What is beauty?
by Lian Brook-Tyler
What is beauty?
Is it only skin deep… or something your SOUL chose?
In many of the spiritual communities and lineages I’ve been part of, it’s understood that the shape of our lives… including our nature, our fate, and our destiny… Is something our soul chose before we came into these bodies.
(If you don’t see it that way, this post is unlikely to be for you. )
But what’s spoken far less often, if ever, is this: What if the shape of our bodies was also chosen?
What if your soul didn’t only choose your path, but also the exact vessel it would walk it in?
This is something I somehow knew before I had words for it. It stirred in me spontaneously as if it was a past life or ancestral remembering… Perhaps awakened by one of my earliest autistic special interests, Marilyn Monroe.
Monroe was a woman whose life was shaped by her shape.
I spent many hours, over many years, poring over her exquisite face, her iconic body, the way she adorned herself with attention and intention, the breathy way she spoke, the signature (one high heel cut shorter than the other) way she moved… And the way her life twisted and turned in response.
I even wrote an A-Level essay on her, exploring the iconography of her life, photos, and films of what I now understand to be her soul’s myth.
Seeing how her appearance and her life were so irrecoverably and intrinsically connected planted a seed in me… One that’s grown quietly over time and is now flowering into something I can name and share.
I know it’s perhaps an unusual, even heretical, thing to suggest… But doesn’t it make a kind of body-felt, bone-deep sense?
That the particular shape your body is speaks to the kinds of experiences your soul came here for.
That the archetypes written into your skin foretell the story you came to live.
And that the wounding you carry around the way you look is inseparable from the wounding you carry around the truth of who you are.
In other words, the ways you make wrong, grasp, hide, dim, prove, shame, contort the way you look are often the very same ways you deny or distort the essence of your soul.
Seen through this lens, beauty is no longer something shallow or superficial to be dismissed… And our yearning for it, our confusion about it, even the ways we’ve pretzeled ourselves to chase it, begin to make sense.
Beauty, in this light, becomes a portal into the most intimate inner work.
That’s the work I’ll be guiding a circle of women into in my upcoming crucible, Beauty Potion.
We’ll work with seven Mythic Beauty archetypes (the Lover, Artist, Queen, Mystic, Enchantress, Maiden, and Wild Woman), each one a mirror to reflect your outer form and inner essence.
Together, we’ll explore how our relationship with the Feminine has become entangled in what I call the Beauty Wound… and how the raw grief, longing, and ache within that wound can be alchemised, not into polish or performance, but into a beauty that’s true and lived.
You’ll come to see that your unique expression of beauty, or even what you’ve believed to be a lack of it, was never a flaw to be hidden or corrected, it’s a map written throughout your face and body, showing you the way to myth your soul chose as this life’s story.
And if you feel ready to enter what may be the most tender, illuminating, and potent work of your life… To look into the mirror not just with your eyes, but with your soul… I would love for you to join us.
We begin in May.
All my love and beauty blessings,
Li ♥️
P.S. as I was looking at photos of Marilyn (and struggling to choose one!) for this post, I was brought to the question… how might have her life turned out, maybe longer and less tragic, with the knowing of the Beauty Wound and how to heal it? But then again, maybe it all was exactly as her soul chose it.
Art: “Marilyn Monroe, Preparation," taken by Sam Shaw in 1955 on the set of The Seven Year Itch
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