venus day reminder to be more shameless
you will behold me, witness me, admire me, should I so please
I’ve been a lifelong ‘Too Much’ woman, and I quite notoriously tend to never shut up about it. I love to observe in others, as well as reflect on, the subject of beauty. Our relationship with our beauty, the awkward dance we dance around what is ‘beautiful,’ or ‘feeling beautiful.’
I came across an endearing reel in Hindi recently, one in which a Vedic astrologer talks about how a home in which a woman adorns herself, enjoys her ‘shringaar’ (a word for adornment whose charge, energy and depth simply cannot be contained by English, nor translated) and tends to her clothes, her adornment and her fragrance, is a very prosperous home in which the protectors and providers will always have abundance. This is because she makes her shukra (Venus) energy strong by caring about and pouring into what feels like beauty everyday, and this pours out into her home. As with everything, anytime a woman pours energy into herself, she inevitably pours into her home, her family. There is no well rested, well nourished, radiant, happy woman whose home and family doesn’t glow from her charge. There is no depressed, dry, embittered, shut down, depleted woman whose home and family doesn’t reflect that at some level. I have always seen this, felt this, and known it to be true. It’s the phenomenon of why your mother’s mood is the mood of your entire home, it’s the vibration you will feel emanate from the walls. It’s why they say things like happy wife, happy life. A woman is an amplifier and an energetic centre of her home and family.
By caring about beauty, the energy I speak of isn’t insecurity, obsession, shame and mentally detrimental concern about how one looks. I mean ritualizing the self, making an offering to one’s femininity by tending to the beauty of the physical body in some way. I mean that adornment is a spiritual practice, and in our current world, it can especially feel like a healing portal for feminine beings.
You can love your God(s) purely from the mind and by prayer, and yet placing a flower upon an altar does feel sweet and sacred, doesn’t it? Even though not doing it wouldn’t make your divinity love you less, nor make you any less spiritual. In the same way, the lipstick, the drop of perfume, those are flowers placed at the altar of the goddess, and I believe that simply existing as a woman makes you an extension of the divine feminine force that creates and circulates all of existence. Every woman is the Goddess in human form. She is in our wombs, our bleeds, our breasts, our milk, our very essence.
I read a thought-provoking, beautifully expressed piece this morning, from
, and I want to quote something here:Because at the end of the day, women want to feel this feeling.
Not all women, but a whole lot of ‘em—want to feel this feeling.
They want to feel like sex goddesses, like they’re dripping in magic, like fuckin’ spell-casters.
If you’ve ever danced seductively in the mirror when no one was watching, then you already know.
I remember one of the most powerful, beautiful spiritual practices that I learnt from a mentor within a Shakti-devotee women’s circle - dancing to a mirror while eye gazing with yourself, deeply witnessing and facing you, to the length of a song or more. Maybe while you slowly strip away, maybe in your natural, naked form, or maybe wearing something beautiful that makes you feel sexy. Looking deep into your eyes, as though seducing yourself, and seeing the infinite being that you are in there. Looking into your own eyes and dancing sensually to your own reflection, even touching yourself as you deepen into the practice and peel away your shame, and connecting with the divinity within. This is deep, intense work, it will be shadow work for many, and it’s potent. It’s diving into the deep end, it’s not exactly beginner friendly handholding into feminine energy work. I remember how intensely, and beautifully I could lean into enjoying witnessing myself dripping in my own magic in the safe space of this solitary practice, locked in my room when the house was asleep. I’ve danced seductively to the mirror over a hundred times in the past two years by now, and it’s one of the bedrocks of my feminine spiritual practices and my feminine healing, to do this.
Oh, I know. I know just how much our heart, our soul, and our deepest currents as women, when we feel safe and untouched by shame, fucking enjoy being sexy and being seen.
It is in the very nature and essence of feminine energy to want to be seen, admired, cherished, witnessed in her full glory. It’s primal. It is goddess-kissed.
A lot of “No, no, I don’t want attention, I don’t need to be pretty, I’m not interested in adornment, I don’t want to be appreciated for my physical presence” is conditioned shame, small-making and taught fear around embracing this primal truth of feminine nature. It’s also a big part of the Pick Me energy that we pick up just to be able to emotionally survive in the patriarchy.
That’s why so many of us shame women who enjoy make up, fashion, beauty and adornment, who enjoy being seen (safely), because the power they tap into terrifies us, for we were never ‘allowed’ to unapologetically and deeply access it ourselves. We may not all outrightly shame them, but at the subtlest, most insidious levels, most of us are doing that.
Almost all around the world, we are culturally groomed into being terrified of owning that as women, we actually do enjoy being sexy, being admired, being seen, and that we would like to feel these feelings safely. We would like a safe space. We all have our own definition of what feels like a safe space. And too many of us are struggling to even feel allowed to admit that we enjoy being seen.
We’re told that only the young and conventionally attractive are allowed to enjoy this, if we aren’t in those categories. And if we are indeed young and conventionally attractive, we’re slut shamed in microdoses all the time, hated on for being and feeling sexy. Always made to fear being too much. Always asked to tone it down.
It is made out to be like a crime to move like you know you’re sexy, and that you enjoy being seen in your sexiness. We STILL act this out on the way we show up on social media, the way we judge other women on social media.
