How to reclaim beauty as a spiritual practice - Lian Brook-Tyler

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Written By Lian Brook-Tyler

Episode 560, released 5th August 2026.

Wild Sovereign Soul co-founder and soul guide, Lian Brook-Tyler, has spent over a decade studying beauty as a soul path rather than a surface concern... she explains why beauty deserves the same conscious attention we already give relationships and money, and what can happen once we stop pretending it doesn't already command our attention.

This episode is Lian’s All The Everything show… her solo space where she dives deeply into a theme that is alive for her, which, if you know her, could be literally anything - explored through the lenses of science, spirituality and story - hence the name of the show!

It is created for those who feel called toward a soulful life shaped by meaning, depth, truth, and love… for those who feel unsatisfied with quick answers or surface level takes. This is a rich rabbit hole that Lian journeys through alongside you. She speaks from her own lived experience and unfolding process… while inviting you into your own as you listen.

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In this episode, Lian explores beauty not as something skin deep, but as a spiritual practice, tracing it from the evolutionary science of adornment through myth, history and her own teenage attempt to reconstruct herself in the image of Marilyn Monroe. She looks at the handicap principle behind why humans adorn themselves at all, research showing how self-surveillance breeds body shame, and what myths can show us.

She brings in the Jungian analyst James Hollis on making our projections conscious, the psychologist James Hillman's case that recovering our sense of beauty is how we recover our lost soul, and her own Beauty Archetype work exploring the Lover and the shadows of chasing beauty and abandoning it. She closes by mapping Venus, the Ascendant and Chiron in the birth chart, asking what your own placements might reveal about your particular path with beauty.

Listen if you either chase beauty for approval or dismiss it, and are wondering if there could be something deeper beyond both.

We'd love to know what YOU think about this week's show. Let's carry on the conversation... please leave a comment below.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

  • Why the same evolutionary instinct behind a forty thousand year old deer tooth necklace may be the same one now, but distorted, driving those anxious checks in the mirror

  • How the myth of Psyche and Aphrodite shows that even the soul and Goddesses aren’t exempt from beauty's pull or the envy of it

  • What happens when beauty is offered as a conscious devotion rather than performed for approval or discarded out of caution

Resources and stuff Lian spoke about:

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Thank you!
Lian & Jonathan

Episode Transcript:

Please note: We are a small team and not able to check through the transcript our software provides. So you may find some words are out of place and a few sentences don’t make complete sense. If you do see something utterly ridiculous we’d love you to let us know so we can correct it. Please email any howlers with the time stamp to team@wildsovereignsoul.com.

Lian (00:00)

Somewhere along the way, beauty stopped being understood as a divine potency and blessing and started to be treated as mere vanity. But could that drive, that instinct, that intuition to express, adorn, tend, and even devote ourselves to beauty actually be one of the most okay.

potent and maybe even most ancient spiritual technologies that we have. So, welcome. This episode is my All the Everything show, and it's my solo space where I dive deep into a theme that's especially alive for me, which, if you know me, could be literally anything, and I explore it through the lenses of science, spirituality, and story, hence the name of the show, All the Everything.

This month's theme is beauty, but not as most people know it, as something that's just skin deep. But beauty is something much deeper and way more soulful. So before we dive in, if you haven't already got a pen and paper, I would really suggest go getting one because there is something we access deep in our psyche when we actually put pen to paper. so you do you. If you choose not to take any notes at all, that's all good. If you prefer to do it electronically, but my recommendation would be if you can go and get old fashioned pen and paper and see what flows. If you're new here, this show is about the deeper, truer life, the one your soul is calling you towards.

And if you've been here before, you already know that. And that calling is exactly why UNIO exists. UNIO is a fellowship of people walking the Wild Sovereign Soul Path where Jonathan and I meet with members twice each month in our guidance circle to meet whatever is alive in your life. And that really could be anything. It could be health, relationships, business, your soul path itself, and the places you're feeling stuck. Or called or both. Often the same things show up simultaneously. And we bring everything we are and everything we know to meet you exactly where you are and help you to move forward. We've also made Unio tiered so that money is never what keeps someone from walking this path. You can find out more and join us at wildsovereignsoul.com/unio And now back to this week's episode, let's dive in.

