Marilyn Harder Come home to your body. Appreciate your body as an instrument for information and celebrate it with joyful pleasure.
Choose clothes that feel soft to your skin, hairstyles, and make-up as creative flows of self-expression that bring you joy. Connect with your gaze to find each sensory experience. The moment you are experiencing, even now, is a gateway to embody every corner of your being and to find presence. When you do, you can truly experience the power, joy, and fulfillment every moment of life offers.
Those who understand embodiment may be questioning Make-up application as a paradoxical embodiment practice. And you are not wrong! The cosmetics industry was founded on judging and changing one’s physical appearance and sociologically driven by turning a critical gaze to yourself and others. Conversely, an embodiment practice is about inward connection, complete acceptance, and grounding into present awareness. You may be wondering how the two can co-exist in one practice. For me, that is through the use and intention of makeup as a tool.
As outlined in the sociological study – “Women, makeup, and authenticity: Negotiating embodiment and discourses of beauty,” in the Journal of Consumer Culture, this paradoxical practice is possible through awareness and ritual. “Incorporating [cosmetic tutorials] and advertising discourses [in self-expression], not yielding to them or resisting them, but [instead] transforming them to suit their needs [women can utilize] makeup products [as tools] for creating [embodied] confidence and preparing themselves for [powerful] engagement in the world.”
Although I have worn make-up in the past as a way to find acceptance, to make myself “more attractive”, and to conform, I have also worn it to transform and connect through self love and care.
Here is my line for defining your relationship with makeup – do you value your face with and without the application of make-up? If the answer is yes, you have a healthy relationship with your makeup routine. If the answer is no, ask yourself why? Do you feel unlovable or unworthy without it? Does it make you uncomfortable to leave the house without makeup? Do you judge others without makeup as unworthy or unlovable? Where do you feel that in your body? Focus on that space. The root of that feeling is fear. Even examining these feelings – I’m turning your awareness inward as an embodiment practice!
For me, I love that my face is recognizable and loved by my husband and children (and friends and family) with or without makeup. I am lovable and worthy of love. I am not ashamed of the redness in my skin or the strawberry birthmark that sits between my eyes. I am beautiful in my existence not through the lens or confines of a sociological definition of beauty. My face is my recognizable fingerprint to the world. I am uniquely and wonderfully made. There is no other “me” in this world. I can run errands and work without makeup. I don’t feel less. I am not less.
I don’t devalue my face by applying make-up.
I love that I am confident leaving the house without make-up and am content to make eye contact and smile. However, I also love to play with orange eye shadows to see how much I can make my blue eyes seemingly glow under long dramatic black lashes. I enjoy the time I spend with myself applying my make-up and the playground of colors and techniques that awaken my artistic expression. I love catching my work of art in the mirror and the moment of pause and the internal smile I give myself. I use those moments as a subsequent reminder to stay connected with me. I make a point to acknowledge and accept my reflection. Further, I grow the relationship that I have with myself by telling my self something nice – and use those affirmations to lift my soul.
How can you know if you have disconnected?
When you are embodied, you bring awareness to the now – the moment at hand. You experience the world in real-time – the vibrance of color, each sound, the feel of your body in space as it explores the world – temperature, texture, and more. When you have disconnected, you spend time in your mind – over analyzing, overthinking, overstimulated – often overstressed and overwhelmed.
When you are embodied, natural peace and absolute awareness and clarity settles upon you – you expand further into your sense of self. When you are embodied, you intuitively connect with the rich storehouse of information your body provides – from the awe of sensory experiences, to hunger, passion, motivation, creative flow, sensuality, and the novelty of present experiences. True presence is seeing life through your eyes without the weight of the past or the anticipation of the future. Our body is the transformative gateway to true happiness, enlightenment/heaven on earth. When we are present, we are brought into the flow & our connection with others and can easily see what we can share/bring to the world.
When you are disconnected, life can feel dull and colorless. The weight of our minds stifle and disorient our awareness of our body and of the now. It can be difficult to recenter. Most don’t even realize they are no longer receiving information from their body. In the process of thinking, they have been trained to repeatedly ignore all the information the body has to share, effectively putting it on mute.
We are taught at a young age to disconnect
“Finish the food on your plate” even if you are not hungry; nap even if you are not tired; “don’t cry – you are being a baby” even though your heart hurts and your body wants to let it flow; “suck it up and move on” even though you need to process it; “sit still” even though your body is craving movement. We are not taught to connect with the rich sensory experience inside our body. We are not taught to process emotions through the experience of feeling them completely and thoroughly in the body. The receptors for the present moment become gummed up with compartmentalizations, data sorting and analysis overload.
We are taught to think and thus “think” we are feeling and connecting. In fact most of us are resisting life when we are forcing or pushing our way through towards a goal or action. In reality, we are using the cognition of our brains as a tool for thinking, analyzing and processing. We make this big and important and conversely reject and shrink our bodily awareness into the smallest corner of our mind – ignoring the innate wisdom our body is screaming to provide. In these moments, we are inadvertently starving ourselves of true satisfaction and the joy of being alive.
