] And I, you know, just women consuming endless streams of beauty content every single day.
[00:07:18] And you know, we have all these products and procedures and information and more access than any generation.
[00:07:28] And for what? We're not more relaxed or at peace or secure.
[00:07:35] I believe that many women are not searching for another beauty solution, but they're searching for a return to themselves, a return to a part of them that existed before the comparison, the conditioning before belief that their worth was something to be measured against.
[00:07:55] And so this podcast episode is an invitation to shine light on the hidden shame that women carry in silence, to speak about the exhaustion openly and the pressure and the disconnection that beauty culture can create. And more importantly, as always, an invitation to remember that beauty was not something we were supposed to chase.
[00:08:27] And when I've been deeply thinking about the definition of, you know, what beauty means to me and thinking about, you know, through an ayurvedic lens, it's when a woman is nourished and embodied and present and deeply connected to her own essence.
[00:08:49] And so I think it is this bigger conversation that we're not having.
[00:08:57] We're keeping it on the surface, and it's really a woman coming home to herself.
[00:09:05] And I guess why I've really wanted to speak about this is because I think as women, we can hold each other to a standard.
[00:09:18] We can question, and we can do that without judgment.
[00:09:25] But I feel that we're in this twilight zone where we can't question anymore. That.
[00:09:35] Yeah. And I. I think it's really important to question, like, oh, okay, why.
[00:09:42] Why are you doing that? Because there's always a route to it, right? And if you're just doing the band aid solution, I am one for getting to the core. Like, oh, you desire to do that? Like, what.
[00:09:59] What is the desire that it is that you're thinking you're going to feel from that?
[00:10:06] And I feel that is why we're on this merry go round. Because we're not going to the root cause, and we're just band aiding the solution.
[00:10:18] And if I'm, you know, we're all aging, it's part of this human experience.
[00:10:28] And so for me, it's like, how.
[00:10:34] How can we reframe that? And so these are just, like, the deeper questions that I have been thinking, and that's why I've really wanted to voice them.
[00:10:45] And I really am coming from this place of, I think, about aliveness lately and what it is that truly is valuable.
[00:10:59] So I've been thinking from this, from this, from so many different lens points, and one of them has been through quantum mechanics. And so from this quantum perspective, we can think of beauty through energy and attention and also the reality that we're tuning ourself to.
[00:11:23] So the moment that beauty becomes I must be beautiful to be loved or I must look younger to be worthy, we're placing excessive importance on it. And that importance, when it comes to quantum mechanics, this creates suffering because it's creating too much of a pendulum. And so the more desperately that we pursue it, the more that we're holding the vibration of its absence, the more we feel losing it, the more power it has over us.
[00:11:59] And so this true beauty I feel is magnetic when it's not being grasped for. And it's like any of the manifestation techniques, when we're grasping onto something, running after something so feverishly.
[00:12:21] This is when we. That's when the suffering happens. And I. I think about our life force. And so when our woman is connected to her purpose, she is in creation. She is deeply engaged with life.
[00:12:38] And this is what I think is the energetic state of beauty. It's that vitality, that self acceptance is that aliveness. It's being in, yeah, alignment, cohesion with ourselves.
[00:12:56] And this is when, from this perspective, reality is going to reflect our dominant relationship with ourself. And so a woman who believes I'm not enough is never going to find enough beauty because she's going to be continually feeding the energy of inadequacy.
[00:13:16] And so this is why, I feel not going to the root cause, because no procedure, product or external validation is going to solve that.
[00:13:26] And when a woman instead believes, I belong here, I am worthy, I am alive, she's moving energetically differently. Her posture, her voice, her eyes.
[00:13:40] The external follows the internal. And so I really wanted to look at it from that lens.
[00:13:48] And then when we think more about the ancient traditions, beauty, as I've touched on, was never separated from vitality or spirit or that harmony with life.
[00:14:01] And a woman, again, has that, who has that presence and carries herself. Her mind, body and spirit were in a relationship with each other that was seen as the expression of her beauty, as that inner alignment, her life force, her devotion to her self respect.
