The Image Maker

The old adage, “beauty is only skin-deep” is so very profound. This cliché is most often used as a negative statement that a beautiful woman or anything of “beauty” may have underlying traits that aren’t so pretty. A rose has a thorn. It is a “sticking point.” The same goes for humans. We are all made up of beauty and the things we’d rather prune from our lives. This book will help you identify what needs to be pruned from your life to help the beauty, your true underlying beauty to emerge and blossom. Although our external reality or the way we look is important, it’s only a small fraction of what needs to change in order to allow your inner beauty to shine and for you to develop an image that expresses who you truly are. You are valuable in any state. But too often we can’t find the way to feel our worth, much less to express it externally. I have just introduced you to the key concept in creating the life and the image that you desire for the rest of the world to see. There are internal processes that go on within each of us that dictate how we see ourselves and how much we buy into the mass marketing of sexuality and what is beautiful. Inside each and every one of us is the ability and the power to make our life whatever we want it to be. So it’s an “inside job,” as one wise friend of mine says. By the way, if the people around you don’t think like this, you may want to consider expanding your inner circle to include those who do – I call this your “circle of influence.” Those around you do affect the way you see yourself, so ask yourself this, “Who in my circle makes me feel good about myself when I’m around them? Who doesn’t?” Notice how do you feel the “vibes” you get from each of them? Almost from the moment we arrive here on planet earth, we are taught to observe and to trust in our five senses. Our senses inform our minds what is happening around us, and this obviously critical information is used to function and be safe in the physical world. We are raised to listen and to watch and to be obedient to our parents and teachers. We are told how things work and we take it on faith, never questioning the motives or perceptions of those who teach us. How could we even begin to question anything? We know nothing but what we’ve learned thus far – we have no basis for comparison. Our earliest experiences are the norm. Furthermore, the norm becomes our norm. This is called conditioning and we have all been conditioned. Not one of us escapes it. Our automatic responses to situations have been imprinted upon us in early childhood, at a time when we were like little dry sponges, soaking up information at a phenomenal speed. We don’t recognize this conditioning because it is deeply imprinted on us at a level that cannot be accessed consciously. It is in our subconscious mind, below the level of our awareness. And no amount of trying to access it makes any difference. If it seems like I’m painting a dismal picture here, bear with me, as I will put it all into perspective a bit later in Chapter 9: “Re-Programming Your Self” (if you just can’t wait). I am trying to show here that our perception of ourselves and everything around us has been conditioned to a point where we don’t recognize that something we accepted as true might not be true at all. You may have a negative self-image because someone told you that you were ugly or fat or uncoordinated as a child. Just because someone said it, that doesn’t make it so. I want you to just begin to play with the idea that you may believe things that are false, especially about yourself, your beauty, your worth and your abilities. And that can be changed with a little bit of work and education on the subject. So far I’ve told you that your power resides within you, then contradicted that by telling you that you have been conditioned and, furthermore, that you can’t even find out exactly what that conditioning entails. How can I suggest that these contradictory states can be resolved? Because I know that we are something much greater than what many of us have been raised to believe that we are. We are not just limited human beings graced with a soul. We are spiritual beings graced with a body. Since we are spiritual beings, having a physical experience, we have been gifted with an intellect to bridge the gap between the physical and the nonphysical worlds - between our reality and our dreams. If this idea is new to you, then there are no cells of recognition with which to process and assimilate this information, because the process of introducing a new intellectual concept sometimes rattles the cage of our paradigms- or our models for life. This is a primary way in which we discover what conditioning resides within our subconscious mind. Our discomfort at entertaining the new idea reveals a paradigm, our pattern of thinking. Up until now our choices and our actions have been quietly directed by this pattern. Now the noise begins with the introduction of this unfamiliar idea. A client I’ll call Susan, to protect her confidentiality, was desperately unhappy with her life and her appearance. She lived alone and had recently given up her only friendship around the time that we began working together. She felt isolated and lonely and frequently angry. Despite her seemingly high level of motivation to change her life, Susan’s even higher level of fear of the unknown controlled her to the extent that she couldn’t entertain new ways of being. Every week we were back to the same place processing the same issues again. Susan was looping through the same material week after week because she was afraid to experience any discomfort long enough to create a new pattern of being, which included new ways of thinking about herself and how life could be.