9
TRANSCRIPT Beauty & Femininity SALON NO. 7

Beauty & Femininity · This is my second attempt and I’m already losing my voice, so please be patient with me. ... master of running from my feelings. I didn’t want to feel,

  • Upload
    others

  • View
    3

  • Download
    0

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: Beauty & Femininity · This is my second attempt and I’m already losing my voice, so please be patient with me. ... master of running from my feelings. I didn’t want to feel,

T R A N S C R I P T

Beauty & Femininity

S A L O N N O . 7

Page 2: Beauty & Femininity · This is my second attempt and I’m already losing my voice, so please be patient with me. ... master of running from my feelings. I didn’t want to feel,

Salon No. 7 - Beauty & Femininitymodern day icon

© French Kiss Life Inc. 2019PAGE 2 OF 9

S A L O N N O . 7

Beauty & Femininity

Hello and welcome to Become a Modern Day Icon. This is Tonya Leigh, the creator and your hostess. You are listening to salon number seven, Beauty and Femininity. I’m somewhat laughing right now because I spent the last hour recording the salon for you. At the very end, my computer decides to freeze and I lost everything. I’m always being reminded that the universe is constantly giving me ways in which I can practice my philosophy, that I’ve ease and fun and play in femininity, and really trusting that the universe is conspiring on my behalf.

This is my second attempt and I’m already losing my voice, so please be patient with me. But I trust that it all happened for a reason. Who knows? Maybe something comes up in this salon that I was truly meant to share. I want to start out with a Sophia Loren quote that says, “Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief that she is beautiful.” Your feminine essence is powerful. The most iconic women know how to leverage their femininity to create their hearts’ desires. When you understand what your feminine powers are, you’ll equally begin to understand your own beauty.

In this line, I’m going to be sharing the five feminine qualities to leverage to step into your iconic power. How your environment is impacting your iconic attraction power. The power of the ask, and the specific things that you need to be asking for right now. Why perfectionism is destroying your dreams and your self-worth, and why competition and comparison is destroying your peace of mind and how to leverage these qualities for more.

Before we get started, it’s really important to understand the art of femininity could be an entire course in itself. And so, to honor the feminine, I’m really going to focus on depth of this conversation and just cover a few concepts to begin to open you up more into your own femininity and beauty. You may have also noticed that these days there’s a lot of conversation floating around about femininity. I personally believe it’s a much needed discussion. We as women have been fighting for equality and freedom and our own rights. In the process, I believe the pendulum has swung too far to the other extreme, which is extreme masculinization.

In my company, I often attract women who are craving more of their feminine. These are women who have often been immersed in the worlds of corporate or medicine or law, which are extremely masculine professions. Although they can’t quite put their finger on it, they know that there’s something missing and what is missing is their feminine essence. It’s within that femininity that they can tap into their iconic power and begin to do some really beautiful healing within themselves.

Unfortunately, we’ve been conditioned to believe that we should not trust our feminine. That somehow if we listen to that part of ourselves, we’ll lose control. That we will destroy our lives or will wreak havoc wherever we go. So, we shut her down. But that part of us has such a deep longing. Let me ask you

something. What are you longing for? When I ask this question, I hear things like more money. I want a promotion at work. I want to lose weight. I want to find a partner. I want to travel.

I always honor a woman’s desires. Yet underneath more stuff and a better me is a much deeper longing that is available to you in this moment. The feminine heart does not believe in a future state of enlightenment waiting until one day to fill her deepest longing. This moment is where she wants to open up and to live fully. If you look at what you desire in the external world, you’ll most likely discover as I did and my clients do, that what you’re really desiring more of are feelings of expressing your authentic self and natural gifts.

