Meditation: An Unwitting Beauty Hack to Feel Better About Yourself
Experts believe that meditation can have a positive impact on your body image. (Photo: Stocksy)
Meditation and mindfulness aren’t practices that have been around for thousands of years for no reason. They are known as tools for treatment of everything from chronic pain to anxiety to cardiovascular health.
So with all that meditation is known to do, could it also serve as an unwitting beauty hack? We asked a group of experts to help explain how and why meditation might help facilitate body acceptance and make you feel (even more) beautiful.
Lynn Waelde is a professor of clinical psychology at Palo Alto University and a consulting professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, whose research and work focuses on the use of meditation in psychotherapy. She’s also been practicing meditation herself since she was a child. She first stumbled across books in the library on it and began to teach herself the practice.
To understand the potential power of meditation to reframe how our minds evaluate our own experiences, Waelde brought meditation as a means of mental health intervention to disaster-stricken communities ranging from the Philippines post-Typhoon Haiyan and New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina and evaluated its use. Consistently, her work has found that meditation was the most helpful form of mental health intervention by the survivors of these disasters.
But it’s not only massive trauma that meditation has the ability to help treat. And, as Waelde explains, the power of meditation inherently exists in everyone.
“This is just the natural capacity of people,” she says. “I see my job as helping people to discover their natural capacity — and not teaching people to do something,” she explains.
She adds, “You can read a lot of research on functional neural brain imaging that shows that meditation tends to change the way the brain is organized in a way that helps people regulate their emotions. It can help people become less depressed and less anxious and more aware of the present moment. It clearly has a profound effect.”
Which is why it’s only natural — literally — that meditation can help us to not just understand but respect and value our own bodies and appearances.
“Meditation can help people access states on the inside that are unchanging,” Waelde says. “You can experience peace on the inside that is not going to change from week to week or from year to year, the way our appearances and bodies can. As we all get older, our bodies are always changing — and not always in a good way! Sometimes we see how we change with age and are not always so happy about it, and sometimes the aging process can be sad for people. We feel like we’re losing one thing after another. But meditation is a process that gets better over time, and the older I get, the more qualified I become to meditate. And over time and with practice, people can access states on the inside of themselves that don’t age and that only become richer and deeper and more nourishing over time.”
Georgia Pettit, the director of programs at the Shambhala Meditation Center of New York and both a practitioner of and teacher of meditation, agrees.
“Meditation changes the way you relate to yourself and your feelings,” Pettit says. “Not that you don’t trust your heart and your feelings, but that you are able to look at them with a little sympathy and a little distance. If something pops in your head that feels a little aggressive or intense, you can say, I don’t have to follow that path. I can just let that go. Meditation helps you be less judgmental towards yourself.”
And this letting go of judgment can be both liberating and empowering in terms of how we come to understand our sense of our own beauty.
In fact, Pettit says, one of the most surprising things she has found about her own sustained meditation practice is that, years into it, not only does she “still look nice” but she’s learned that her fear that “if I relate to my body and my face in a way that is more kind and accepting, I’ll go to s***” is unfounded. “But I would say that I have come into my style with a sense of confidence and acceptance that I wouldn’t have had before if I had been chasing whatever had been put in front of me about what beauty is. With self-acceptance comes a certain kind of beauty and confidence.”
Waelde attributes this transformation to what is known in the scientific community as decentering, or not identifying with passing thoughts or passing experiences and not regarding these thoughts or experiences as something permanent or even necessarily true. In other words, you can come to understand that hating your own thighs does not have to be a judgment of yourself that you have to hang on to forever.
And so, Waelde explains, decentering from our thoughts lets us root our sense of identity with something “that is inside each of us that is unchanging and permanent and a deep wellspring of peace. If you begin to decenter, you open yourself to start identifying with some other qualities of yourself or other capacities. Tapping into the part of the self below the surface and not subject to the judgment of the day is deeply nourishing. And for some people, that might be accessing the capacity to be at peace. And that’s the really important part — what a lot of people realize is that actually being at peace is something that is tremendously attractive to other people. This goes beyond physical beauty. We have all known people who are soothing to be around. There is no doubt that people who are at peace and are calm are people we are attracted to.”
