The Beauty of the Heart

Or: What If You Stopped Fighting Your Face?

I’ve been keeping a little secret.

Yes, I make some of the best skincare you will ever put on your face.

I grow the plants. I distill the hydrosols. I blend the oils. I have spent decades understanding skin, beauty, women, and the strange alchemy that happens when you put something living and beautiful onto the body.

But that is not my real secret.

The sacred space of the heart is.

I believe that is part of what has kept me youthful.

Not because I have somehow escaped aging.

I haven’t.

I am sixty-four years old. I have lived. My face knows it.

But I have spent years going into the heart and dismantling things.

Old programs.

Old identities.

Old grief.

Old expectations.

Old ideas about who I was supposed to be.

And increasingly, I have begun to wonder how much of what we call aging belongs only to biology...

and how much belongs to everything we have been carrying.

Here’s a mildly inconvenient thought for the beauty industry:

What if your face is not the problem?

I know.

Terrible for business.

Entire industries have been built around convincing women that aging is an emergency requiring immediate intervention.

Wrinkle spotted.

Emergency declared.

Credit card deployed.

A line appears and suddenly we need a peptide, a procedure, a machine, a needle, a cream made from something harvested by moonlight from a Swiss glacier and sold for $412 an ounce.

God forbid a woman’s face reveal that she has actually been alive.

Meanwhile, very little is said about the heart.

And I don’t mean the sentimental Valentine’s Day heart.

I mean the sacred space of the heart.

The interior place where we hold memory, grief, identity, fear, love, old vows, old stories, and an astonishing collection of programming we never consciously agreed to.

Including the programming around aging.

We are told what sixty looks like.

What seventy looks like.

What a woman is supposed to become when she is no longer twenty-eight.

Invisible.

Practical.

Quiet.

Covered.

Grateful anyone still finds her attractive.

Oh, please.

Some of us have only just arrived.

The Body Is Listening

The body is not separate from the life being lived inside it.

Anyone who has ever gone through grief knows this.

Anyone who has fallen wildly in love knows this.

Anyone who has finally left a terrible relationship, quit a soul-crushing job, moved across the country, forgiven someone, stopped pretending, or suddenly rediscovered joy knows this.

The body changes.

The face changes.

The eyes change.

The shoulders drop.

The breath deepens.

There are people who seem to age ten years during a season of misery and then somehow look five years younger after getting their life back.

Something changed.

Not merely on their skin.

Inside them.

The heart, brain, nervous system, immune system, hormones and body are not operating in little private apartments, politely ignoring one another.

They are in conversation.

Constantly.

Stress changes us.

Fear changes us.

Grief changes us.

Love changes us.

Joy changes us.

Freedom changes us.

So perhaps beauty was never happening only from the epidermis outward.

Perhaps some of it has always been happening from the heart outward.

Aging Has a Script

Now here is where the Crone gets her machete.

Because somewhere along the way, women were sold the idea that getting older was a cosmetic failure.

Convenient, isn’t it?

First they tell you exactly what is going to go wrong.

Your skin will dry out.

Your face will fall.

Your memory will disappear.

Your body will hurt.

Your desire will vanish.

Your relevance will evaporate.

And then they hand you a mirror.

So you start looking.

You are handed the diagnosis before you even have the symptom.

Every line becomes evidence.

Every ache becomes evidence.

Every tired afternoon becomes evidence.

Every forgotten name becomes evidence.

And suddenly you are not living in your body anymore.

You are monitoring it.

Waiting for the predicted collapse.

That is the part that fascinates me.

Because expectation does not simply sit quietly in the corner.

Expectation directs attention.

Attention hunts for proof.

Proof becomes interpretation.

Interpretation becomes identity.

And eventually you say:

See? I knew I was getting old.

Well, of course you did.

You have been rehearsing for it your entire life.

We are told what sixty looks like before we ever reach forty.

We are told what seventy feels like before we have any idea who we will even be at seventy.

We are handed an aging script and then praised when we perform it convincingly.

No thank you.

That doesn’t mean biology isn’t real.

It means I refuse to confuse biology with programming.

Those are not the same thing.

And I am very interested in finding out which is which.

Because once you can see the script, you can stop reading from it.

Humans are extraordinarily suggestible creatures.

We organize ourselves around expectations all the time.

That doesn’t mean you can stand naked under the full moon chanting, “I am twenty-three,” and expect your ovaries to issue a formal apology and restart production.

Please.

But it does mean we should become far more curious about the difference between:

What is my body actually doing?

and

What have I been told my body must do?

Those are not always the same thing.

And that is where the sacred space of the heart becomes so powerful.

Not through positive thinking.

Not through pretending.

Through seeing.

You begin noticing:

That belief isn’t mine.

That fear isn’t mine.

That definition of beauty isn’t mine.

That timeline isn’t mine.

That version of womanhood isn’t mine.

That woman I was told I had to become?

She isn’t mine either.

And one by one, you begin putting things down.

The Face You Were Born Beneath

Most women have spent decades wearing expressions that were never entirely theirs.