Page 3: Beauty & Femininity · This is my second attempt and I’m already losing my voice, so please be patient with me. ... master of running from my feelings. I didn’t want to feel,

Salon No. 7 - Beauty & Femininitymodern day icon

© French Kiss Life Inc. 2019PAGE 3 OF 9

To experience this moment more fully. To be present and open to life. To feel connected. To feel a sense of belonging in community, and to love and be loved. When you stop waiting, controlling, trying to be better, trying to get more stuff and fully experiencing each moment, what you’ll find is that your feminine heart will lead you towards your deepest desires from a place of ease, love, and play.

Before we move into the key points that I want to cover in today’s salon, I want to touch briefly on the conversation of the feminine and masculine. I think sometimes when we talk about femininity, we think that that’s the only thing that we need to nurture in our lives, when in fact it’s really important for us to have a beautiful blend of both to create a life you love.

Personally, I’m in an area and in a time of my life where I’m really working on cultivating more of my masculine. I’m a very feminine woman by heart. I’m very wild. I love living in the mystery. I’m okay with uncertainty. I love the nurturing aspect of the feminine and all of those qualities have served me really well. But I also realized to cultivate the life that I love, it’s going to require that I also begin to nurture the masculine aspects. When you think of the masculine, the qualities that come to mind for me are the focus, determination, being direct, the linear and logical thinking. It’s that provider and protective energy.

One of my most popular blog post ever is called How a Lady of Leisure Hustles, and it’s basically an exploration of how your masculine can serve your feminine. How structure, focus, determination, and providing for yourself and protecting yourself can serve your feminine heart. As you can see, having these qualities can enhance your life. However, imagine only living in that masculine world and what that will do to your feminine heart that longs for ease, love, desire, wild abandon, play, and receiving, just to name a few.

What will happen is that you’ll find yourself shutting the world out, not trusting your intuition, trying to control everything, always living in your head, being serious most of the time and contracting more and more. When you trap your feminine soul, she rebels. This can show up in so many ways, such as self-loathing, feelings of depression, feeling overly controlling, and an overall sense of dis-ease. If you want to step into your iconic power, it is essential that you

begin to embrace the feminine. Create a relationship with her and listen to what she has to say.

The feminine has many qualities, but for the purpose of this salon, I really want to spend time thinking about the five that would really help you step into your iconic power. First, the feminine feels. We have been taught that it’s bad to be emotional. That we should always experience bliss. That we should always keep things in control. That bad emotions will wreck our lives. So we shut down our feelings and try to pretend that everything is fine.

I mean, how many times have we gone to a party after having a terrible day and someone ask us how we’re doing and we put on a happy face and say, “We’re fine.” It’s a lie. It’s not allowing ourselves to be true with what is going on in that moment. If I’ve learned anything, there are no bad emotions. We tend to label everything, but there are no bad emotions. There are only resisted ones. I am speaking from experience here because I used to be the master of running from my feelings. I didn’t want to feel, so I ate, I shopped, I traveled, I called up friends. I would do anything to distract me from feeling.

My mind tried to convince me that I didn’t have the capacity to feel the deep range of emotions that were brewing underneath me. However, when a woman shuts down her feelings, she’s shutting down life itself. She’s shutting down her guidance system and she ends up feeling lost and confused. Trying not to feel is like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. You can only hold it down for so long and the more you push, the more you repress, the more pressure that builds within you. Eventually that ball is going to come up. Allowing it to come up can be one of the most beautiful experiences of your life.

Page 4: Beauty & Femininity · This is my second attempt and I’m already losing my voice, so please be patient with me. ... master of running from my feelings. I didn’t want to feel,

Salon No. 7 - Beauty & Femininitymodern day icon

© French Kiss Life Inc. 2019PAGE 4 OF 9

For me personally, I knew I had a lot of feelings underneath that I had been afraid to feel and to face. When I asked a friend of mine, who happens to be a psychiatrist at Harvard, what to do, he said something that would forever change my life. At first I was a little perplexed. I expected him to have this beautiful formula. I expected him to tell me what to do to feel better. But what he said to me is, “Tonya, sit with it.” And I did. I learned to sit with my feelings.

