I was at the airport this morning, catching an early flight. Paying for gum and a magazine. There was a long line behind me. I felt myself habitually tighten, and press down on my inner gas pedal. “Hurry Regena! The next person is waiting!!”

Noticing the constriction in my chest, I purposely slowed down. Made eye contact with the cashier. Appreciated her for her help. It was a push, but I did it. And yet I know I did not relax into the simple enjoyment of the cashier, myself, and our human connection, all the way.
The hustle is not easy to shed.
But by choosing to connect with her, for a moment, I was able to connect with myself.

What gets lost when we are rushing through life?
Certainly not hard work. Nor efficiency.
Generally speaking, when we are working hard, we are pushing to get it all done and trying our best to be as efficient as possible. We are checking off the to-do list like a champion.
And yet.
Consider this:
In a life well-lived, is it our efficiency and labor we want to be remembered for?
Or is it some ethereal ephemeral other?

The urge, inside, to create beauty, or simply, to create, is precisely the same force as that which lives within the Universal Creator. The GPS.
When we live in awareness of ourselves as a force of creation, we are connected to our innate ability to bring magic into the moment and we can actually find the magnificence in the chaos of life. This inner awareness is what allows us to leave the planet stress, and inhabit the planet of beauty.

When women are connected to our own experience of our own beauty, it is like a super power. We feel calm, centered, in a state of flow.
Because of the skewed priorities of the patriarchal world culture (PWC), which cuts women off from their pleasure, women tend to devalue the importance of beauty in their lives. Effort is much more applauded than imagination. But there is a hugely important part of us that wants to create beauty in as many ways as possible – from the way we dress, to the way we create our food, to the way we live, the way we relate to our community, the way we make love, write poetry, sing, dance, pray, or move through a busy airport.

We ignore beauty to our own detriment.
When we disconnect from our feminine value system, and instead adopt the more masculine value system, we actually block our own ability to create harmony in both our own lives, and the lives of our loved ones. We might even begin to believe that beauty is not an important or worthy goal, which puts a block on our ability to live in a state of grace, and pops us into a state of stress.

When we disconnect from our natural affinity and desire to create beauty, we block our own flow.

Beauty is not superficial.
It flows from within, as an expression of love and radiance.
Beauty has been co-opted by the PWC as an unattainable cultural standard, leading women to believe we do not have a right to relate to beauty unless we appear a certain way. We can believe beauty is either an unattainable goal, or an unworthy goal.

If you have struggled with the obsessive attitude towards beauty that tends to prevail in human culture, it’s time to unplug from that viewpoint, change the channel and plug into nature instead.
Her version of beauty is limitless. Vast. Diverse. Expansive. Humorous. Adorable. Monumental.

When we rush through life, disconnected from our innate talent and love of beauty, our self-esteem takes a huge hit. When we believe the PWC beauty standards instead of the flow of our own innate river of beauty, we can feel shut down and depressed. The simple pleasure of being you, exactly and precisely as you are, can be devastatingly diminished, when we shut this supposedly trivial (but wildly important) door.

We have the ability to switch gears.
To choose a different pathway.
To fight back, and choose to become our own generator of our own magnificence.
Just in the very same way I did, when I made myself slow down at the airport and took the time to flirt with my cashier.
We can choose to honor our nature.
To be slow, when we don’t think we have enough time to be. To embrace the chaos of our emotions. To defiantly love our bodies no matter how they defy the narrow societal conventions that exclude so many of us who are aging, full-figured, thin, not able-bodied, non-binary and gender non-conforming.

We can learn this quickly – it does not have to take a long time. We can make teeny tiny steps towards loving our bodies, every day. Just because. We can choose to practice approving of the depth and breadth of our ever-changing emotions, every day. And by so doing, we can begin to trust ourselves, and trust wherever we are on our path. No matter what we think it looks like to others.

Women are meant to find beauty, to create beauty.

Can you feel it?
It is our birthright.
Beauty soothes the soul, inspires love, balances the nervous system, invites divinity. The impact of beauty is healing, for both the creator and the receiver. There is nothing trivial about the pursuit of beauty. A world without beauty is a world without inspiration and meaning. It is a woman’s nature to explore beauty, imagine beauty, dream of beauty and create beauty.

Expect beauty.
Stand for it.
Create beauty.
It is your pathway home.
And it is a magnificent way to be of service to the world.

With so much love and pleasure,

Regena Thomashauer, aka “Mama Gena”
The School of Womanly Arts

Regena is a feminist icon, a teacher, a speaker, a mother, a best-selling author, and creatrix and CEO of The School of Womanly Arts.