This is the spiritual lesson and sacred trigger that the archetypes of the courtesan, the exotic dancer, the sex priestess, the seductress, the temptress, the stripper, all reveal to us. The way we feel about them is a spectrum of intense disgust, awe, shame, admiration, wonder, lust, fear, and all of this actually says nothing about them and everything about us. The taboo feminine triggers us in ways very little else can. She’s that powerful. It is too indulgent, too bold, too outrageous, to be a woman who owns her sexiness and enjoys being fully seen in it. She must be outcast. Her power terrifies us.
“She’s beautiful and she doesn’t know it” is a desirable, acceptable, endearing way to exist as a woman. Because She doesn’t have power here. She doesn’t have agency over, awareness of and enjoyment of her beauty, only her (usually male gaze) beholder does.
She’s beautiful AND she knows it? She’s posting thirst traps? She’s sexy and enjoying her sexiness publicly? That’s not good. You’re taught that that’s not good. Because if you’re her, you convey that you have power, in this awareness. Then you own your beauty. It’s not a favour bestowed upon you by that beholder’s gaze. You move different, you move with a current of power. The patriarchy doesn’t want you owning your body, your beauty, your sexiness, none of it.
We are terrified of the energetic power that ripples out when a woman fully, unapologetically enjoys looking beautiful. When she enjoys wielding her sexiness. We are fascinated by the exotic dancer, and at the same time every single one of our conditioned shadows make us feel deeply ashamed, terrified, even repulsed.
A woman enjoying her sexiness, owning her sexiness, knowing that sensuality can sometimes be played with as a spectacle that she might enjoy, is almost always demonized for tapping into this stream in any way.
The triggers are evoked esepcially when women enjoy their adornment, their hotness and their juiciness without even trying to cultivate a performance of ‘effortless,’ or any other such kind of false dilution that has an intention to be less so that others are comfortable. We cringe so hard at a woman who doesn’t try to look minimalist or effortless, a ‘Too Much’ woman, don’t we? Because our envy, our suppressed desire to be her - to be a goddess that’s fully expressed and enjoying it - is triggered.
A lot of the make up education I was exposed to as a millennial teenager came from the western world. It taught me, you can only have a bold lip and nude eyes or fully done up eyes and a nude lip. You can’t do both. That would be bad, wrong, too much. You shouldn’t look like you’ve done make up, even. You shouldn’t be enjoying the art form that make up is. Make up is apologetic, something we all do but shouldn’t admit out loud that we do, just like the fact that we bleed. But one day, when you're an Indian woman going to meet the goddess during Sharadiya Navratri and Pujo, and you behold her idol, and you emulate her shringaar, and also see all the traditionally Indian women around you, you remember that it's not either or for us Indian women, it's both AND bindi. And adornments. And anklets. And flowers in our hair. We don’t leave one part of our body from head to toe unadorned by jewellery when we meet the Goddess, or come together in ritual of any kind.
And honestly, we were all born "too much."
It's kohl rimmed eyes and red lips and unhinged, unapologetic feminine adornment in it's fullest sacred intensity, all together. That's the signature of the Indian way of feminine beauty and the Devi, isn't it?
She's overwhelming. And she doesn’t really care about overwhelming you.
Sometimes, I feel so bored and done with all these Cool Girl tropes of striving to look like you actually did nothing to look beautiful, even though you did do something. “Be less, don’t look too dressed up, don’t look like you enjoy make up and the creative self expression through fashion, nobody should find out that you’re pouring into enjoying your own beauty, how dare you? That’s only for those in showbiz, not for you.” These invisible codes keep women dull, small, dry and hidden, and it just fucking exasperates me.
This is not about the women who enjoy being subtle and elegantly understated because that’s just who they are, if that’s who you are and that’s what lights you up, you’ll be sumptuous in doing just that.
A lot of times, for a lot of us, that’s not who we actually are. That’s who we are telling ourselves we are, because we think that Good Girls shouldn’t be enjoying being seen, admired. Good Girls shouldn’t enjoy their physical form. Good Girls should erase, erase, erase.
Deep down, beneath all the conditioning, the ‘I’m not good enough,’ the shame, the insecurity, the fear, all the bullshit calcification most of us carry, there is a juicy, pink current. And the feminine energy does, very much enjoy being complimented, seen, witnessed, admired, dripping, and all she wants is to feel safe in doing so.
When you create a safe container for yourself to play with this current that does exist within you, a powerful kind of deep, deep healing will begin.
If you’re unfamiliar with this reference, this scene will express everything I’ve said to you far more potently than I could have said it, without any words.
Before I sign off, I want to share with you some beautiful, beautiful reads in the same vein of my girlblog letter to you today. May you dip your toes, your hips and then swan dive into relishing your beauty, your femininity and your energy a little more than you’ve been allowing yourself. I can promise, this stuff goes deeper than the superficial patriarchal conditioning that’s keeping you powerless by telling you that looks don’t matter, or that tending to one’s appearance or enjoying fashion and beauty is vain. Your glamour is power, the way you present in this world is witchcraft that alters your energy, and your entire life. You are a human woman, and you were born to and meant to fucking enjoy your physical body, to adorn it and to relish in being adored, and to dance seductively in front of a mirror, or a club, whatever you fancy.
Let them behold you.
A list of reads that exist in the same sphere as this subject, and will nourish and heal you in a gentle, profound way, should you allow them to:
