If you are a sensitive soul, you probably have a deep need for beauty. You are nourished by every experience that seems to touch the edges of mystery. The same high sensitivity that can sometimes feel so hard and painful then becomes a portal into the deep rhythms of the world.
But, and this is a big but, having a need for beauty can sound superficial. It goes against a lot of the puritanical conditioning we are fed. We are supposed to work hard, with our noses at the grindstone. Hankering after beauty feels like such a waste of time. Is it even a real need?
I think it is. I think you suspect so, as well.
As a highly sensitive person, you know how beauty can give meaning to your every day.
It connects you to your senses. It brings you down into your body, when you might have been flying desperately into your mind. It gives you an anchor in the present moment. It connects you to the divine.
What is the nature of this beauty? Why do we sometimes get so confused about whether we even need or deserve to have it, in the first place? Why do we confuse it with materialism and buying things that please us in the moment?
While re-reading Sarah Ban Breathnach’s lovely book Simple Abundance, I came across an essay where she answers just these questions. What is this need for beauty? How can we address it? What does it mean when we really want something, but maybe can’t afford it right now?
Sarah B. tells us about how she had been experimenting with living a simply abundant life for almost a year and thought that she had, finally, quite successfully overcome the “Buy me” syndrome.
“I enjoyed window shopping and did not feel diminished because I couldn’t purchase something that captured my eye. Then I discovered a $45 lifestyle book crammed with pictures of things I love. Lush arrangements of flowers. Groupings of silver picture frames. Rose chintz. I flipped through visions I wanted to live in. Angrily, I returned it to the bookstore shelf, furious that I couldn’t afford the book and fed up that I wasn’t living the lifestyle I thought I wanted. All I had may very well have been all I needed, but it certainly wasn’t all I wanted.”
For several hours, these feelings churned through her. Then, in a momentary pause, she stopped and asked herself: What was really happening here? What had pushed her buttons? Had she been sticking too strictly to her budget? Was she depressed because she could no longer afford to buy something she enjoyed on a whim like she once had been able to do? Or was it something completely different? Was a deeper issue at play here?
“The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I hadn’t been paying enough attention to my passion for beauty. My deprivation was caused by not appreciating, savoring, or celebrating the beauty that already existed in my life — so much so that my soul had erupted into a volcano of protest. When something calls to us on a deep enough level to engage our emotions, our conscious attention is sought. Beauty was calling to me, not objects.”
As she realized this, that the longing she was feeling was for beauty and not just things, she headed to a farmer’s market for flowers.
Instead of just one bouquet, she treated herself to two. When she set down these lush arrangements in her living room, she felt her want and longing quieting down. She had satisfied her authentic need for beauty in a much more inexpensive way.
“Don’t feel you have to deny or ignore your feelings when you want something beautiful but can’t afford it. The desire offers clues to satisfy this holy hunger. Explore why you behold something as beautiful; use your impressions to jump-start your imagination. Beauty surrounds us. It is everywhere if we search for it, if we’re open to having more of it in our lives. “Here we are, sitting in a shower of gold,” the Australian novelist Christia Stead wrote in 1938, with “nothing to hold up but a pitchfork.”
Just like Sarah B. says, we need to explore our own holy hunger. What might satiate the deep need for beauty that is part of every highly sensitive person’s experience?
Do we need music that glides over us? Do we need beautiful words that lift us up, that breathe their courage into the recesses of our soul? Do we need to be held in the sounds of nature? Are we yearning for our own heartbeat?
What is it that you want today? How can you get it, in the simplest way?
You have permission to throw off the cloak of martyrdom, and take deep gulps of the nourishing, clear waters of true beauty. I hope you have a wonderful time!
If you liked this post, you might also like this post I wrote on creating authentic beauty in our homes. In it, I talk about bringing in the colors, textures and the living soul of my life in India to my home here in the United States.
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