The pleasing face.

The worried face.

The capable face.

The “everything is fine” face.

The face that anticipates everyone’s needs.

The face that braces for impact.

The face that stays small so someone else can stay comfortable.

The face that smiles when it wants to say fuck off.

That one has probably caused a wrinkle or two.

Do that for thirty or forty years and the body remembers.

Then something remarkable can happen when a woman begins returning to herself.

Her face softens.

Her eyes become different.

Something enters her.

Or perhaps something that was always there finally gets to come out.

It isn’t that every line disappears.

It’s that the woman underneath the lines begins appearing.

And that is an entirely different kind of beauty.

It has heat in it.

Presence.

Humor.

Eroticism.

Intelligence.

Mystery.

The kind of face you actually want to look at.

Not because it is flawless.

Because somebody is home.

Aurelia Gold Heart

This is part of where Aurelia Gold Heart came from.

I thought I was writing a story.

And I was.

But beneath the story was the thing I had been living for years:

the journey into the heart.

A woman at the threshold.

A woman dismantling who she had been told to be.

A woman walking away from old identities, old maps, old agreements and entering the mystery of who she is becoming.

Aurelia does not become younger.

She becomes more alive.

That distinction matters to me.

Because somewhere along the way we confused youth with aliveness.

They are not the same thing.

Youth belongs to a season.

Aliveness belongs to the soul.

And I have met women in their twenties who seem ancient from the weight of themselves.

I have met women in their seventies whose eyes contain more mischief, sensuality and life than half the room.

That is the beauty I am interested in now.

And perhaps that is why Aurelia had to arrive when she did.

She is not running backward.

She is walking deeper.

Into the heart.

Into the mystery.

Into herself.

Beauty Was Never Supposed to Be Punishment

Now, before anyone throws their face serum into the compost pile, this is not an argument against beauty potions.

Good God, no.

I make them.

I love them.

And I intend to continue making ridiculously beautiful things for women to rub all over themselves.

Oil your face.

Mist yourself with rose.

Rub magnificent plants into your skin.

Take baths.

Anoint your breasts.

Massage your scalp.

Put flowers in your hair.

Smell like a forest goddess if that pleases you.

Beauty is pleasure.

Beauty is ritual.

Beauty is adornment.

Beauty is one of the ways we say to the body:

I see you.

But there is an enormous difference between:

I must fix myself.

and

I am tending something sacred.

One is warfare.

The other is relationship.

And I think skin knows the difference.

For decades the beauty industry has encouraged women to approach their own faces as adversaries.

Fight wrinkles.

Attack aging.

Erase lines.

Destroy pigmentation.

Correct imperfections.

Everything is a battle.

The beauty industry doesn’t merely sell products.

It sells surveillance.

Look closer.

Inspect harder.

Find the flaw.

Buy the correction.

Repeat.

At some point, we have to ask who benefits from a woman spending half her life standing two inches from a mirror looking for evidence of her own decline.

Not her.

That much I know.

What if we simply stop fighting ourselves?

What if tending the skin becomes an act of affection rather than correction?

That is the kind of beauty ritual I want.

Good plants.

Beautiful oils.

Wild hydrosols.

Hands on skin.

And a woman who no longer stands in front of the mirror looking for evidence that something has gone wrong.

Keep the serum.

Lose the programming.

Maybe the Greatest Beauty Treatment Is Freedom

There comes a point in a woman’s life when beauty becomes far more interesting than being pretty.

Pretty is easy.

Pretty has rules.

Beauty does not.

Beauty is a sixty-four-year-old woman laughing too loudly.

Beauty is silver hair.

Beauty is a deeply lined face attached to sparkling eyes.

Beauty is sensuality without permission.

Beauty is intelligence that no longer apologizes for itself.

Beauty is a woman who has stopped auditioning.

And for the record, I am not particularly interested in “aging gracefully.”

Gracefully has always sounded suspiciously like:

Don’t frighten the neighbors.

No.

I am interested in aging consciously.

Wildly.

Sensually.

Curiously.

Still becoming.

Beauty is the moment the heart says:

Enough.

I will no longer organize my body around fear.

I will no longer hate the evidence that I have lived.

I will no longer accept every story handed to me about what getting older is supposed to mean.

I will no longer spend my days searching my body for proof of my own decline.

I will not grieve myself while I am still standing here.

And I will no longer allow an industry to convince me that the natural evolution of my face is a medical emergency.

And yes.

I will also use the damn face oil because it smells glorious.

Both things can be true.

So yes.

I have been keeping a secret.

I make beautiful skincare.

And I believe deeply in the medicine of plants.

But if you ask me what my real beauty practice has been, it is this:

I keep returning to the sacred space of my heart.

I go in.

I listen.

I dismantle.

I leave behind another thing I no longer need.

And every time I do, I become a little less burdened by who I was told I had to be...

and a little more alive as the woman I actually am.

Perhaps we were never meant to remain young.

Perhaps we were meant to become increasingly alive.

And that, my darling, is a beauty treatment no laboratory has managed to bottle yet.