I met today with my beautiful editor. She came rushing to our meeting to work on my next book. She looked luminous like someone who is accomplishing great stuff in her life. Her nails were chipped. I found it really attractive. What is more attractive than a driven woman expressing her gifts and struggling to work out her life?
As women we want to make ourselves beautiful, both to ourselves and to others, however life always tends to get in the way. If you only work on your looks and the external image, it becomes superficial and you will soon be bored. Too many women think beauty is everything, but working just towards aesthetics should always take the passenger seat in life. The important thing is to work on who you are and the passion that drives you and all the activities that you do that relate to creating who you are - and often that results in chipped nails! Following your passion will result in the true beauty of accomplishment, discovering who you are - and your beauty within never lies. Nothing can glow more than the happiness of being fulfilled. Being perfect outwardly is a way to please the world when it should be part of a global quest of beauty, inside and outside.
A perfect manicure is just an attempt to conform to both male and female demands for a certain standard in presentation... which both celebrates and demeans what it means to be female. On the one hand the nail varnish is an expression of polished femininity on the other it is a codifier, conveying a psycho/sexual message to men...and other women. We all do it as we live in a male society. From birth we learn how to behave and how to succeed in a male society. Everyone is told to put aside feminine traits: intuition, gentleness, compassion. All those female qualities are cast away because we need to survive the struggle, to be strong, to put the male side and the male point of view above everything.
Funnily enough beauty has been corrupted. Beauty, once the ultimate pinnacle of female energy, has now become simply a tool for success in our society and not the accomplishment of harmony, and of well-being. Beauty should be the reflection of our internal emotions. This has been misinterpreted by both sexes. Beauty has become a powerful way to be at the top of the game; attracting power and status. Thus women and men rush to aesthetic surgeons to buy a fantasized vision beauty that they believe will buy them power and love. Basically through the pursuit of the external beauty we have silenced the positive female aspects in all of us. We are shells of our former female selves.
Male values of success form the ideas of success within society as a whole. When we come into this world we are told that we cannot be female-orientated to be successful, so as women we suppress a big part of our female energy. And it concerns men too; they feel for example that they cannot cry in front of others, if at all. They learn to suppress all their own more female energies and focus on the "MAN" within. We all have two sides to our brains; one male, one female, one logical, one creative. Life is male and female, the yin and yang. Life's been perceived like that since the beginning. We need to honour and acknowledge our differences. Most importantly women need to honour this quality themselves, to recognise that we have a feminine energy and it's sacred and part of universal energy which is divine, its source is divine and it created the world. We are all connected to it; we are all creative divine beings.
We must recognize that we all have this sacred feminine energy within ourselves. There are different ways of remembering that this is part of our core being, different meditations and prayers we can do. We need to recognize the sacred feminine energy within us, remember it, and then express it. Because we are born in a world where unconsciously we want to get rid of it, to abandon our female energy, this denial is rooted very deeply in us, we always want to deny our intuition or creative side because we are told from the beginning that it goes nowhere. It's denying who you are. So to be able to grab that part of yourself and give it a voice is very important. It's great to go through this kind of process. You realize the potential of this energy has been cast aside.
We need to value the female perspective and honour our feminine energy. We dig for things we have hidden within us, in this masculine world. This needs to be balanced. Some people are very intuitive yet they don't trust it, so they spoil it by judging themselves and eventually they lose that ability. They don't use it. They lose the truth. For me intuition is an essential tool in life, a guide, I cannot live without it. It's fascinating to remember how, event twenty years ago, women were seen in the world. Values traditionally ascribed as feminine such as creativity are now considered highly desirable in all sorts of businesses. Global corporations such as Facebook and Apple are now looking to female leaders and CEO's and are listening to their female energy in how they operate their businesses and how they behave. The whole success of these new high-tech companies, as well as the worlds of fashion, design and beauty and many other ones, are based on cheering the creative side of their creators and designers. These female business leaders are employed because they are able to bring a clever mix of creativity and a more compassionate understanding of their peers and customers and their abilities to manage their workforce.
We are also looking at success in politics where feminine qualities are drastically needed. Finally here in the UK we are seeing more female politicians taking centre stage. Hilary Clinton was in town recently - surely the next and first female US President! Angela Merkel from Germany was recently celebrating the victorious German win in the World Cup with the players. All these women are using their female energy to change the world by placing importance on their feminine values. But it's not just about women, it's about how men can express their female emotions too and channel their intuition and their creativity. We must continue to work towards balance between masculine and feminine traits in this world. Chipped nails to world politics...