At first I cried. I screamed. I curled up in fetal position for hours. Then the storm passed, as it always does. I felt such a sense of peace. Before that moment, I had felt numb. I wasn’t experiencing life. I was spending most of my time resisting it. However, the feminine welcomes all. She wants to feel life and everything that it has to offer.

If you don’t label your emotions, if there are no bad or good emotions, there are just these waves of energy that comes in and out of your life, you’ll begin to welcome everything that life has to offer you. You may be wondering though as I did. We have this whole formula that our thoughts create our feelings, which is true. If we want to feel better, we need to create better feeling thoughts. And

so, for me, I was just always trying to think better feeling thoughts and I was in my head all of the time.

Again, I think the feminine embraces the middle path. It doesn’t have to be either or. What I do know is that as I allowed myself to feel more and more, I had a better understanding of where I was and what the stories were that were creating the feelings. From that place, I could then begin to find the better feeling thoughts.

However, when I was at that point in my life that I wasn’t allowing myself to feel, I had no access point into the stories, into the beliefs that had been haunting me for years but I was never willing to face. In your feminine, you don’t try to control, you don’t resist and contract from your feelings. You welcome all of life. Within that welcoming and opening, you’ll discover your iconic power. Ask yourself, what have you not been allowing yourself to feel, and what is that costing you?

The second feminine quality to nurture is the feminine heart desires. Your heart has so many desires. Most of my work with women isn’t around how to get what they want, but it’s more around defining what they want. Most women in our culture have been living according to what everybody else has told them that they should want, and they haven’t spent any time discovering their own true desires.

Denying or resisting your desires is destructive. It’s just like trying to resist your desire for chocolate instead of acknowledging that you want a piece and allowing yourself to enjoy it and create a healthy relationship with it. Repression and resistance will shatter your heart. Acknowledgement and acceptance will open it.

Begin nurturing your femininity by understanding and nurturing your desires. This is going to require that you do something that a lot of women have a really tough time doing, and that is, become still. Allow yourself to have quiet time and space so that you can begin to explore, what do I want right now? At first you may hear, “I don’t know,” but please don’t stop there because you do know. Continue to ask yourself and trust what comes up for you.

Many times throughout my day, I’ll stop and ask myself, “Darling, what do you want right now?” Sometimes I’ll hear things like peace, movement, chocolate, rest, connection. The more I listen, the more I hear. Allow yourself to be honest with your desires, which will require that you don’t judge them.

Just last week at our society retreat, one of my beautiful ladies said something. The moment she said it, we could all feel her energy shift and our energy shifted as well. Her desire was to nest. This is a woman who has been working hard and been an overachiever her entire life. To give herself permission to just nest, to

stay at home, to cultivate family and a beautiful environment, it was such a beautiful process to watch her actually step into her true desire.

Page 5: Beauty & Femininity · This is my second attempt and I’m already losing my voice, so please be patient with me. ... master of running from my feelings. I didn’t want to feel,

Salon No. 7 - Beauty & Femininitymodern day icon

© French Kiss Life Inc. 2019PAGE 5 OF 9

During our work together this year, I have watched this lovely woman struggle with this desire. Her desire to just be at home and to rest. To see her finally give herself permission and see her radiate the moment she truly felt that it was okay to want what she wanted, it was so permissive for everyone in the group. For us all to honor our desires without judgment.

You see, in a woman’s life there are ebb and flows. There will be times and periods in your life where you want to hustle and build empires and do things that your heart’s really calling you to do. Then there are going to be other times when your heart’s calling you to rest and to slow down. Trusting your heart is a skill that you must practice. If I’ve learned anything, it’s this. Your heart’s truest desires will never lead you astray. So darling, what do you desire?

Now I want to talk about another feminine quality that is so important, and it’s that the feminine loves to play. Plato said, “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” At the French Kiss the World Society retreat, I watched women step back into a state of play and the freedom and creativity that comes from this childlike state. We danced, we floated down the river. We jumped into the water. Watching and hearing the smiles and laughter was such a beautiful testament to the power of our feminine, which requires a life of play, not just work.

Many people fear play though thinking that if they aren’t serious and working 24/7, they will not be successful. However, when I think about the most successful people I know, play is a part of their life. They make it a part of their business plan. It’s within their states of play that they find ideas, solutions, and inspiration.

I know for me personally when I feel stuck or I’m lacking inspiration, I don’t try to work harder or force it because that never works. What I do is I go out and play. Sometimes that means floating down the river. Sometimes it means going out dancing, or it may be going to the dog park. When I started to view life as a playground and not some serious battlefield, everything in my life shifted. I began asking questions like, what does play feel like to me?

What I know is that play is different for every woman. For you, it may be going to the spa and getting a facial. For another woman, it may be taking tango lessons. It’s different for every woman. Define what play feels and looks like for you. Another question I began to ask is, how can I make this easier? We’ve been conditioned to believe that life has to be hard. Work has to be hard. If it’s not hard, it’s not working. I believe that that is a lie.

Sometimes things in life may not be easy, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t breathe ease into them. Begin to ask yourself, whatever you’re struggling with

in life right now, how can you make it easier? Another question that I love is, how can I have more fun in this area? Think about an area in your life that is lacking play. Perhaps it’s at work, perhaps it’s in your relationships and begin to explore creative ways that you can add more play into them.

Finally, and I think this is a really important one is, do I like my playmates? Meaning those people who you allow into your life. Just last week at the society retreat... I know I keep referencing it, but so many good things came up during our time together. But we were on a raft and one of the ladies said, “You know what I’m realizing, is it’s not the destination, but it’s who is in the boat with you that really makes for a beautiful life.” That’s what I mean when I talk about playmates. Who’s in your boat and are you enjoying the people that are around you. Begin to ask yourself these questions on a daily basis and tap into your feminine, playful spirit.

Another quality of the feminine is, the feminine is creative. Whether you want to admit it or not, you are a creative being and you are creating your life. Creativity comes in many forms, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are a musician or a painter. It’s more about how you look at your life and coming up with creative solutions to whatever is in front of you.

Page 6: Beauty & Femininity · This is my second attempt and I’m already losing my voice, so please be patient with me. ... master of running from my feelings. I didn’t want to feel,

Salon No. 7 - Beauty & Femininitymodern day icon

© French Kiss Life Inc. 2019PAGE 6 OF 9

There’s a beautiful Corita Kent quote that says, “Creativity belongs to the artist in each of us. To create means to relate. The root meaning of the word art is “to fit together” and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating, whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day.” If you live within a world of assumptions or close mindedness based on what you’ve been taught, you are missing out on what is truly possible for you and the creativity that is within you to approach any situation.

The feminine spirit is abundant with creativity, and within that creativity are ideas and solutions to any challenge that you may face. Creativity is something that must be nurtured on a daily basis. I find the more that I nurture my creative process and my practices, the more creative I become when I’m faced with a challenge. However, I find that a lot of women postpone creativity until one day, and this is usually out of fear of either failure or out of allowing daily obligations to take over.

However, as a feminine woman, you must commit to nurturing this part of yourself. Whether it’s through a daily writing ritual or painting, or perhaps it’s through cooking or how you dress yourself, what’s important is that you are honoring your creative practice. Ask yourself, do you have a creative practice? How do you feel called to express your creativity? Again, this could be through your wardrobe, the meals that you’re cooking, writing poetry, taking dance classes, or anything that you feel needs to be expressed. Then how do you intend to honor your creativity? Because within your creativity, you’ll open up more of your iconic power.

The final feminine quality that I want to discuss is the feminine loves. One of my favorite questions to ask is, what would love do? This guarantees that I am leading from my feminine heart? Unfortunately, we’ve been taught to disconnect from ourselves to protect our hearts and contract out of fear of rejection, hurt, and failure. However, if the feminine desires one thing, it’s love. To love and to be loved. What I’ve discovered is that when I give love, I become more love.

The most important relationship that you have in life starts with yourself. I recently wrote a blog post about romance. I used to believe romance was with a partner, and passion. Yes, passion is important, but it doesn’t necessarily require partner. What I’ve learned is that when I look outside of myself for things, I often begin to feel disconnected from myself because what we want from others, we must first learn to give to ourselves.

As Oscar Wilde said, “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” I have worked and I have been one of those ladies who waited for prince charming or waited for my partner to change. Yet, what I’ve come to discover is that when I live in compromise, that’s what I attract in my relationships. Equally, when I live in integrity with what I value and what I hold dear in my own truth, I attract the same kind of relationships into my life. Again. The love always begins and ends with me.

The beautiful news is that we can begin to commit to ourselves in this moment by learning to deeply love and honor ourselves and equally loving and honoring those people in our lives. To do this, you must think about what it would look like if you let your life become a deep reflection of your deepest truth and values. This may require that you make hard decisions. I know that I’ve had to make some really tough decisions when I really committed to myself on this level. I can offer you this. You can make those decisions from a deep place of love.

When I finally sat down with one of my deep values of passion and love, I began to let that be reflected in my daily life. I realized that I was living in a compromised relationship. As I allowed myself to sit with the discomfort of that truth, I finally made a decision to honor myself and to make a decision out of love, not fear. I committed to myself and I sent love to all of those involved.

Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.” What is within each of us is love, and to disconnect from ourselves and others is destructive. Love is available to you in this moment, and it will require that you open your heart; risk

Page 7: Beauty & Femininity · This is my second attempt and I’m already losing my voice, so please be patient with me. ... master of running from my feelings. I didn’t want to feel,

Salon No. 7 - Beauty & Femininitymodern day icon

© French Kiss Life Inc. 2019PAGE 7 OF 9

being hurt, risk being rejected, and begin to offer compassion to yourself and to those around you. Ask yourself, where are you not loving yourself ? Where are you not honoring yourself ? Where are you withholding love from others, and what would love do?

Now that we’ve touched on the five feminine qualities that I really want you to begin to nurture, I now want to talk about something else that’s outside of you but is a reflection of you and your feminine state, and it’s your environment. Your environment is a reflection of your inner world. If you’ve been living mostly within your masculine, you may realize that your environment could be lacking beauty, creativity and inspiration.

The feminine desires to be surrounded by beauty and ease. Is your environment a reflection of that? When I think about iconic women, one of the things that I am most intrigued by is their living spaces and how it is really a reflection of who they are. A great example of this is Betsy Johnson’s home. With just one look, you know that this is a woman of whimsical adventure and just wild abandon. You get that this is Betsy Johnson’s home, and you also understand that her favorite color is pink.

Looking around at your environment, you may fill an invitation to use this space as a container to begin to nurture your creative practice. Perhaps there is a room in your house that you want to reinvent to become a true reflection of you. When I worked with Oprah and the IKEA Life Improvement Project, this was the overall theme. Creating a home that is a true reflection of you.

I invite you to do the following exercise. I want you to think about a room in your house that you are least satisfied with and I want you to go and sit in that room. Close your eyes and ask the room, what do you want to be? Allow words and images just to form in your mind. Then use whatever comes to you as the creative directive of how you can transform this space to be a reflection of you.

Now we’re going to explore another quality of the feminine that is essential for living a full life, and it lies within the quality of receiving. As a woman, in our culture, I know that we are taught to be strong and reliable. While these are beautiful masculine qualities possess, there is also a much needed conversation around allowing yourself to receive and to be nurtured.

As a woman, we are natural caregivers and always seem to be nurturing others. However, if we are always giving, where is their space in your life to receive? The feminine not only gives, she also opens her heart to receive. This means that you will be required to do something that may be very uncomfortable for you, and that is to ask for help.

At our Durango retreat, I was able to see this reflected back with one of the ladies as she was working with the horses. Before she went into the pen, the trainer said to her, “Just ask me if you need anything.” Keep in mind that this is a beautiful, brilliant, very successful woman who has spent most of her life giving to others. What we watched unfold in that pen was her getting frustrated, not knowing really what to do, and all she needed to do was ask for help. Help that had already been offered to her.

It was really interesting because she knows that this is one of her, I don’t want to say weaknesses, but it is an area that she’s wanting to step more into because she’s doing big things in this world and she is going to be required to ask for support. She’s not alone in this. I know that I have always prided myself in being an independent woman, the woman who’s always got it together. The truth is that I don’t. There are many times that I don’t have it together. I’ve learned that to create what I’m on a mission to create, it’s going to require that I stop pretending that I can keep it together and instead begin to ask for support in those areas where I truly need it.

When I think about where women need to start in this process of asking, there are four questions that are very simple and it’s a great way for you to begin to think of where you need support and how you can begin to ask for it. The first question is, where do you feel stuck or overwhelmed in life? The second question is, what do you need

Page 8: Beauty & Femininity · This is my second attempt and I’m already losing my voice, so please be patient with me. ... master of running from my feelings. I didn’t want to feel,

Salon No. 7 - Beauty & Femininitymodern day icon

© French Kiss Life Inc. 2019PAGE 8 OF 9

in these areas? The third question is, who can you ask for help? And the final question is, what do you need to ask from them?

I’m going to offer you just a really simple example of how I use these questions in my own life. One of the things that I don’t claim to be is a domestic goddess. I happen to love a clean and beautiful home, but I’m not really good at doing all of this stuff that it requires to keep it that way. Where do I feel overwhelmed in life? For me it’s keeping my home clean and organized and beautiful. What do I need in these areas? I need someone to come in on a weekly basis to support me in keeping my home in such a state where I feel that I can live with ease and beauty.

Who do I need to ask for help? Well, first of all, I needed to begin to ask around to see if people in my community knew of anyone that I could ask to come in and support me. Then finally, what do I need from them? Well, I made a specific list of things that I would love for someone to come in and support me around. The more specific you can be around where you need help, the easier it will be for people to help you. Begin to think about where it is that you feel stuck or overwhelmed in your life, and who can you ask for help? What do you need? What is the question or what is it specifically that you need to ask from them?

And so, finally, I want to wrap up this salon by talking about the three biggest things that I see robbing women of their own feminine essence. These things go hand in hand because they are all rooted in the same fear, and that is not enoughness. Those three things are perfectionism, competition, and comparison. I want you to think about a situation where one or all of these feelings have come up for you. As you see yourself in that situation, I want you to notice what happens in your body and your connection with yourself and others.

I remember being in a situation where I was constantly comparing myself. When I look back now, excuse me, of how I was showing up in that situation, what I saw was a woman contracting and denying herself of love and beauty and fully

living in that moment. I just want to say here, I mean, it’s so understandable as to why we as women would fill this way. We have been taught to compete. We’ve been given standards of beauty that are unobtainable probably by 99% of the population, and we live in this life of comparison and ranking and always trying to see where we fit in that equation.

But when you’re living from a place of perfectionism or comparison or competing, what it does is it causes you to do one of two things. You either contract or you overpower to prove yourself. But I want you to know, you have nothing to prove. Your presence is proof enough and the more you tap into your feminine nature, the bigger your presence will become because where you are in alignment with your femininity, there is love, there is connection, there is beauty, there’s passion. There are all of those things that we admire so much in other people. And those things do not align with perfectionism and comparison or competition.

You see, the feminine is this open vessel of creativity, wildness, and living within the mystery of life. Those three things, the perfectionism, competing and comparison will destroy a woman’s heart if she doesn’t learn to be aware and constantly tear down the walls that separate her from absolute love. The first one that I want to address is perfectionism. When I look back over my life, I realize that everything good that I’ve done has been my willingness to be imperfect. Interestingly enough, the more I share about my life, the more imperfections that I disclose, the more connected I feel to others and vice versa.