[00:14:24] And in Ayurveda, radiance is connected with ojis. And it's this subtle essence that's created through nourishment and rest and integrity and love and really food and nervous system balance.
[00:14:41] And in the Vedic understanding, beauty was always cultivated through how we lived.
[00:14:50] And this is why beauty has been inverted.
[00:14:55] And with the inversion, it always works by taking something real and distorting it into something externalized and extractive.
[00:15:10] So beauty became disconnected from life force.
[00:15:13] And it's attached, you can see, instead, to insecurity. And the feminine body has become this marketplace. And you can see women being taught to monitor themselves constantly. And so we're in this state of self surveillance and inadequacy and comparison and you can see like the, the energetic imprint of this.
[00:15:42] And we're really encouraged to spend more time looking at ourselves than being ourselves.
[00:15:50] And it just, it is such a.
[00:15:56] Like drawing our attention and our life force and from spiritually.
[00:16:03] This is really important because attention is our creative power. If our attention is being fragmented towards correcting and comparing and fixing and editing ourselves, the energy is no longer available for our intuition, our artistry, our leadership, our sensuality, our philosophy, our.
[00:16:26] That deep self knowledge.
[00:16:29] And a distracted woman is far easier to influence than a sovereign one.
[00:16:34] And the inversion is not beauty itself. I just want to make that clear. I feel that the, you know, the beauty is sacred. The inversion is the severing of beauty from truth.
[00:16:47] And so we've come now to this culture where exhaustion is beneath this perfection and youth is valued more than wisdom. And we're rewarded artificially rather than, rather than rewarded on our aliveness.
[00:17:12] And so as women, we can spend years sculpting the perfect image of ourselves, but at what cost?
[00:17:21] At the cost of losing connection to our instinct, our body, our deeper essence.
[00:17:29] And I think about this a lot because I've been very outspoken on Botox and a lot of people don't like this. And I, I completely understand me speaking out about it because it has become so accepted now.
[00:17:45] But when you start to look at the deeper implication of that, of how it is not allowing movement on the face and you know, the science, as always, is going to take so long to catch up.
[00:18:04] But a few women that I have had these conversations with feel that it has, yeah, really deeply affected them on a subtle level.
[00:18:16] And yeah, again, it comes at this cost.
[00:18:22] And so the distortion begins when beauty stops being an expression of the soul and it becomes a replacement for it.
[00:18:30] And when we look at the ancient societies, they understood that a woman that was connected to her intuition, to nature, to the rhythms of nature, to spiritual authority, she was immensely powerful.
[00:18:46] And so I can't help but think that keeping us orbiting around appearance and appearance as our identity, and it's this endless quest is keeping our consciousness small.
[00:19:04] And for me I'm here to expand my consciousness. And so this is why have been really being mindful of this inversion. And the inversion is seeing aging as failure rather than an initiation. Because like I said, we're all aging.
[00:19:25] And it's encouraging us as women to remain desirable but not fully powerful.
[00:19:38] And we can be visible but not awake. It's just really interesting when you start peeling back the layers of this, because a woman who remembers herself becomes very Difficult to manipulate because she no longer seeks her worth through that external validation.
[00:19:57] And she begins asking different questions.
[00:20:01] Does this deepen my spirit? Does this honor my body? Does this strengthen my nervous system? Does this expand my consciousness? Does this reflect my truth?
[00:20:13] Does this make me feel more alive?
[00:20:18] And I feel that this is a process because I definitely haven't arrived here overnight.
[00:20:29] There was particular beauty practices that I was doing that I didn't have awareness around. But it wasn't until I was like, I don't really like spending two hours doing that.
[00:20:46] Well, like, why? Why am I doing that? It's I, I. And then I started thinking about all the ways that I could be using that time. I'm like.
[00:20:55] And like, you know, the, the toxic burden and all these layers. And I think you need to come to that, that awakening in that regard. But it just seems that the deeper return is coming back to this questioning, but also thinking about what is this inversion? And it's not necessarily even very avertedly oppressive.
[00:21:24] It can be very empowering. It can be, you know, it's your self expression, it's self care, it's wellness, liberation.
[00:21:33] But I think we need to also see the deeper distractions placed upon that.
[00:21:42] So I just think we need to have awareness around that. Because if we're continuously watching ourselves from the outside, that monitoring, correcting, editing, again, coming back to attention is life force.
[00:21:59] And attention determines what grows in our reality.
[00:22:04] And if generations of women can be conditioned to funnel enormous psychic energy into managing perception, then that energy is removed from philosophy, leadership, spiritual development, artistry, sovereignty, community building, book reading, deep study, self realization, motherhood.
[00:22:32] And then I think about.
[00:22:35] I wanted to talk about Cleopatra as well, because this feels really important to bring into the conversation. Because history has reduced her to a seductress, a temptress, a beautiful woman who manipulated powerful men.
[00:22:53] But I feel this is one of the great historical diminishments of female intelligence, which is all throughout history.
[00:23:04] But Cleopatra was extraordinarily educated. She spoke multiple languages.
[00:23:12] She was politically strategic, very educated economically. She was deeply cultured and capable of navigating one of the most unstable political periods in history.
[00:23:29] She understood diplomacy, theatre, symbolism, power, astronomy and psychological influence. And Egypt under her rule remained intellectually and economically significant. Immense, immense imperial pressure.
[00:23:48] And yet the collective memory continually returns to her beauty, which I have found fascinating.
[00:23:57] And it seems that we are more comfortable reducing powerful women to aesthetics rather than confronting her incredible intellect.
[00:24:12] And if a woman's influence can be explained purely through attractiveness, then the deeper threat of her Consciousness never has to be acknowledged. And women have absorbed this message unconsciously for generations.
[00:24:29] Your power is how you look, your influence is your desirability, you, your relevance is your youth. And particularly your value is visual.
[00:24:43] And even now, when we speak about iconic women, their appearance is discussed before their philosophy, their courage, their work.
[00:24:56] And I really don't think this is accidental because a woman that is preoccupied with maintaining her visual value, again, this is the control then coming back to devoting herself to her inner authority. And this is why I think this conversation is so important to be hard, because when we think about the inversion, it becomes really psychologically sophisticated because it's constantly shape shifting and.
[00:25:33] Yeah, and a great example of this is Pamela Anderson. She, for me, has been a fascinating cultural mirror because for decades when I was growing up, Pamela Anderson was shown as one of the ultimate fantasy projections of hyper sexualized beauty culture.
[00:25:57] She was kind of like the pin up in my era for cosmic surgery, implants, glamour, aesthetics, really hyper feminized performance.
[00:26:09] And she became really symbolic in that way. And it was sold to my generation and it exaggerated this desirability and this, this. My generation really had this image consciously or unconsciously. And now reflecting on that, I can see through my generation how that's really impacted the beauty standards. And a lot of people in my generation got the implants and I felt a lot of pressure with that.
[00:26:44] And it's really interesting now. And why I'm using her as an example is because now culture has pivoted and she again has become celebrated, but she's become celebrated for appearing without makeup, her natural skin, her, her minimal styling and simplicity.
[00:27:08] And it's really fascinating to watch because for me, it's the same.
[00:27:15] It's, you know, from one extreme to the other, but it's the same. It's still showing women this completely unrealistic beauty standard and that if they don't measure up to that, then they're failures. So my generation has gone through this, oh, you need to have this, like implants and look this way.
[00:27:41] And so women did all that and now it's like, oh, you have to look effortlessly beautiful and perfect without makeup.
[00:27:48] And you can see how this is just so fascinating.
[00:27:54] And it's this, this is why I'm calling impossible beauty. Because, you know, now it's pivoted. You should look effortlessly beautiful, age naturally, but perfectly appear untouched and no longer care about beauty, but still really care about it.
[00:28:12] And I feel like it's this trap, it's this performance changing costumes, but it's this Obsession with our appearance that is remaining the center of this.
[00:28:25] And this is why we're exhausted. And no matter what path we choose, if we participate in the beauty culture, we're criticized for vanity. And there's two paths. If you reject it, then you only sort of are able to do that while you remain beautiful doing it. And so with this, the issue is when beauty becomes this primary way through which women seek worth, identity and safety.
