Last weekend I was away taking a group of students on a yoga retreat. We were staying in an country house in the heart of the East Sussex countryside. The house is old and quirky with a unique history, and the garden is magical and slightly wild. Our yoga space was a beautiful yurt which provided us with a quiet circle in which to do our practice, enabling us to feel connected to each other in a peaceful way.
We ate healthy, vegetarian food, made new friends and took time to relax, restore and replenish. It was a beautiful weekend. On my return I found I was looking at familiar things in a different way, noticing beauty in the ordinary. Every thing and every one of us is beautiful in it's own way - we just need to look outside of the stereotypes that our culture presses upon us.
Nowhere, in my humble opinion, is beauty more apparent than in the natural world. Perfect in it's imperfections, nature reminds us time and time again that there is beauty to be found everywhere we look if we choose to see it. Bindweed, by it's very name, is a weed that we want to eradicate from our gardens, but if you take a closer look you'll see that the flower is truly beautiful. Maybe we could do this more often and learn look outside of conventional opinions of beauty and see it within ourselves too.
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| Beautiful Bindweed |
This lovely article speaks for itself:
50 Reasons Why You Are Absolutely Beautiful
by Linnea Jensen-Stewart via Elephant Journal
Beauty is this word that is often thrown around conditionally.
It’s another category that can sometimes feel esoteric. To me, beauty is a celebration of everything in our lives—even the stuff that we shove deep down in hopes of never seeing that “ugliness” again—it’s the organic substance that fuels our gorgeous smile, and breathtaking laugh. Beauty in its rawness can’t be faked.
2. If you have been to hell and back, your resilience is beautiful.
3. Beauty is a daring action. One that is built on your authentic intention instead of being attached to the outcome.
4. Asking questions—especially “why?”—is always beautiful. Why? Because curiosity is beautiful.
5. If you can string words together into a sentence, and you’re brave enough to let someone else read it, that’s beautiful.
6. Flat stomachs are beautiful, absolutely, but big, soft bellies are beautiful, too.
7. It is beautiful to speak another language. It is beautiful to try.
8. Beauty is putting paint on canvas, or strumming a guitar, or capturing a stunning moment in a picture, or dancing with your eyes closed.
9. Creating is always beautiful.
10. Your eyes are beautiful. Nobody else has eyes like yours. They are deep and authentic and instantly recognizable.
11. Beauty is being brave enough to embrace your feelings- the good, the bad, and the ugly. To open yourself to the possibility that there is something magnificent there.
12. Remember the time your best friend called you crying? Because only your voice could calm her down? That was beautiful.
13. Beauty is laughing so hard your stomach hurts and you’re yelling, “Stop! Seriously, I’m peeing!” Yes. Peeing your pants can be beautiful.
14. Beauty is not letting ignorance be mistaken for truth. Even if you’re the one in the dark.
15. Beauty is calling someone out for saying something hurtful, even if you weren’t the one getting hurt.
16. Your legs are beautiful. No, really. They are. Admire the curve of your calves, the muscles in your thighs, the peaks and valleys of your knee.
17. Letting go of a toxic relationship? Ah, what a beautiful relief!
18. You are beautiful when you rock out so hard at a concert that your neck is sore the next day.
19. Intelligence is beautiful.
20. Humor. There is nothing more beautiful than laughter.
21. Compassion is very, very beautiful.
22. Beauty is wearing an outfit so fierce that when people compliment you on it you say, “I know, right?” and then, “Oh, I mean, thank you.”
23. Strong opinions are beautiful.
24. Respecting other people’s strong opinions is beautiful too.
25. Beauty is your hometown, whether you love it or hate it, because it helped shape you who you are.
26. Beauty is telling a joke only you think is funny and laughing so hard nobody can hear the punchline.
27. Walking away from a relationship –Platonic or romantic because you know its the only way to truly love them is to stop trying to change them, and let them be who they are. That is most beautiful.
29. Listening is beautiful. Choosing to respond instead of react- even if you don’t want to hear it- trusting that there is always something valuable in someone else’s words.
30. Your bare face in the morning is beautiful. Ask the people that love you. It’s true.
31. The way our bodies tell the truth—we blush when we are attracted to someone, we blink twice when we lie, we get sick when we’re pushing our mental limits—is beautiful.
32. Having faith in someone else’s word, because we know we’ve been true to our own. That is beautiful.
33. Beauty is being comfortable enough with someone else to be silent. As the character Sherry Anne in the movie Best In Show put it, “We could talk or not talk forever and still find things to not talk about.”
34. Beauty is being able to walk gracefully in high heels.
35. Beauty is digging your bare feet into the sand.
36. Beauty is sitting very still with your thoughts.
37. It is beautiful to find the strength to ask for help when you need it. No matter how successful you are. We all feel like we’re drowning sometimes, and we would all be glad to pull you from the rapids.
