Society today tells us that to be successful and happy we have to be beautiful – and to be beautiful we must be skinny. We see it in every advertisement, every movie and every TV series. Due the lack of a real education system that aims at making us conscious human beings and more than just consumers, the triad of advertising-TV-Cinema becomes the real ‘educator’ telling us what is and what isn’t desirable. Alas, this modern ideal of skinniness as beauty is not harmonious and leads to many problems that affect us as individuals and as a society today.Beauty does matter
First of all, it is important to note that beauty does matter. Beauty is the external manifestation of harmony. But from this we also learn that anybody can be beautiful, anybody is potentially beautiful – we just need to gain inner harmony and balance and then our own unique beauty will manifest itself. That beauty that shines from inside is the real beauty that can move people’s souls, not the syntactic plastic beauty that can be simulated today using plastic surgery or photoshop.
Beauty is a sign of harmony
As we said, beauty is a manifestation of harmony and balance. I would say that being skinny is not a harmonious state. How can we say we are well balanced if we are hungry and frustrated? The state of harmony manifests in the body as a state of harmonious corpulentness, a well-balanced fullness, a state of fulfilment.
A harmoniously full body brings a lot more happiness then a skinny one
People that are very happy are usually harmoniously full – not to skinny nor to fat, just right. It is this state of balance that brings happiness. Any excess either way brings suffering and frustration. People who are too thin usually tend to be tense and discontent.Dr. James Watson, Nobel Prize winner for his work in Genetics of discovering the DNA structure, has discovered a clear link between having a harmoniously full body and the state of happiness and contentment. He has explained it through the release of certain hormones called endorphins in the body when we are full, and these hormones create in the being the experience of happiness and pleasure.
Skinniness is a new invention
When we look at the artistic ideals of beauty throughout the history we can see that they were always having harmoniously full bodies: the ancient Greek and Roman statues, the works of the great renaissance artists (like Botticelli's Venus and Michelangelo’s David) and even as recent as the 1950’s with the great beauty of Marilyn Monroe (who was far from being skinny). It is only in the last 50 years that the strange idea of skinny = beautiful appeared. But why?
Women usually say that everything is the men’s fault. This time they are right
It is valid for both men and women that a harmoniously full body helps inducing a state of happiness. However, the strange notion that skinny=beautiful has been applied to women much less then it has been for men. Why is that? And why has this odd notion of skinniness been introduced in the last 50 years in contradiction of thousands of years of the ideal of harmonious fullness?In my opinion, this is a male invention, designed to keep women ‘under control’. A person who is fuller, more vital, has more powerful states and emotions then a skinny person. All men know how challenging it is to handle a woman’s emotions. It is challenging to handle her happiness in bed, and it is challenging to handle her emotional fluctuations in the daily interactions. If a women gets more vital her states and emotion intensify and it becomes even more challenging for the man to handle them. So the men have 2 options: get stronger, or get the woman weaker. The option of weak men is to keep the woman weak in order to control her.
Our patriarchal society tends to look at female values as unimportant and to look at nature itself (a manifestation of femininity) as something to be feared and controlled. It is this attitude that aims to control women that lead to the propagation of the idea of skinniness as something which is desirable.
I believe that this idea has led to the growing state of frustration in women manifesting as many psychological problems, to the ongoing process of weakening of men, to the falling apart of relationships and families, to the loss of clear gender identities and a host of other problems.
The solution is simple. We just need to let go of this superficial idea of skinniness and discover in us of the state of harmonious and balanced fullness, of harmony.
Enjoy
Do you have some images that manifest the ideal of beauty as harmonious fullness? please send them to me on my facebook and we can share and inspire.
Have other examples of this trend? dont agrea with me? write here and lets have a discussion.
I am familiar with these ideas for quite some time already and have made an experimentation in my life, having an experience from the skinny side of the scale until plus 9kg from there and noticed that in the more round side of the scale I felt more fulfilled, not running out of energy easily, and feeling more stable, also emotionally and mentally. I would say, especially for women, that this is definitely something worth putting attention into. Also since depending on how we think of any aspect of ourself, depends how it influences us. It is a shame to see women to whom nature offered a bit more roundish bodies (that in my eyes look abundantly feminine and charming), feeling shame of themselves, trying to squeeze themselves into a strange skinny form, thus not being able to fully enjoy their inborn abundant vitality and life force. I´m fully in for a harmonious, naturally round, more and more happy femininity! <3
ReplyDelete