So, as it's very topical at the moment with the release of the Odyssey, we know that beauty has started wars, built empires, and has even been named by series psychologists as something that can lead a person back to their own soul, which of course is what we're going to dive into in today's episode. And yet, most of us are at some point in our lives. Have filed beauty under something that's suspicious or shallow or something that serious people don't really spend too much attention on. And just to be clear, what we're going to explore today isn't that kind of beauty versus substance argument that I'm sure you've already really kind of had and dived deep into, and probably already have a sense that version of beauty where it's about performance being looked at, conforming, chasing approval, you probably already know that that has limited appeal once we've gone so far on our soul path. And at some point, we may well recognise that in rejecting beauty and all of those things I just named.

We're also rejecting something deeper and truer within it. And so this episode isn't about that kind of obvious beauty trap, let's say, that anyone that's spent any time on the path already recognizes, but something that takes us much, much deeper beyond those surface appearances, beyond those knee-ject reactions, beyond the ways that we've kind of decided that's not for us, and into something that is going to reveal something of our own souls.

First, I'm going to share a little bit about my own story when it comes to beauty. And this this could easily be a whole episode in itself, so I'm going to try and keep this fairly succinct and relevant to the things that we're going to be talking about. I was raised by a single father. My parents split up when I was small, and to cut a long story short, I ended up going with my father.

And I was also very much a tomboy and we lived this very unusual wild life, traveling, living close to the earth, and I had somewhat consciously, somewhat unconsciously, very much rejected anything I associated with the feminine, with femininity, which aren't exactly the same thing. And along with it, beauty. I could very much appreciate the beauty of say nature or animals, but that idea of the beauty of a woman, for example, was something I had absolutely pushed to one side. The reasons for that we may get into later in this episode, but for the suffice to say, that's where I was in childhood. Then, as is so often the case, as we hit teenagehood, we are called to re-examine perhaps the the path we're on, the way of showing up that w has become you know our normal way of showing up, and we can start to create a version of ourselves that we feel is going to better fit in, be accepted, be approved of, be desired, even. And because I didn't really have much in the way of women role models around me, often my mother was in a separate different country or county. my father had really, a stream of girlfriends. So often there was a woman in our lives, but not for long periods of time. And I didn't really create that sense of closeness. So my answer to that was to study beauty almost like I can't quite think of an analogy, like degree level focus on beauty. And one of the main ways I did that was through studying Marilyn Monroe. Why Marilyn Monroe? I don't know. It was who just appealed to me for some reason as I guess that quintessence of beauty. And you might say, I suppose, that she herself was this constructed beauty. So maybe there was something in her expression of beauty that I could see was like she's created that. And if she can, I can too. And I very much was a real ugly duckling. I'm not at all being kind of mo faux modest to say this.