However, like many women, there was a time in my life where I didn’t want people to see who I really was. I was afraid if people saw the real me, they would reject me, they wouldn’t like me. Boy, how exhausting is it to keep up that facade. What I’ve learned is that when we try to be so perfect, we reject ourselves. It’s betraying ourselves of who we truly are, and our feminine hearts are going to rebel because she does not believe in perfectionism. She believes in living authentically with a heart full of love.

Page 9: Beauty & Femininity · This is my second attempt and I’m already losing my voice, so please be patient with me. ... master of running from my feelings. I didn’t want to feel,

Salon No. 7 - Beauty & Femininitymodern day icon

© French Kiss Life Inc. 2019PAGE 9 OF 9

As you go about your week, I want you to consider where you’re trying so hard to live perfectly and what this is costing you. When you think about the icons that we admire, it’s their imperfections that we actually love. When you think of Oprah, for example, imagine if she was this perfect being that never did wrong. She would not have the millions of fans who adore her ability to be imperfect and vulnerable and to share her struggles with millions across the world.

Cindy Crawford is another great example. I mean, here she had this mole on her face that people tried to tell her she needed to remove in order to be a model but she refused. I believe it was that belief in her own beauty and honoring what many would have considered an imperfect flaw that really catapulted her into supermodel status. Embrace your imperfections because they are actually what make you so beautiful.

Now I want to talk about comparison and competing, because if anything goes against your feminine nature, it’s these two things. The reason being is that it disconnects you from yourself and others. The feminine thrives in a state of connection. It’s unfortunate that we as women have been conditioned to believe that women are our enemies and not our allies. We’ve been encouraged to put up our walls to protect ourselves. We have bought into definitions of beauty and success that don’t serve us.

I want you to learn to embrace your own definition of beauty that honors you and that you can live out fully today. I know that when I started this journey, I was most certainly trying to live up to a standard of beauty that I would never ever achieve, such as being a size two and having a more straight figure. It was exhausting. I finally realized that I was fighting with myself and resisting myself on a daily basis.

And so, what I did is that I created my own beauty manifesto. This is a manifesto that ended up being about two pages long. But what I put on those pieces of paper was life changing because it was what beauty truly was for me. It was a definition and a manifesto that I could live and embody in that moment. Some of the things that I wrote down was: I share love wherever I go. I open my heart without judgment. I create warm, inviting spaces. I look for beauty in everyone and everything. I nurture my body with beautiful foods and movement. I love and accept my body as it is in this moment. I dress my body in clothes that expresses who I am and how I want to feel.

These are just a few of the things that I wrote. Again, it was like two full pages. But what I noticed as I began to really change my relationship with beauty is that I dropped the comparison and the competition and I really began to honor the beauty that I saw in other people. A good rule of thumb is this. Where you find yourself comparing, I want you to begin celebrating. That means if you’re comparing yourself with another woman, what is it about her that you find to be so beautiful? What if you celebrated that instead.

Another one is, what you judge, begin to appreciate. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that what we judge in others, we’re probably judging in ourselves. If we judge others harshly, we’re probably more harshly judging ourselves. Begin to appreciate others instead of judging them.

The final one is, where you compete, learn to collaborate. We as women are not competitors. We thrive in a state of collaboration. Especially in business, I see what competition does to women. It’s really difficult, especially for women in corporate to be in those environments because their nature is to collaborate and to work together. These are environments that are asking them to go against their nature. And so, perhaps asking, how can I collaborate more in your life, you will begin to feel that you’re living more in your feminine essence.

To end this salon, I want to leave you with this. The iconic woman doesn’t have time for perfectionism, comparison, or competition. She is on a mission to live her life based on her deepest truths and values. As you go about your week, I want you to ask yourself, am I honoring my feminine? That part of you that desires connection, love, creativity. That part of you that has desires, that asks for support, that creates beautiful spaces and sees beauty in yourself and everything and everyone around you with so much love. I hope you have a beautiful week and remember to be iconic. Cheers.