Inner Beauty

The recipe for beauty is to have less illusion and more Soul, to retreat from the belief of pain or pleasure in the body into the unchanging calm and glorious freedom of spiritual harmony.

~Mary Baker-Eddy

One of my favorite movies is Waiting to Exhale one my best friends Michelle and I would watch this movie over and over in her apartment over on Thomas Street. When either of us had a bad day or a "situation" we would pop this in the VCR along with our white zin, and it became a ritual and to this day if were getting together we ask, "is this a waiting to exhale moment". This was legendary among our male friends as well and  if they came over to her house and saw the movie in I remember my friend Garland would say "are yall on one of those exhale moments?" One of the lines that stick out to me is when the Whitney character said "well if your ugly on the inside then your ugly on the outside" I still love that line because it is so true. I know from time to time the major focus is fixing whats on the outside but doing soul work and finding inner beauty requires that same amount of attention.  As I form my own recipe card for what is beautiful to me and what I want to project is peace, grace and resilience instantly comes to mind. I use to hate to have conversations or be with people who have a pre conceived idea of who I am and what I'm about based on what they think to be true about who I am. Also because  it was usually  an onesided conversation with the tone of I'm so gald I'm not you. Being a single parent often brings an un welcomed  automatic judgment, ignorance, and entitlement from those who are not single parent(s) and often this comes from people who I have established relationships with or have known for a long time. In the past I would retreat and focus on why do people think their better than me because their married. (maybe because they were literally telling me they thought so)Then it came to me that I was focusing on the wrong thing and putting energy in other's perception and pre conceived notions of me and I did not want to project that I agreed becuase I didn't and  I thought the comments, assessments and diggs where some of the most ignorant self serving string of sentances that I have ever heard in my life.  Once I began to boldly buffer these conversations with talking about my happiness and joy of where I am in life and love these conversations and interactions with people stopped thank God.( I guess I'm not supposed to be happy lol) I began to realize that being calm, confident and also thankful and walking in my belief that what God has for me it is for me no matter what. I began to feel a glorious freedom, spiritual harmony and beautiful.