[00:29:05] Because in that regard, our life just becomes absolutely consumed by maintenance, maintaining youth, attractiveness, relevance, visibility.
[00:29:21] And you know, I've experienced this in, in my own life. And you know, the years pass, the soul awaits. And I think about the books that remain unwritten, the visions, the intuition that's getting ignored, and the intellect like the spiritual life. And I think this is where it becomes uncomfortable to talk about, like, how many female genius have been lost because women were taught to spend their prime years trying to become visually acceptable instead of spiritually, intellectually and creatively realize, like, how many women have postponed their dharma because they believed their highest value was attractiveness.
[00:30:12] How many women know about anti aging protocols than they do about philosophy or nervous system regulation or economics, or ancient texts and spirituality?
[00:30:25] And I'm not criticizing women. I feel this is a cultural conditioning and it's been reinforced for generations. And this is again why I want to bring light on this subject. Because I believe many of us now are feeling the exhaustion of it. And we're starting to realize that we don't want our entire existence organized around being looked at. I certainly don't. I said to one of my girlfriends the other day, I want how I look to be the least interesting thing about me. And you know, the feminine soul, she wants to create, think, love, study, build, awaken.
[00:31:09] But instead, beauty has become a kind of currency and this bargaining tool.
[00:31:17] And if beauty alone could save women, then the most beautiful women who have ever lived would then in this thought, would have been the happiest women alive.
[00:31:30] But we know that's not true. Again, also from history, I think about Marilyn Monroe, a woman who became one of the most projected upon feminine figures in history.
[00:31:43] Desired, globally worshipped, photographed, transformed into an icon of again, feminine fantasy. And beneath all of that projection, there was loneliness, addiction, emotional instability, deep sadness, and this longing that she had to be truly seen beyond the image that the world had constructed of her. And so beauty didn't save her. And I think that is something important to acknowledge, because this beauty culture continues to sell women the illusion that beauty is power. And it ignores that women are psychologically Struggling beneath that pressure of maintaining that power.
[00:32:33] And I don't think beauty was ever supposed to be the center of a woman's life, but we've kind of commodified the feminine as that is the self worth. And I think one of the most important things women need to understand is that you do not have to heal this loop by suddenly loving yourself more in a way to heal it is slowly rebuilding a relationship with yourself that isn't entirely through appearance and external validation and this constant self observation. And so I wanted to offer some ways of doing that to break these unconscious loops and practically spending less time looking at yourself digitally.
[00:33:27] And I went a step ahead of this. And I also, for many, many years now, I haven't used like a filter. And that maybe seem like a very small thing, but it was just this like, subtle nuance that seeing myself in a. In a different way and the, the contrast of what I was seeing and then what I was seeing on the filter and what that did, like, I just noticed how subtle that was. And I was like, oh, I am not doing that.
[00:33:58] And so you'll notice, that's why I, I don't. And also unfollowing people who make you feel chronically inadequate, I would go a step further in that and say also people that don't make you feel good, like, have, like don't have a good opinion about you. You know, when you say something and they just. Yeah, you know what I mean?
[00:34:23] Also not filming and documenting every moment and creating periods where you're not consuming beauty content at all, allowing your brain to recalibrate back to reality. And then, you know, how do we rebuild this self worth that we have been told is, you know, the self worth is the desirability.
[00:34:47] And these are the questions. Is, who am I beyond appearance? What are my gifts? What am I creating? What do I deeply care about? What am I devoted to? What am I learning? What conversations nourish me? What gives my life meaning? Because I really feel when we start to connect to our purpose, there is far less tyranny of this self observation, this self obsession. And that is, is the danger. And I think this is very nuanced. But even spiritually, I think we need to grieve the impossible standard itself that we're never going to win.
[00:35:29] And I'm laughing because if you're listening to this, you're probably new, like quite competitive, and you like to win and you just try harder and harder. But I really want to reframe this and see it as liberation because once you stop expecting beauty to save you. You are finally free to discover what actually nourishes your soul. And I think one of the deepest practical shifts is learning how to cultivate a life that genuinely feels beautiful. To live, not looks beautiful, feels beautiful.
[00:36:12] And that could be a regulated nervous system, meaningful friendships, purposeful work, depth, creativity, spiritual connection, time in nature. That is a big one. I have to say, when I am in the garden, I do not give one thought to how I am looking and thinking about how we can care for our body rather than controlling it. And so how I look at beauty now, I really look at it as that vitality, as cultivating the ojas, as preservation, rather than fixing and correcting.
[00:36:57] I my beauty philosophy, that it is really internally, but there's so many factors involved in that. It's, you know, good food, it's joy, it's relationships. And I really do think that is more of that ancient vitality, that beauty shining from within. It is essentially how I look and feel about beauty now.
[00:37:22] I really give my younger self a lot of compassion. And especially the younger women now the. The standards are even more intense.
[00:37:34] However, I have seen lately that there is new beauty standards emerging of, like, older women and looking really unique because the pendulum always swings and like the pendulum has been on this perfect looking the same, same procedures, and now they're predicting that looking unique in terms of having a particular floor is what makes you unique. It's like the. The wood table, that its floor is the knot of the wood, and that is what gives it its beauty. It's. It's kind of that.
[00:38:17] That is really fascinating me now. And it feels more of an exhale rather than this perfect, almost.
[00:38:28] Yeah, like flawless look.
[00:38:31] So focusing on what it is that you do, you know, love about yourself and on all accounts.
[00:38:42] But I guess the biggest takeaway from this conversation is I really want to start moving this to, okay, what is at the root cause how can we start healing these deeper aspects so that when we're in our 50s, 60s, beyond that, this isn't something that we're needing to grasp then?
[00:39:07] And how can we also be that beacon for younger women to say, you know, to be excited about getting older because you're fully authentic and liberated and so much more than your age and your face.
[00:39:28] What about. What are you working on? What. What makes you interesting? What. What are you doing when you completely lose that lens of critiquing yourself?
[00:39:41] And how can you strengthen more of that?
[00:39:46] And don't buy into.
[00:39:49] Just be aware, just be curious of these Stories that society is projecting on your visual value and how can you reclaim that and yeah, empower yourself.
[00:40:05] And so that is where I wanted to go with that. I also want to mention if you're interested in this topic and want to go into it deeper and this was interesting to you.
[00:40:17] It's a book called the One Square Foot of Skin. It's by Justin Bateman and I highly recommend it.
[00:40:29] I read it a couple of years ago now and I do recommend it to, to every woman to read.
[00:40:36] So I'd really love you to let me know what you thought about this episode.
[00:40:41] It was interesting. I recorded this once before because my first recording I felt was too spicy and even when I was recording this one, I kind of felt myself being very mindful of the words that I was using, which is interesting because I think this conversation is very nuanced, very loaded, very personal. Personal.
[00:41:07] And yeah. So I hope that you took away the key messages and I do want to let you know that I have opened up my second round of Lumen Literary Club. And this is a non fiction book club. It is for women and it's basically reading difficult books, books that make us expand our consciousness. And what I mean by that is we grow through reading these difficult texts because they challenge our beliefs, what we think about reality as it is.
[00:41:50] And this for me is the greatest way to up level and change our life because we're expanding our our reality with breaking through our thought.
[00:42:04] And so I'm loving this container that I have created. The first one that we had, Lumen Circle 1 was incredible. And so we have just started Circle 2. So if you're hearing this and you're like I need to be in that, please message me because we have just started the next book. It is the Yu Giyas and this is a book that I do recommend everyone to read because it had such a profound effect on me. We actually have one of the authors, Joseph Selby, coming into our third and final discussion. So you'll be able to ask him any questions around the book.
[00:42:48] And you'll also be in a community of women that are just phenomenal.
[00:42:53] And we catch up. This is a spanned over three months. We catch up once a month and we have a WhatsApp group where we share anything that we're finding challenging or what is really exciting us in the books.
[00:43:11] So I want to leave you with that. I'm sending you lots of love and I'll speak to you soon. Thanks for tuning in to Star Being. May the wisdom shared resonate in your soul. Until next time, stay connected and keep reaching for the stars. This is Star Being signing off.
