Declare Your Own Authentic Beauty
Goals:
- Re-envision your beauty as a creative, dynamic process
- Inhabit your body with joy and confidence
Benefit:
Cultivate the ability to see beauty independently of societal pressures, opening to a deep appreciation of the diverse factors that contribute to authentic beauty.
The Body Positive promotes the practice of creating our own beauty definitions. The Be Body Positive Model's fourth competency, Declare Your Own Authentic Beauty, offers a process for taking power away from the external messages we receive about what beauty is supposed to look like, and deciding for ourselves what constitutes real beauty.
Beauty ideals are social constructs, not truth. If you look back throughout history, you will see that these ideals have changed over time. In each era, however, the dominant definition of beauty excludes most of the population. When people believe in their ugliness, they often employ harmful measures in their attempts to transform their bodies. They become trapped in an endless battle to conform to an external, arbitrary, often unreachable standard. The messages defining beauty come not only from advertising and media, but from our friends, families, and cultural values as well. To declare one's authentic beauty is a bold act that The Body Positive sees as critically important if we are to ever change the definitions of beauty that cause so many people to suffer.
Exploring beauty through a Body Positive lens teaches us to see our own beauty as a dynamic, engaged relationship with the world around us. We discover the essence of beauty in ourselves simply because we are living, breathing, conscious beings. We honor our bodies as we pass through each developmental stage of life. Our definition expands and deepens to include whatever age we happen to be in the moment. We have the opportunity to truly care for our bodies, because we do not confuse physical self-care with a desire to transform our bodies to fit someone else's definition of beauty. We are free to fully engage in life. To declare authentic beauty is the radical idea that it is possible to fully inhabit our bodies and trust our hungers and desires-to experience beauty as the authentic, open hearted, and vulnerable expression of our unique selves.
To read about the other four competencies of the Be Body Positive Model, go to: