Beauty Will Save the World
The practice of resourcing is integral to healing and self-regulation, so finding our personal resources is one of the most important acts of self nourishment we will ever make. The potency of beauty as a resource has been known for millennia, exalted for its intrinsic ability to restore harmony and fulfilment in individuals and societies alike. There is a reason that the ancient world placed such a high value on beauty as empires were built. Even artists and the world’s greatest thinkers have praised the role that beauty plays in wellbeing. The legendary Russian novelist Dostoevsky may have put it best when he said, “Beauty will save the world.” He wasn’t wrong.
What Does it Mean to be Resourced?
Resourcing is a clinical term that describes the very important process of ensuring that we have sufficient - well, resources - to support our nervous systems as we do intensive healing, recovery, or processing work. With resources, it’s much easier to self-regulate.
MY INTRODUCTION TO RESOURCING
In 2016 I experienced a violent, acute trauma that landed me in the hospital for several months and bedbound in my flat for a couple further months. By the time I was fully ‘functional’ I was experiencing what I now know were symptoms of Acute Stress Disorder. If left untreated for a long period of time, as it was in my case, ASD often evolves into Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). After visiting the site of my trauma for the first time, I had what I can only describe as a breakdown during which I sat on the ground outside my office sobbing. Eventually a colleague stepped off a bus and was able to support me in getting home, after which I decided the time had come to find a healer.
Before I started practicing EFT and knowing that talk therapy would be woefully inadequate to process an experience that I knew, even then, lived in my body, I had heard about a powerful trauma therapy called Somatic Experiencing which was created by the numinous and heroic Dr Peter Levine, and located a practitioner who just happened to have a free slot in her calendar for me. In our first SE session, my therapist went to great lengths to learn not about what happened to me but about how I nourish myself. What did I love doing? What did I find most inspiring? When I found myself frustrated and hopeless, what was I instinctively pulled towards? I didn’t understand it then but what my therapist was doing was a crucial step in somatic methodology which is to establish what their client’s resources are. (The concept of resourcing isn’t exclusive to Somatic Experiencing, it’s just where I first learned about it)
RESOURCING TECHNIQUES
Internal resourcing is completely personal, so what one person experiences as a resource may not have any positive connotations to someone else. Examples may include (but are in no way limited to): pets; gardening; friends; specific places; the sea; the mountains; walking; certain genres of music; moments of solitude; reading; studying language; creating art; therapy; support groups; places of religious worship; meditation; volunteering; spiritual practice; crafting or building things with one’s hands; light exercise; nutrition; a spiritual teacher; connecting with one’s ancestral lineage; cooking or baking; stuffed animals; a meticulously curated bed; napping; and so forth.
Tarot as a spiritual practice has been one of my most supportive resources.
My Relationship to Beauty
Beauty is my lifeblood, it’s how I resource myself. Going back to my early therapy sessions during which my healer helped me excavate my resources before even going near my traumatic experience, all questions led back to my profound appreciation for beauty. I told her about the decade I spent working in high-end interior design on projects in iconic buildings of historic significance around Europe followed by several years working at the V&A in London. In this work I traveled to some of the most beautiful places in the world, meeting with architects, designers, and craftsmen learning about how beauty is made.
I told my therapist that when I was feeling my lowest, I would visit historic stately homes or museums, or I would go sit in Claridge’s Hotel, a former project that has great personal significance to me, with a glass of champagne. Surrounding myself with sumptuousness never failed to lift my spirits. Listening attentively, my therapist translated for me what I was really saying:
When the ugliness of my experience becomes overwhelming, being in the presence of beauty restores my sense of safety.
Sometimes I simply bury my face in velvet cushions. Other times, I sit in solitude with the most deliciously scented candle I own, listening to a beautiful piece of music, and pour through a book about French architecture. When I’m feeling depleted, instead of numbing in front of the TV, I immerse myself in beauty. Numbing doesn’t replete anyone, resourcing does.
Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milan, a house whose beauty has many a time brought me back to a sense of rightness and calm. Photo by the author.
Beauty is Transcendental
WHAT INDIGENOUS PEOPLE KNEW ABOUT BEAUTY
The universe has a tendency to bring us back to the center of the spiral. As I’m always telling my clients, healing is not a linear process. We progress and we have set backs but we never end up back at square one - we may just find ourselves at the center of the spiral. Life, nature, and healing are cyclical processes. To prove my point, I recently read a memoir by Somatic Experiencing founder Peter Levine about his own brutal trauma and healing journey, called An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey. In it, Dr Levine recounts being schooled in the healing methods of Navajo medicine men. One ritual was particularly resonant to him.
When welcoming a warrior back after a battle or difficult journey, before he rejoined the tribe, the medicine man would ensure that he was healed from whatever traumatic experience he had survived so as not to bring it back to the others (many indigenous peoples knew exactly how trauma works long before Western science started paying attention to it). The goal of the ritual - in a grossly reductive description by me - was to discharge any disruption in the body and restore wellbeing. At the end of the healing ritual, a song was sung:
“I walk in beauty before me
I walk in beauty behind me
I walk in beauty above me
I walk in beauty all around me
The whole world is beautiful.”
As it turned out, my own resource wasn’t unique at all. The Navajo people and many others before me knew of the crucial role that beauty plays in helping us transcend pain.
BEAUTY AS A ROUTE TO THE DIVINE
Some of the most prolific societies in world history considered beauty a core tenet, from the ancient Romans to the French republic. To the ancient Greeks, beauty was synonymous with harmony. This ideal underpinned the art and architecture of the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods, much of which is still extant today. In many societies, beauty was a route to divinity. This is how I experience it too. For me, being in the presence of beauty is the closest to God/Spirit/Source that I’ve felt since my Near Death Experience in 2016. It lifts my spirit, feeds my soul, and connects me to something pure. The spiritual teacher Satish Kumar captures this sentiment in his beautifully laconic way:
“Being beautiful is more than being pretty. When something is in the right proportion, right balance, and the right relationship, then we experience a sense of harmony, a sense of comfort and joy, a sense of ease and wellbeing. That is a beauty experience; it is more than outer appearance, more than a visual pleasure. Beauty is a blissful source of fulfillment.”
The Temple of Dionysus at the Parthenon, Athens
Beauty Belongs to everyone
Beauty is not superficial, it’s not skin-deep. Beauty has the intrinsic ability to conjure hope, desire, even tears. It moves emotion through us in a way that is not dissimilar to somatic healing. As a Shameworker, I often talk about Shame as being a shapeshifting emotion in that it wears the masks of other more tolerable experiences such as rage, perfectionism, and righteousness. Beauty is also a shapeshifter. It’s like water, it takes the form of whatever vessel it occupies. Beauty can infiltrate nature; human faces or souls; textiles; architecture; performance; sound; scent; taste; how light behaves; the moon and the sun; the space where the sky meets the sea, and the way in which air touches skin.
Unlike shame, which shapeshifts in order to elude detection, beauty shapeshifts to make itself available to everyone. I think yellow is the most beautiful hue that exists, others are stimulated by cobalt or fuchsia. I adore the scent of jasmine, others are intoxicated by the bitter scent of lavender. I swoon in the presence of symmetry; the craquelure of antique wooden paneling; brocade; Baroque painting; golden blonde hair; dimples; Verde Tinos marble; mercury glass; the masculine clarity of the Italian language which never takes shortcuts; dahlias; autumnal foliage; and green velvet, OH MY! I also find the most beautiful quality to be vulnerability. To me, there is a limit to anyone’s beauty who maintains a closed heart.
You might find beauty in ballet; sleek leather and mirror; winter snowstorms; opera; the Aurora Borealis; black hair and hazel eyes; the feminine melody of the French language; the unpredictability of jazz music; or anything else that ignites your senses. What you find beautiful doesn’t matter. Beauty costs nothing; what matters is that you find it.
“Beauty is food for the soul. It is essential and not a luxury. Beauty is for everyone and not for the few.”
-Satish Kumar
Next Steps
If you feel called to break the cycle of pain, free to book a free, no-commitment Discovery Session (20 mins) and learn about how Integrative Therapy and somatics may serve you.