Strip off the Comforting Armor and Go on Naked

 
Martha Beck's memoir, Expecting Adam, moved us in many ways. Her life experiences that lead her to see beautiful were moving. 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 strip off our comfort armor - which could prove to be life saving.

This is Martha seeing beautiful after an operation:

"...there was a concrete message that remained even after the drugs had left my system, and this is - sort of - what it said. It said that the way back to my real environment, the place where my soul was meant to exist, doesn't lie through any set of codes I will ever find outside of myself. I have to look inward. I have to jettison every sorrow, every terror, every misconception, every lie that stands between my conscious mind and what I know in my heart to be true. Instead of clutching around me all the trappings of a 'good' person, a 'successful' person, or even a 'righteous' person, I have to be exactly what I am, and take the horrible chance that I may be rejected for it. I can't get home by cloaking myself in the armor or any system, social, political, or religious. I have to strip off all that comforting armor and go naked"  (Beck, 2011, p. 301).

So what if we did? What if we stripped the armor we feel we need to navigate pop culture's murky waters? Interestingly, armor would get quite heavy to wear wading through sea after sea of expectation. Wouldn't it be freeing, and in the case of carrying armor across a body of water, even life saving to let go of what holds you down and find a lifesaver in yourself? Lifesaving. How 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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