Robbing Yourself of Beautiful

This is our Part II feature of Martha Beck's memoir, Expecting Adam. The first explored the empowerment of stripping off the armor that protects us from conforming in ways that can hinder your ability to be yourself. The armor is really protecting you from nothing and keeping you from yourself. Beck's life experiences that lead her to see beautiful are inspiring. Her accounts of tough decision-making that surrounded her unborn son and the beautiful life he would come to lead are inspiring and raw and moving and real. While reading her book we found several passages so attuned to See Beautiful and our movement that we couldn't have aligned them more perfectly, and in the quote below she invites us to think about how our own cognitive prejudice is robbing you from seeing beautiful.

This is Martha seeing beautiful on a run (after mistaking a piece of cardboard for a rose quartz):

"As I continued my run, it occurred to me that the piece of Styrofoam hadn't changed at all between the time I first saw it, when I was so drawn to its beauty, and the moment I realized what it was, and was disgusted by its ugliness. The only change was inside my head. I had assigned two different labels to that small pink object, and those labels, not the thing itself, had determined my reaction to it. This was enough to make me wonder if many of the things I reviled as ugly might not in fact be beautiful, if I might be robbing myself of beauty with my own cognitive prejudice" (Beck, 2011, p. 322).

This is Martha seeing beautiful in her reflections of the truth:

"Living with Adam, loving Adam, has taught me a lot about the truth. He has taught me to look at things in themselves, not at the value a brutal and often senseless world assigns to them.As Adam's mother I have been able to see quite clearly that he is no less beautiful for being called ugly, no less wise for appearing dull, no less precious for being seen as worthless. And neither am I. Neither are you. Neither is any of us" (Beck, 2011, p. 332).

Neither is any of us. You are beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.

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Visit Martha Beck's website HERE.
Connect with Martha on Facebook HERE. 
Connect with Martha on Twitter HERE.

Beck, M. (2011). Expecting Adam. NY: Three Rivers Press.

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