Again, I had gone from being this absolute tomboy with no interest at all in beauty style. I spent most of my time in like really scruffy clothes, working with animals. and so there was this realization in me that in order to be like the other girls, in order to secure acceptance, friendship, not be bullied, I'd been ferociously bullied to I guess attract the attention of boys. I need to construct a different version of myself. And again, I wonder if because there was this constructed version of beauty that Monroe had, that seemed like this is who I need to learn from. So I studied her and studied her. I drew pictures of her. I suppose in some ways I drew pictures of her on my own face, studied how she did her makeup, how she held herself, how she spoke, and then I was reacquainted. I did film studies as one of my A-levels, and I chose to focus on Marilyn Monroe films as my final essay. So I had that opportunity to go even deeper and really study the iconography of her films and how, you know, holding her body just so or turning in this way or using her you know, whatever she brought to the fore, and she brought, you know, practically everything she possibly could, all really, as I saw it, in this expression of beauty. And so there's that was, I guess, a background that has then run on a kind of autopilot in the years since. and it was mostly out of my conscious awareness. I I I understood and we'll get into this perhaps later in the episode, the sort of astrology piece I can now see that that that hyper focus on beauty wasn't only from wounding, wasn't only from this kind of desperate attempt to fit in there was also a deep soul soul longing for beauty for the expression of beauty for the creation of beauty and so that continued to unfold in my adult life even though it wasn't happening in this kind of obvious visible way in terms of for example my work interestingly I just recently guested on a A podcast episode with Caroline Carey. her podcast, which I highly recommend, is called The Neurodivergent Soul. And we talked a bit about this. How I look back and I can see actually, even though my past careers weren't obviously beauty-related, they all had this connection to like design, style, or beauty. So, cut a long story short, that was most of my adult life until I got very much thrust onto the path of soul and spirit back 14 years ago, which I'm not going to focus on today. I've spoken about how and why and when that happened many times before, but suffice to say, I got plunged from my very kind of mainstream normal corporate life that I've kind of managed to train myself into this world of soul and spirit and archetypes and myths and Shamanism and all of these things, and this aspect of beauty was kept very separate. I couldn't see there was a way of uniting my deep love of all things beauty with a kind of serious spiritual path, and so I'm deep on my own path, I guide others on their own soul path, and for many years kept my deep, deep devotion to beauty out of that work. It began to slowly come into my work around sort of 2016, 17, and then very much so in 2018. As I started to work more with women, back then there was a a course, a crucible I used to run called Waking the Wild Feminine, which, as you can probably tell from the name, was very much about reclaiming that wild feminine of our body, our cycles, our connection to the earth. And it was like I was giving myself a tiny bit of permission to start to talk about beauty, but very much indirectly, and very much never, I would never say the things I'm going to be saying today where I would even suggest that beauty itself could be a spiritual path. And then little by little, through the nudges one does get as we go deeper on our soul path.

I kept being shown it was time to talk about beauty more directly. It been increasingly so important on my own path, in ways that I'll share more about, that it was clear this was something to share with other women. And so it became more and more woven into the one-to-one work I was doing with women, and then into group work, and then with a number of different group courses and circles I ran, it became more and more the theme. And then last year, yes, it was last year, so this is 2016. So 2016, sorry, my my grasp of numbers is dreadful. Ignore any numbers I give on this show, they're probably wrong. so last year, which I think is 2025, I ran Beauty potion. So the very first thing with beauty in its name, and it was all about beauty and the bringing together the distillation of seven mythic beauty archetypes. So these are archetypes but not as they're typically spoken about. So it was looking at archetypes like the lover, like the mystic mystic, but through the lens of the way their essence could be expressed physically, or repressed, held in shadow. And so we worked through this circle of women and I worked through each of these mythic beauty archetypes. And it was just glorious, really, really enjoyable but also deep, gorgeous work. And then I had been focused on other things. We've been very, very busy moving into what we're now White World Sovereign Soul. More recently we're just in the final stages of running the World Sovereign Soul Pilgrimage, and then I got the tap on the shoulder from spirit. It's time to refocus on my devotion to beauty. And as I record this, this is not a promotion for any upcoming course I've got. I likely will be running something again, and I'll share later a way that you can register your interest, but I genuinely don't know what's coming up, only that something will be.

But what feels important is to continue in this devotion to beauty that I have personally, and in that devotion to sharing what I've seen, what I've experienced, what I've witnessed in other women can be revealed, can be reclaimed, can be expressed when we treat this path of beauty with what I see the reverence it deserves. So little bit of a backstory why we are here even talking about beauty in this way.

Okay, so back to beauty as a whole. And I ought to say I I've kind of been speaking about beauty as if it's only about the human and I guess physical appearance. And of course, beauty is much wider than that, but we are going to be focusing primarily on the human, the human body in this episode. For a couple of reasons. One, the human body is something we all already have.

And it's not like we have to sort of go out and find this work of art or this incredible landscape. We all have a body already. And as you'll see as we go deeper into this, it's where so much of our attention, consciously and otherwise, is already going. and you're you're if you don't already see that, I suspect you will as we deepen into this episode. This body. And our relationship to beauty is here and is playing out all of the time. So why not make that conscious?

