Health is Beauty
A view of Frybrook House, a beautifully restored Georgian residence, where I stayed during a recent visit to Boyle Ireland
When I was young my mother regularly bought what are known as “women’s magazines.” She never chose those that focused on high fashion or interior design (like the expensive glossy ones that I later came to appreciate); she favoured the type that were budget-friendly and typically displayed by the supermarket check-out counter. Her typical go-to’s were the American Family Circle and Woman’s Day, and the Canadian Chatelaine. Back home, once the groceries were unpacked and put away, Mom would make a cup of coffee and flip through the pages of that day’s choice, scanning for interesting recipes or home management tips. Then she’d put the magazine aside and I’d read it cover to cover—including the child-rearing columns which led me to take a rather evaluative view of how my parents behaved towards me and my sister and which no doubt contributed to my becoming a psychologist.
At some point, perhaps in my preteen years, I remember thinking that Mom was buying those magazines more for me than for herself, although she seemed to enjoy her quick perusal of them. I clearly recall asking her to buy particular issues because I was drawn to the articles inside. When I reflect now on my eager consumption of those magazines, I think about how they shaped my interests in the realm of beauty (they covered topics ranging from skin-care and make-up to fashion and décor) and health (both physical and mental). A great deal of my early education about those subjects, for good or ill, came from those publications—along with the television—rather than from my parents or other adults.
Somewhere along the line as a teenager, I tore out a page from one of those magazines and taped it to the inside of the medicine-cabinet door in my bathroom. The page showed a photo of a smiling freckle-faced auburn-haired girl of my approximate age seemingly about to bite into a big red apple. There were trees in the background and the sun was shining. The caption underneath said: “Health is Beauty.”
I saw that image almost every day of my adolescence until I left home at nineteen for a trip to Europe followed on my return by renting an apartment with a friend. Even though I had moved on, that magazine page stayed in place in the medicine-cabinet over multiple decades until I finally took it down when clearing out our family home after my mother died. I remember hesitating before throwing it out, not only because I had always found it inspiring, but because it had endured as one of the few physical reminders that I had once lived in that house. The image I described is just a memory now, but the message it delivered still resonates for me: Health is Beauty.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between health and beauty since I returned a few months ago from a wonderful five-day retreat in Boyle, Ireland. Boyle, a small town in the northwest of the country, is the home of Live5DHealth, a lovely and well-equipped wellness centre. Along with standard spa facilities such as a sauna and steam room, the centre offers a wide variety of state-of-the-art health treatments, primarily based on frequency healing (see live5dhealth.com for details). I tried every treatment at least once and repeated many of them over the five days I was there. Fresh air walks in the surrounding countryside added to their benefits. I left feeling rejuvenated in body, mind, and spirit.
I was fortunate to spend my time in Ireland with a small group who share similar values about the importance of a holistic and integrated approach to health. Mark Attwood and Gary Kealey, the owners of Live5DHealth, and all others there who contributed to our experience, are of like-mind. As we all moved through the week, the unique spirit of each individual shone through in various beautiful ways, and we were also beautiful together in how we interacted and cared for one another. It was an experience that brought health and beauty into marvelous harmony and prompted the following musings about those separate but closely aligned concepts.
In my recent book, Awakening to Aphrodite’s Light: Love, Beauty & the Divine Feminine, I wrote about different aspects of beauty, but I didn’t explore in any depth how human beauty and health relate to one another. Most people tend to immediately associate the term “health” with physical health and see it as necessary, at least to some degree, for the presence of external physical beauty. (I’m quite sure that’s how I initially interpreted the phrase “Health is Beauty.”) A second, broader, understanding of health that encompasses mental well-being may follow, but mental health is usually a secondary consideration in our evaluation of what constitutes overall health or beauty.
Of course, physical and mental health are interconnected, as any health practitioner with a holistic perspective will attest. And we can easily link practices that promote physical health such as good nutrition, exercise, or the maintenance of balanced hormone levels, to accepted markers of beauty such as glowing skin, shiny hair, a pleasing body shape, and general vitality. We can also link those same practices to the maintenance of stable mental health—for example, the ability to effectively cope with change and manage stress, and the absence of problems such as serious anxiety, depression, or other psychological concerns.
