How are we raising our girls in today’s world?
What is ‘the norm’?
Are the ‘leading examples’ of ways to support our girls truly working?
Is there another more natural and truly supportive way?
Reading through the comments of a blog, which I totally love, here on Women in Livingness, the blog asks some pertinent questions:
- Why does it feel like we have to attain beauty and we are not beautiful until it has been acquired or purchased?
- Why isn’t anyone telling us that we are already truly beautiful and amazing?
- Why are we not supported to seek forms of expression that confirm our beauty?
The sharing got me to reflect further and to ask deeper questions. The ladies commenting began to discuss how it was different than the normalised images of beauty for their daughters. How the celebration in a sense of natural beauty remained and was playfully expressed through clothes, make up… and that these things were not there to make the girls beautiful but to support them in having fun, expressing that they are already full of beauty.
My ‘little girl’ – actually a five year old woman – (really she is!) is knowing of her beauty, and celebrates with all manner of expressive tools; clothes, dance, song, creams, jewellery, nail polish and a certain steady depth shining, unabated in her precious eyes.
She adores the amazing true role model in Natalie Benhayon and utilises the videos of The woman I am and Take a picture as ways to support her in this celebration. It is gorgeous to watch her dressing up and dancing and singing so freely – not looking for approval – but shining bright and confirming that she is amazing and full of beauty. Her favourite book is one from Sunlight Ink called I am Beauty-Full … just for being me, and whilst she cannot yet read the words, she goes through the pages and tells the story… “Is it what you do that makes you beautiful?, nooo, what we do can be beautiful but it can never make you full of beauty.”
I have noticed that she reaches for these supports at the end of a day out in the world (at preschool or day care) receiving messages, be they directly or reading the obvious unspoken ‘between the lines’, that what she does or how she looks is what makes her special.
So what, if any, true support is out there on offer to allow our amazing daughters, young girls, so brimming with love and lightness of heart, to know they are amazing?
I have recently had the joy of being acquainted with the amazing Girl to Woman Project, a project that is part of Esoteric Women’s Health, which has a tag line:
‘True Beauty comes from within, always and forever waiting there for you to bring it out’.
‘Worth Celebrating’
Prior to meeting this beauty-filled, revelatory, common sense, everyday heavenly approach, I had been involved in programs set up to ‘transition’ girls to womanhood. Although perhaps well intentioned, they lacked a truly supportive foundation and confirmation of a simple fact that every girl’s amazing beauty is within, ‘always and forever waiting for her to bring it out’.
Once I even took part in ‘maiden ceremonies’ but none of it turned out to be very practical, real or meaningful in daily life, just another set of words and things to live up to, for how could young girls relate to becoming a ‘goddess’ and how would that notion leave them with a sense of themselves from the inside first.
There are other projects around claiming to ‘lead the way’ in ‘giving’ girls self confidence and self esteem…. but sadly by telling them in (and between) every word that it is what they DO that makes them beautiful and confident. It is about ticking boxes and etiquette rules for the ‘importance of self image’ i.e. that the way we dress, or wear make up or do our hair is about the image we want to create in the world to prove our worth and to succeed. The ‘confidence’ one assumes is from knowing the rule book well enough to be ‘confident’, so that all the boxes are being ticked.
But is this the way to raise our girls to know themselves? Is it encouraging them to stay connected to the amazingness within, where true confidence and so true beauty stems from?
If we sent a beauty-full precious and naturally confident 5 year old along to one such program, how would it aid her to remain confident? Would everything delivered not be going against what her heart is already telling her? Would we not be encouraging a box ticking method and bringing her focus on everything that is saying that ‘beauty’ is a doing, instead of a being to be celebrated and expressed?
Are the programs that are supposedly at the pinnacle of leading the way in empowering girls, actually delivering and propagating the messages that result in most of us leaving our innate beauty to seek outside?
If on the other hand our girls were offered opportunity to attend projects like Girl to Woman Festival, they would be given an opportunity to know and confirm that they are precious, always and forever worthy of a celebration of the beauty they are.
They would learn that applying make up is not skin deep and definitely not there to mask anything but there to be used as a natural reflection of their innate expression.
They would learn that their beauty radiates as a glowing warmth from within and shines through as the undeniable sparkle in their eyes, and that no one and nothing outside them can either take this away or decide for them if they are worthy of true cherishing or not.
The warmth all young girls have inside never dies – hence how natural the yearning is to express this beauty yet how frequently it has been hijacked in a world that is hypersexualised and where we are bombarded from so young with images and ideals to live up to or prove a worth that was always there in the first place…. Madness we must render naught.
To all young women everywhere: enjoy this heart-meltingly beautiful Girl to Woman Song by Rachael Kane – know you are so precious and so worth celebrating.
Heartfull thanks to Natalie Benhayon, and all the women and girls who are leading the way for us all, with the deep care and awesomely playful celebration and expression of the beauty we all are as women.
by Kate Burns, Bellingen, Australia
You may also like:
The Natural Yearning and Impulse to Express our Beauty by Gina Dunlop