So looking at it from that lens, as as we touched on earlier, beauty has altered the course of human history and, of course, kind of shown up in myths and fairy tales for Aeons. And before Helen of Troy ever entered the story, obviously there's a big focus on Helen of Troy at the moment, but the story began with three goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. And they stood before a golden apple inscribed simply to the fairest. And then they asked a somewhat foolish, you might say, mortal man Paris to choose between them who should have his judgment as the fairest. And simply put, he was choosing between power, wisdom, and love.

And of course, Aphrodite also being the most beautiful. So this is he's choosing between like what will I what will I be given? What will I receive in this choice of which goddess is the fairest? And he chose Aphrodite, and her bribe, which is love, was the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen. And as as we saw through the whole story of the Odyssey, although she was previously already married, Paris took her anyway, and that single choice, love and beauty over power and wisdom, is what set that Trojan war in motion, the whole 10-year conflict, thousands of lives, an empire's fall, and all traceable back to that one decision: who was most beautiful.

And then of course there's Aphrodite herself, and she's a goddess that I've spent a lot of time with, as you can probably imagine. And the way she's depicted in stories and actually in famous art, well works of art too, is that she's rising fully formed from sea foam. So beauty is something materialising directly from the divine, rather than something that she's earned or built or developed, that a pure expression of the divine. And then of course we have Aphrodite showing up again in Psyche's story. and interestingly of course Psyche means soul. And her trial begins because her extraordinary beauty caused people to worship her instead of Aphrodite. I did an episode I think last year, probably on the run-up to beauty potion really looking at the themes in that story. So I'll try and remember to link to that if you would like to journey more deeply with that story. But in short, Aphrodite became jealous and then set her on this whole task into the underworld. and there's like that whole story is dripping with beauty. There's so many different themes around beauty that I could spend the whole episode doing talking about that all over again and I won't.

And then Cleopatra, another one of my favorites, she famously staged her entrance to meet Mark Anthony on a gilded barge with perfume sails. And she apparently wasn't a natural beauty, but perhaps like Monroe, had cultivated this beauty in a way that was power. And so she deployed it really very consciously as a political theatre to gain power, to gain influence.

So beauty is certainly not just this thing, you know, like it's to do with whether someone's pretty. It has been fought over, it has been desired, wielded with full intention, it has something of the divine. And somehow behind between all of that rich heritage and now we lost our conscious relationship to beauty. We lost our relationship to beauty as this sacred force, and now we're left with its flattened cousin. prettiness or pleasing appearance. So, of course, beauty as we're exploring today doesn't just mean pretty, and it doesn't mean this kind of particularly a modern idea of perfectly symmetrical, filtered, approved upon. I guess a working definition for how we're journeying with beauty today is beauty is a form of expression and the inner state and of course the inner state itself is something that kind of opens us up to all kinds of things but the inner state becoming visible in outer form as we could say soul and spirit becoming visible in outer form.

So I'm going to be asking you inquiry questions as we go. And of course, it's your choice if you would like to receive the invitation and make a note of what comes up for you, but I'll ask the questions and then see what arises for you and whether you want to capture it. And of course, do share in the comments too. So If beauty is expression, expression of something deeper, something inner, rather than simply decoration, what has your own beauty been saying and has it been saying what you actually mean? Is your beauty really an expression of what you would consciously choose to be saying?

I often like to look at the the the etymology, the word root of words, and beauty has a particularly interesting heritage where it takes us through the old French and the Latin and then further back still, and we end up with root words of things like blessed, good, and this sense of this not really being about physical appearance, but something deeper, something more sacred is what my invitation is for us to look at today. And so this is, I guess, again, an invitation as we even set out whether you are willing to even inquire upon beauty as being something that is a blessing, is sacred, is something. There is a goodness that's not good as in a judgment, good versus bad, but that kind of goodness we can feel.

And perhaps already in your life you have experienced beauty like that. So where have you in your life experienced beauty as something closer to blessing than just to appearance? as I was preparing this episode and thought of that question to ask you, I was immediately taken back to my children as babies. And it's cliche, I suppose, but those moments when we look at a baby and they're just perfect innocence and the beauty of them and it's so much more than this surface appearance, is that we I think in those moments experience this deeper meaning of beauty, this blessedness. But I would love to know what that's for you.

And if we were to experience beauty in this way and to invite beauty to take up its right space in our hearts and mind, what might that show us? And again, going back to what I said earlier, the very reason we're going to focus here is because most of us are doing this anyway. Most of us already have our heads full of all things beauty. We're just going to make this conscious.

And relationships are something that most of us recognise, particularly intimate relationships, romantic relationships. We recognise they command an enormous amount of our attention and energy. Most of us spend years, really decades, focusing on them, shaped by them, seeing ourselves in relationship to relationships, broken open by them. But it really takes people who are deeply committed to their soul path to bring consciousness to that pool to relationships rather than simply being run by it. So of course, this is not a new thing. I'm saying things that you know many psychologists and spiritual teachers have said, but it's worth just recognising that relationships are something that we are almost all pulled towards and obsessed with.

And yet it's actually quite a small subset of society that will make that conscious, start to look at the projections, start to understand what that's speaking to within them. and if you're familiar with the Jungian analyst James Hollis, he wrote an amazing book called The Eden Project. The subtitle is In Search of the Magical Other, and highly, highly recommend this book. And he says in this book, I'm paraphrasing clearly, our projections onto another person aren't really a problem. They're kind of a vital part of the human journey. It's probably what we signed up for. But the limiting factor there is that often the projections stay unconscious rather than to be brought into the awareness of what they really are about, what they're saying about us.

Money is another example of this, and in the kind of wider coaching field, often money is used in the same way. Well, it's like, wow, it's already taking up so much of our attention. Why not make this conscious? Why not see what this is triggering within us? I believe the beauty deserves exactly the same reckoning, exactly that same treatment. It again, already commands so much of our energy, attention, time, money, whether we like to admit that or not. And something that's interesting, even though it's not often spoken about, the archetypal psychologist James Hill James Hillman actually said this too. He may not have focused on it quite in the way that we are in this episode, where we're talking about the beauty of a human.

But he really saw that if we don't reclaim that sense of beauty, we can't really reclaim our lost soul. And when I discovered that, it really hit me like, wow, this was seen and known and spoken about before, and yet doesn't seem to have captured that same attention and interest as so many other ways that we can work, you know, do our soul work. And so again, just trying to pretend that beauty doesn't already have this hold on us, create this attention, it doesn't make it go away. It just leaves it running unconsciously in the background. And so rather than trying to make ourselves wrong for that. And again, we often do, we'll talk about this in a bit in a moment. We often push it to one side or the other. We either kind of unconsciously try to sort of grasp after beauty, to use it in ways to create approval, much as I did as a teenager, or we try and reject it and sort of see it as beneath us. But why not recognise?

There is something in this that could actually show us something of our own soul. So that is what I see beauty as a spiritual practice. well starts with, starts with, there is so much more.

So I'm going to ask you another question. Which side of those two ways of relating to beauty have you lived in more? It could be chasing beauty for approval, control, power, desirability, or dismissing it, discarding it so that you don't appear vain, so that you can be taken seriously. And which of those, or which how has that cost you? Whichever one of those are.

Can you see how that might cost you in some way?

And what might change if you were to give beauty that same conscious attention that perhaps, I I suspect if you're listening to this, you're already somewhat deep on your soul path. If you were to give beauty the same conscious attention that perhaps you're giving your relationships, what might that offer you? And again, it's not that you're necessarily going to know, but I'm interested, what arises as you ask yourself that question?

Okay. So we're going to look at beauty through the three primordial strands of wild sovereign soul. As the name suggests, there's the wild, then there's the sovereign, then there's the soul. And each of them will show us a different facet of beauty. And so the first place beauty lives is in the body itself, before looking in a mirror, before someone giving us feedback. And this is a return to the animal self, the instinct, body as compass rather than ornament. So this is the wild strand of our path.

