Taking In Beauty as a Spiritual Practice

Many years ago, my sister visited Thailand and mentioned to her travel partner how much I would enjoy the setting there and told me in an offhand way: “I am looking for you too”, implying that her filling herself up with beautiful impressions would somehow, on a telepathic level, reach me, and that her self-love would in some way benefit me.

I forgot about it, until Elinor, a friend who enjoys traveling too, mentioned to me a practice she does to remember me: she took in the beauty of the land, gave thanks from her heart to Gaia and thanks to me at the same time.

I love the earth, I am committed to the earth’s well-being, I am a Sagittarius (the traveling sign), of course I found this practice intriguing. I felt happy for them to have developed it so organically and that I too was in the picture of such a pleasant activity— maybe because I made them even more aware of the wonder of life, more sensitive to the earth, or maybe they just spontaneously felt that I would enjoy the environment and that was a way to have me “there with them”.

I am sharing that not only because that practice moved me years ago, but because I think that it is an approach worth sharing and cultivating: you see something beautiful, you let it fill up your senses, on behalf of someone who couldn’t be there with you — someone who would benefit from some friendly energy, someone you want to thank, or someone you love.

Our own pleasure and healing (and sacrifice of stress, sadness, distraction, and whatever baggage we carry) can send ripples out into the world. Our awe about something magnificent in nature can open our heart in a way that welcomes others or even stimulate a recipient of such a moment of inspiration to a sense of being welcome and to sudden and unexplained joy. Our ability to connect with the beauty in our surroundings can make us connect — on the inner planes — with people who also connect like that and appreciate the wonder in the web of life and people who appreciate us.

In fact, I have heard several stories of how men absorbed in meditation while outdoors suddenly knew who their wife or future partner was going to be. It was a person they had met before and never thought of in that light, but after being struck by something beautiful in a garden, on a mountain top, near a river, by the ocean, a woman entered their thoughts “out of nowhere” and they knew: “Oh, it is her! I am going to go to her, and ask her to marry me..” or, more cautiously, “ask her if she is single and will consider me as her partner”.

A lot of life changing and deep insights can rise while meditating in and drinking the beauty of nature. Thoughts certainly turn more harmonious and expanded, constructive, even passionate or creative — because Gaia provides that order, harmony, nurturance, that approval of life, the experience of the sacred.

If you enjoy this suggestion, join me in the practice of taking in beauty for your own well-being and for the good of the people you care about, maybe even for the good of all living beings.

“Looking for you too” is an uncomplicated and blissful practice to awaken and pamper your inner lover, to love your self in the region you are discovering, and to broadcast what you want others to feel too.

Photo of a local rose, July 2019