38. Beauty is loving your pet as much as they love you.
39. Beauty is a fresh flower in your hair.
40. The physical remnants of our life experiences—stretch marks, scars, wrinkles, and sun spots—are beautiful.
41. Wisdom is beautiful.
42. Humility is beautiful.
43. Beauty is the sweaty satisfaction of a hard workout- moving your body in the way it was meant to.
44. It is beautiful to finally tell someone your secret.
45. It is beautiful to turn the worst night into the funniest story- the ability to see the humor in the darker, sometimes neglected parts of our life.
46. Beauty is being able to truly enjoy the food you eat.
47. It is beautiful to be grateful to all the strong people who came before you: the ones who raised you, the ones who fought for your rights, the ones who were burned at the stake because they were too powerful.
48. Giving birth is beautiful. (Messy, but beautiful.) Rebirth– as many times as necessary- is also beautiful.
49. Freedom is beautiful. You are free to fill your life with the things that make you happy. You have a choice.
50. Happiness is beautiful. Never be ashamed of being happy.
Beautifully Yummy and Summery Cocktail (alcohol-free)
I recently went for a meal at Giraffe restaurant and had a wonderful pineapple and coconut no-alcohol cocktail called a Wavebreaker. It was really good, like a Pina Colada, and reminded me of holidays. I thought I'd try to replicate it at home and it was a success. It's really easy, and way more healthy than most cocktails. Pineapple juice contains large amounts of Vitamin C, and contains an enzyme called Bromelian which is anti-inflammatory, aids digestion, and is also a natural anti-coagulant, helping to slow blood clotting.
The coconut milk is very low in calories, and contains no added sugars. I've been using Alpro coconut milk for a while now as a milk substitute, not because I'm lactose intolerant but for ethical reasons. I've never felt comfortable with the dairy industry and mass produced milk and all the animal welfare horrors it entails. Coconut milk obviously avoids these and the production of it uses less water, land and generates less CO2 than dairy milk so it feels a better alternative for me.
Here's what you'll need to make a Wavebreaker:
Pineapple juice (make sure it is pure juice, not a juice drink which has added sugars/sweeteners, or you could make your own juice for even tastier results)
Coconut milk (I use Alpro Coconut from the chill counter in most supermarkets)
Fresh mint
Ice
And here's how to make it:
Put some ice in your glass.
Fill the glass half-full with pineapple juice, then fill to the top with coconut milk.
Add some mint (crush it first to release the flavours).
Stir with a straw.
Take outside and sit and drink it in the sunshine for that holiday feeling :-)
Take Some Time to Relax and Have Beautifully Soft Feet
It's so important to take time to look after yourself. We can be very good at looking after others, either at home with our families, or at work but there's a tendency to not be so good at doing it for ourselves.
Yoga practice helps, giving us space to feel how the body feels and the opportunity to reconnect with the soul. It gives us time to pause, and we get to press the reset button before we go on with the rest of the day, hopefully with a little less stress and tension and a little more clarity and positivity.
This simple, natural foot spa is a lovely treat, especially in this hot weather when your feet might be a tad sweaty!! You'll need a bowl of warm water, some Epsom Salts if you have them (you can buy them in Boots or a health food shop), a couple of drops of lavender oil, and some whole almonds. If you have a nut allergy you can use sea salt to scrub your feet instead but you will need to use a moisturiser afterwards.
First, grind your almonds in a food processor until they are like coarse breadcrumbs. Don't grind them too finely or they'll lose their "scrub" quality.
Then fill a clean washing up bowl with warm water and add a tablespoon of Epsom Salts. These are high in magnesium and are a good muscle relaxant so will feel great for achy feet if you've been standing or walking all day. Add a couple of drops of lavender oil (and maybe some lavender flowers if they're growing in your garden) then sit and soak your feet for 10 minutes. Bliss!
Then take a scoop of the ground almonds and rub all over each foot, scrubbing hard to remove dead skin and rough patches. Almonds are high in Vitamin E which is healing, anti-inflammatory and moisturising so their natural oils will leave your feet feeling really smooth and soft.
Finally, dry your feet gently with a towel. If they still feel dry you can moisturise them with a little bit of coconut or almond oil.
If you have any of the almonds left over you can keep them in a tupperware for a couple of weeks and use them as an all-over body scrub in the shower (try not to get them too wet in the pot or they'll go off more quickly). They also work miracles as a hand scrub too.
Here's a great fun video entitled "All About That Base" reminding us about the importance of a strong foundation in our practice. It shows all sorts of people doing all sorts of yoga poses with a smile on their faces - beautiful :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yZ75hcjRyHs
Have a beautiful weekend.
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