I heard this once and it stuck with me. If we don’t feel – we don’t know what we need, we don’t know what others need and we don’t know what the planet needs. However, once we do feel, we do know, and from innate design – we cannot just sit by, we are called and pulled into action. Feeling creates connection, connection then creates care, and care creates beautiful action. The root of a meaningful human experience is in our beautiful ability to care.
As an analytical woman of action, I have fallen into the disembodied trap.
I have in my lifetime, most often fallen into to cycles of unhealthy and disordered eating and obsessive and controlling thoughts as my disembodied vices of choice. I have experienced anxiety, panic attacks, bouts of fatigue, depression, low self-confidence, low self-worth, and an overall feeling of numbness. I have learned though, that my insecurities and emotional pain have a relationship to my connection to my body. I have further learned how to connect and clear these “data alerts” with loving self-kindness and a return to my body, not through pushing them down/away or through external plans/actions.
Reconnect through a practice of embodiment
As an adult, our habits have been groomed through decades of experiences and our default response often returns us to the same unhealthy patterning. If 2020 has taught me anything, it has taught me how to return to my tools of embodiment and that returning to embodiment can bring peace and joy no matter the external environment.
Embodiment practices can take many forms. Anytime you enter your body with intention, it is a practice of embodiment. It can be as simple as 3 slowly purposeful breaths following the flow to the soles of your feet through the crown of your head.
In times of continual ruminating thought, I enjoy a grounding practice to bring somatic awareness to every part of my body as an interaction to the earth. Before bed, I run inventory to check in and reset my connection to my body through PNF (Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation) contract and release stretching.
However, my favorite way to practice embodiment is through my pilates practice – both when I teach and when I practice. I love the moments when I draw attention to the small fine-tuned awareness of alignment, the subtle shifts in pressure in the feet as they zip the connection up to the hip, and the freedom to just move without judgment, listening to the bodily feedback to improve connection and alignment. In these moments, I know myself more deeply and find so much pleasure in simple sensations. I integrate my breath, I integrate my movements, I integrate sound and I claim my body fully.
A regular practice in our daily lives can be challenging as we can get caught in the flow of doing and forget to create space for ourselves, our embodiment and just being.
For me, my skincare and makeup routine has become a place I practice daily embodiment. I have previously discussed my skincare routine as my meditation and a time for reflection, affirmations and self-love during a loving act of care.
Through the daily ritual of care and self expression in my make-up routine, I have found another entry to practice daily embodiment.
How do you create an embodied beauty routine?
It starts with intention. I have created a space, with a mirror and a chair in front of a beautiful window that lets in natural light. I overlook a fence with climbing ivy and peeks of bushes and the park beyond. I open the blinds, I adjust the mirror and I smile at myself. I take a moment to decide how my skin feels – is it dry or oily and I choose the primer I need for my skin that day. As I apply it, I take time to feel the way the product glides and slides over my skin.
In the two minutes it takes to set, I ground myself and breath deeply and freely. I find the connection with my feet on the earth and imagine roots from my feet growing into the depths of the core of the earth. I imagine those vines growing through my legs, up to my knees and through my hips, pausing to draw awareness to my tailbone and sitz bones perched on my seat. I pool my attention to my belly (this is my most frequent point of personal bodily disconnect) and I breath into each part. Some days I breath into each of the quadrants of my belly, others – I breath into 4 stacked layers. I feel the heart beat and the rib cage fully expand.
Then I travel to my shoulders feeling the weight broaden and release as the vines continue to spiral and grow tall through the crown of my head. I imagine the roots spiral and travel to each finger, each toe, through my jaw and again through the crown of my head. I imagine my body hanging from the ceiling from the broadness of my shoulders and allow my neck to become free without losing height and experience the change of sensation as my body stacks and relaxed under my shoulders. Finally, I imagine growing both tall and rooted in equal intensity and length before drawing both sets of roots back into my body and opening and gazing into my own eyes.
As I choose what to apply that day, I take notice of the textures of the products, the brushes as they dance on my skin. I choose colors that match my mood and my expression for the day ahead. I look at my face as a canvas and my time spent as artistic creative expression. I don’t conceal to hide or shrink, I paint to claim a bold embodied presence. I deserve space for myself and this is one way I claim it.
When I pair the practice of embodied connection in my beauty/make-up routine, it happens regularly. I tune into the whispers of my body. I take notice if I feel heavy or light. I take notice if I feel resistance or openness. I commune with my body to start and to claim space for myself in my day.
Make-up may not be part of your authentic expression. But I challenge you to explore pairing your embodiment practice with another daily ritual/routine that you move slowly through and see just how incredibly rich your experience of life can become.
Practice Self Care and embodiment daily. You are worth it.
Women, makeup, and authenticity: Negotiating embodiment and discourses of beauty; Maryann McCabe, Timothy de Waal Malefyt, Antonella Fabri Journal of Consumer Culture – First Published October 16, 2017 Research Article