One of the biggest physical changes Pettit says she has seen in herself as a result of her commitment to her meditation practice is that she finds herself smiling more, even in “ordinary moments.”
“I never used to hear people say, ‘Oh — your smile!’ but now I do,” she notes. “I feel more relaxed in everyday situations because I feel that I trust myself to not be mean to myself or put myself up against pretty unrealistic standards of beauty that are unrelated to me and have not that much to do with me altogether. I smile more easily because the inner dialogue I maintain is more gentle. When you’re walking around thinking, ‘I hate my nose. I hate my nose. I hate my nose.’ you’re walking around wearing that. People are seeing that conversation you are having with yourself.”
Pettit reflects, “So much of what we consider beautiful isn’t really actual archetypal beauty, but confidence and relaxing — the luxury of relaxing. By meditating, you create a shortcut. You’re not always trying out and reaching for other ideas of beauty, trying to change your face or your bone structure. You can say, ‘Hey, this nose on my face? It’s big and beautiful! I like my nose! It helps me breathe! I’m going to wear it well!’ That’s the beginning of beauty.”
And the beauty benefits don’t stop there.
“When you maintain a meditation practice, so many other areas of life get lifted up because you are taking care of your mind,” Pettit says. “When I am taking care of my mind, it makes me want to take care of my nails. I think, I want my nails to lift me up and look nice and make me feel nice — versus, ‘Ugh, your nails are awful, and what is wrong with you?’ I maintain my mind by maintaining my face, my hair — I want to look nice. I love this face, I love this body — it’s all more fun now. It’s less of a grind, and more of an art project.
“The idea of wanting to be physically beautiful and to meditate are completely compatible with each other. There is no contradiction at all. The difference that meditation makes is in this idea of acceptance and feeling free to choose how you want to express yourself rather than feeling so pressured to conform to some other standards. With meditation, you get more choices about what you want to do. Meditation allows people to do more with their abilities. And if your talent is presenting a beautiful image to the world, you will be able to do that in a more beautiful and authentic way. It will be an expression, not a performance.”
Elizabeth Rowan, the Atlanta-based founder of The Alchemy of Yoga and leader of yoga retreats across the globe, takes things one step further: “Meditation is beauty,” she says. “Meditate for 45 days — rewire the neural pathways of your brain. You will be beautiful, inside and out.”
Rowan says she meditates every day and considers meditation to be “a tremendous, if not primary” part of her yoga practice.
“In this day and age, our senses and minds are assaulted every moment,” Rowan says. “Technology yields an all-access pass to be reached, removes boundaries and does so via a false sense of connection. By sitting in quiet stillness, even if just for a minute or two at a time, we begin to still the mind and reconnect with our true self. The goal is not cessation of thought, rather an increased ability to manage the mind; mental-self preservation, if you will.”
Pettit gives a concrete example of being able to use the tools that meditation fosters to better serve yourself and your own confidence in your real self.
“I used to say, ‘Oh, I’m having a bad day. I’ll go find the right color of lipstick to fix that.’ I’ve done that. I feel bad, and then I’ll go across the street to Sephora and fix it and then feel, say, ready for a meeting I wasn’t feeling confident about. But meditation says, ‘Well, that’s a separate thing. It’s OK to feel anxious or bad. But let’s see what happens if you don’t act on that fear right now.’ Meditation gives you more options.”
Pettit adds that meditation helps you want to help your body in positive ways, flipping the script from wanting to exercise because you hate your body to instead wanting to exercise to care for and energize your body. Same action, completely different motivation — and desired outcome.
“That line between objectifying yourself and helping yourself changes everything,” Pettit says.
Which is why, Rowan says, meditation can be so crucial in coming to love ourselves and our bodies.
“Meditation brings us home to ourselves, perhaps even more so than the physical component of yoga. Through meditation, we grow intuition, self-love, self-trust and a connection with ourself far deeper than our relationship to the physical body. If the above outcomes result in a glow, then you, my dear, will be illuminated. Inner beauty easily shines through as one of the many positive side effects of meditation — metaphorically and otherwise.”
And so, Rowan concludes, “Meditation may very well be among the oldest beauty hacks of all: Imagine yourself refreshed, calm, serene, confident, connected, and deeply in tune with yourself and others. You radiate — from an inner light that cannot be bottled. No product or peel necessary.”
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