Meditation as a Foundational Beauty Tool
Have you heard this saying?
"You can't control your experiences, but YOU CAN control how you experience your experiences."
When you think about it, those words can be transformational.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and as you may have experienced in your own beauty journey, it's way more than physical- beauty is very much psychological, emotional, and spiritual.
Now more than ever, there is a collective responsibility to integrate these topics into all beauty conversations because looking and feeling your best biologically stems from the mind + heart.
Beauty is Primordial
Much of the feminine is emphasized by beauty because it is primordial.
The innate desire to look younger, healthy, and desirable is part of human biology. We are hardwired to want to attract a mate or human connection for survival.
Beauty is subjective, but what remains true is that its process entails a sensation-based evaluation. Humans base their experience on symmetry, balance, complexity or simplicity, and composition.
For centuries, beauty (as it relates to human aesthetics) has been about expressing a feeling, an identity, status, or, more importantly, an attachment to a community. Only a few ancient cultures understood that your inner world is deeply connected to what you see on the outside.
As we (and technology) evolve, beauty ideals have become more aspirational and harder to maintain, resulting in the highest rates of appearance-based anxiety and depression than ever reported.
Traditional Western beauty culture focuses on crafting your desired body to fast-track happiness, acceptance, community, or inner peace.
This one-dimensional approach has limitations because only a few will feel a sense of peace within themselves by changing their aesthetics.
This one-dimensional approach has limitations because only a few will feel a sense of peace within themselves by changing their aesthetics.
Therefore the fundamental infrastructure to feeling free, at peace, and happy in your body is about understanding the balance between your inner and outer world and forging a union with those dimensions of yourself.
The foundation of conscious beauty rests on the interconnectedness of your inner and outer worlds to foster more balance in your mind and body.
The Nervous System and Beauty
It's not stress that ages you. It's your reaction to stress that does.
Have you noticed the way your skin looks and feels when you are experiencing a stressful period? Was there a shift in your skin health?
Most people will experience unfavorable skin reactions because:
When you are experiencing stress, your body activates the sympathetic nervous system telling you to fight, flight, or freeze for survival- no matter if a tiger is chasing you or if you received an off-putting email.
Here your body pumps blood and energy to your limbs to prepare for survival and steals energy and vital nutrients from the integumentary system-your body's outer layer consisting of your skin, hair, nails, and glands + nerves on the skin.
In this state, cortisol (and epinephrine + adrenaline) hormone levels elevate. If you spend long periods in this state, you trigger inflammation that stimulates the skin to react with unfavorable skin reactions.
Inflammation also causes something now known as inflammaging:
- Leading to entropy and depletion of natural hyaluronic acid
- Slowing down skin cell rejuvenation
- Accelerating signs of premature aging
A solution is to learn how to respond to stress vs. reacting to it.
Why Meditation For Beauty + Wellness?
The most sustainable beauty practice is building an internal ecosystem for the skin to thrive.
Along with gut health, meditation is the most profound foundational tool used at Beauty Flow because it is the most impactful method to train the mind and regulate the central nervous system.
*According to Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH): Participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress.
Caps off to ancient Eastern cultures for recognizing that meditation instills inner balance and, as a result, strengthens cellular function and self-connection.
Emerging scientific research shows that a daily 15-minute meditation elicits noticeable and measured improvements to brain, skin, and metabolic health.
7 Benefits Of A Daily 15-Minute Meditation Practice
1. Medically test biologically younger than their age.
2. Be more emotionally resilient due to more density in the brain's prefrontal cortex and the amygdala activation decreases.
3. 4x's more likely to heal the skin with visualization meditation practices.
4. More quickly to regulate the nervous system so the body can rest, digest, and repair itself, allowing skin cells to retain moisture, rejuvenate, and restore faster.
5. Recalibrates the circadian rhythm to produce the hormones that help with sleeping (melatonin) and skin cell rejuvenation.
6. Releases energetic blocks of self-doubt and strengthens compassion, empathy, and self-love (so important for beauty).
7. Lengthen telomeres- this slightly reverses the signs of aging because these chromosomes are attached to our aging cells and shorten as we age.
In the Beauty Flow Method, each coaching session ends with a 15-minute guided meditation to improve the mind, self-connection, + skin health, and most importantly, regulate the nervous system.
The goal is to set you up with a framework you can apply, no matter your experience with meditation.
For balanced beauty, it's time to go beyond the skin.
Ready to learn more about The Beauty Flow Method?