Dear Beloved: Beauty in the Whole

Dear Beloved,

It is hard for you to look at yourself and see something that is beautiful. This is because you see only the separate component parts and never the whole. You isolate a particular physical feature and analyze it as though it can be stacked up against others of this kind. But as soon as you remove this feature from the living, breathing whole, it becomes lifeless and flat. On its own, this one “part” of you is nothing, and yet when seen in the fullness of its context, the whole self radiates through, and the brilliance and uniqueness of this self overshadow so-called objective “imperfections.” 

Why do you neglect to see the “whole”? You are too close, too engrossed in your own self and desire to be loved, that your eyes search greedily for the areas demanding improvement. You subject your body to frequent comparisons, but you are so bent on recognizing these inadequacies that you fail to notice that the measurement standards are incompatible. You are not just a body, and the whispers that reduce your self to this exterior shell are misguided and untrue. However, your body is part of who you are, though it is not the whole of who you are. You are mind and body and spirit, an inexplicably beautiful blend of divinely inspired attributes, all designed to complement one another.

Do you now see how useless it is to try to separate the inextricable layers of self and to judge them without seeing and appreciating the whole and magnificence of your unique beauty? When you yearn for a beauty that is not your own, you reject your individual beauty in favour of something different. Give up your attempts to conceal what you feel to be flaws and your private mirror-frozen self-loathing. These only deny your true, unrepeatable self, and your beauty, which is yours the moment that you choose to claim it.