Although we don’t usually think of good mental health as being an indicator of human physical beauty, its presence or absence can shape our perception and evaluation of beauty in others, as well as in ourselves. This is because someone’s level of psychological and emotional well-being affects their energetic/vibrational frequency which in turn affects how we experience them, including whether or not we consider them to be beautiful in our eyes. For example, if we experience someone as exuding aggressive or chaotic “vibes,” we’re much less likely to assess them as beautiful, even though we might think they have attractive bodily features. At the same time, our own energetic/vibrational frequency affects how we experience and judge others, and influences what we might project onto them, positively or negatively. Our personal frequency level will similarly affect how we view and treat ourselves—e.g., harshly and self-critically or with love and self-acceptance—and whether we are able to recognize and celebrate our own beauty. Furthermore, the state of one’s mental health can also affect the ability to perceive beauty in a more general sense; if one’s inner world feels dark, it can be hard to see beauty’s light in the larger world. (This can, of course, also be the case if one is suffering physically.)
A consideration of energetic/vibrational frequency leads us to address the spiritual component of health and how it’s related to consciousness. The subject of consciousness is one that the psychiatrist and author David Hawkins explored in Power versus Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior (2002). In his well-known “Map of Consciousness,” he categorized and ranked the fields of energy associated with different levels of consciousness. Hawkins’s map starts with the experience of shame at the lowest level and moves up to the experience of enlightenment at the highest level. His map can be a useful guide to understanding how one can grow emotionally and spiritually through cultivating higher order experiences like love and the appreciation and creation of beauty.
When I recently searched online about the relationship between beauty and health, almost every site I found focused on the link between beauty and strictly physical health (or in a few cases, “internal health” which included mental health) and offered strategies for enhancing the former through emphasis on improving the latter. That’s a valid pursuit, but it limits our understanding of how beauty and health are connected. Physical and mental health are definitely important components of beauty, but true health also includes spiritual health. Development of that aspect of health goes far beyond the alleviation or management of problematic bodily, psychological, or emotional symptoms, as is typically the emphasis of our current physical and mental health systems. Also, the concept of spiritual health is not as easily understood as that or physical or mental health.
Spiritual health can generally be understood to mean that someone has a sense of the interconnection of all life, a sense of meaning and purpose, and is living authentically and in alignment with their personal beliefs and values. The attainment of spiritual health requires deep self-reflection and the willingness to take responsibility for oneself and one’s choices (what some would call “soul work”). Its “success” is directly reflected in the level of consciousness one attains. An elevated consciousness then allows us to perceive, experience, and create beauty. Indeed, the pursuit of consciousness is a healthy and beautiful act in itself.
So, if we expand our definition of “health” to encompass spiritual, as well as physical and mental aspects, we can realize a much deeper relationship between health and beauty than is usually considered. If we embrace the necessity of including that spiritual component, we can begin to see that true health—of mind, body, and spirit—does indeed equate with true beauty, and that health and beauty form a nourishing, reciprocal inner cycle of wholeness and well-being. When someone is truly healthy in the sense of having integrated their mind, body, and spirit, and has achieved an elevated level of consciousness, they will radiate a quality of beauty that transcends typical assessments of physical attractiveness. We are then able to see and experience the beauty of their essential divine self.
Although our culture tends to pay little more than lip service to this idea, we instinctively know it to be true: the people we experience as genuinely beautiful are not necessarily the ones who look the most polished or conventionally attractive, but the ones that are most fully and beautifully alive. To quote William Blake, “Exuberance is beauty,” and those who most naturally experience and radiate exuberance are usually those who embody health in the broadest sense of that term.
As a final note, I’ll add that while health may be equated with beauty, beauty is comprised of more than health, but if we’re talking about personal experiences and expressions of health and beauty, the two concepts are intrinsically connected. True beauty has the power to elevate, heal, and transform us, as does the attainment of true health. I’ll be exploring and writing more about these ideas in the months ahead.
Until next time, wishing you love and beauty,
Geraldine.
This post was originally published on Substack.