Beauty

How often do you recognize the beauty that surrounds you? How often do you look about and see the miracles of nature, the flowers, shrubs, trees, animals? Do you look into the sky and marvel at the clouds? Do you notice the changes in light as the day progresses or a change of weather occurs? Do you breathe in the scent of flowers or a rain soaked morning? If you do these things, do you stop and savour them for a bit of time? Think about breathing in the scent of newly fallen rain. Stop right now and describe it to yourself. Can you? Is the description long and full of wonderful adjectives to attempt to give the sense of the scent or is your description more rudimentary and something akin to “fresh” or "clean” and that is all?  What are the underlying scents? Is it musky, or like hay or some tree that you have? Does it cleanse your senses in purity? Stopping to enjoy and ingest the smell of new rain is free. It brings joy to the senses and enlivens you as it is a gift from nature, yet you do not stop for the gift.  

Now take clouds.  Do you see shapes in the clouds?  Do you observe the differences in them? Do you play the game of finding shapes or objects or animals in them? Do you wonder at their beauty? Do you notice how the sunlight plays with them or during a full moon how different and magnificent they are?  Do you notice the sunsets or sunrises and the different colors and differences during weather changes? Are there any flowering plants right now in your yard or home? After you are done with this mediation, go out and see what is in your yard or in a nearby park or just walk down your street and notice any vegetation that is around. 

Beauty surrounds you and it surrounds you for free. It does not have to come from a store or a bottle or something that must be acquired. It is right there, every day and at most any moment. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder has been a phrase for a long time, but what do you behold? Now we realize that this phrase is often used with regard to someone’s personal beauty, but it applies to many aspects. How willing are you to see the beauty in living? How willing are you to see your own beauty? 

Now we do not want this put into terms of physical beauty only. There are some people who might be more classically beautiful given the norms of your desires, cultures and societies, but when you look at those people do they radiate beauty or do they simply possess it? Radiating beauty is a gift that you can develop no matter what your outer self looks like. Many of you worry about how you look much more than how you act or how you connect with the world around you. Is your beauty only skin deep or does it come from deeply within yourself and radiate outwards to encompass all you meet and see? Do you work at refining your interior as hard as you may work at your exterior?  Some of you feel you have no inner beauty and therefore you allow the outer shell to become less than beautiful. It is as though you believe your soul would like to be housed in a rundown shack with vacant cars and appliances in your personal yard. You eschew all trappings of beauty because you have made a decision that your soul is not beautiful and therefore why bother. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every one of you has the most of beautiful souls. The light and radiance they emit would overwhelm most people if they allowed it to light up and project at its true candle power. Think about this for a while. Work on finding the beauty within and then we will revisit the task of realizing beauty and radiance. 

We leave you in love.

Namaste

Excerpt from “We Are All In This Alone - A Spiritual Journey to Self - Insights of Babaji” by Heather Cronrath