Back in 1975, the biologist Zahavi proposed what's called the handicap principle or costly signalling theory. And the the idea is that costly traits, as in things that take a lot of energy or endanger us in some way, can function as honest signals in mate selection, as in they're a way of saying I'm healthy or I've got lots of resources and I can afford to bear this cost without it compromising my survival. So a peacock's tail is the classic example that's given, this kind of big flamboyant thing that's you know really just a signal of you know how beautiful I am, and it doesn't help it to you know hunt prey or you know escape being hunted.

But it can afford to do that. And again, as is always the case, you know, the probably the bigger the better, the most beautiful the better. And it's a way of signaling to mates, here I am, look at me. And then if we look back through history, you know, going right back to Paleolithic times, we can see things like engraved deer teeth worked into necklaces and ochre pigment that probably was used for body painting, pointing to way back then this sense of how can I adorn myself, this human adornment that in the same way likely served as these honest signals of cognitive capacity, social status, the skills to be able to find these things, work with these things. And again, that physical resilience that I can do all of this and here I am surviving. And so, you know, 40,000 years ago, someone worked that, say, for example, deer tooth into something beautiful to wear, to adorn themselves, to appear more beautiful. And so that instinct isn't this modern invention, and is it really vanity?

Or is it something deeper, something more primal, something more natural to our expression as humans? And this is where also and this fascinates me how in many ways, and this can be absolutely overstated, oversimplified, and can be quite ableist, in many ways, beauty and health are the same thing. A body that is taken care of, well nourished, is allowed to move, can breathe fully, is strong. It that often is also what is beautiful. It's alive and in alignment and doing what it was created to do. And so it appears beautiful, but that's not the intention, it is just the human animal in its natural state.

I think there's something interesting there. And again, it can be very much reduced to s to something's too simple, but it but nonetheless, I think it's important to see that. And then there's this kind of modern hijack of all of these things that's taken place. So in 1997, by the way, when I'm saying these dates, I've got them written down because I won't remember them, so these dates you can trust.

In 1997, the psychologists Barbara Frederickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts proposed objectification theory, which describes how women in a culture that sexually objectifies female body are trained to internalise an observer's view of their bodies. You may not have known about that theory, but I'm sure you're all too aware of that as a thing. And so this internalized observer leads to habitual self-monitoring, focusing, analyzing on what one looks like, which research shows pr promotes body shame and anxiety and disrupts a person's awareness of their own internal body states. And my suggestion is that almost certainly leads to the culture we have today where there's this preponderance of Botox and fillers and cosmetic surgeries and all of the things. And just to be really clear, I'm not at all making any judgment on anyone's personal choices. I'm really not. I'm talking about this culture and the energies, the beliefs, the drives that this is playing out within. And so this instinct behind the adornment with the deer tooth necklace and that valuing of deep health and radiance and this instinct between this instinct of looking in the mirror and do I look right? Am I aging? Do I need to add this, that, or the other? They're perhaps coming from that same instinct. Just the older one is that kind of honest signal offered outwards, this showing of something deeper, something that is related to the wildness of the human animal. And the other, this more modern one, is that same instinct, but kind of introjected into this kind of constant surveillance and this sense of not being good enough, and I need to change how I am. And so perhaps when we look at it through this wild lens.

Reclaiming beauty as wildness is returning this instinct to something that we can trust, can guide us, can move us towards deeper alignment, deeper health and deeper beauty.

So where and when in your life did that honest signal, that drive to adorn, to signal where you are, who you are, how you are, when and maybe if did that happen in your own life? When did it become surveillance, anxiety, a sense of I need to improve, I need to do certain things, because this natural expression isn't enough.

And again, I can as my story earlier showed, that definitely was what was playing out for me back in teenagehood, where that expression of who I really was got it there was a yes, perhaps some of it was this natural instinct to to have a relationship with adornment. And it definitely was coming also from this idea of how I look isn't good enough, isn't acceptable, and so there needs to be some change made.

So now moving into the sovereign, the second second strand of the world sovereign soul path. And so if world is that body's instinct, sovereign is what allows us to govern the choices made consciously around this. And this is about the difference between a beauty choice made from true agency and consciousness and one that is automatic and coming from ego and wounding. And sometimes those choices can look identical from the outside. It's not really interestingly about appearance. and to make things even more complex, that that wounding that out of consciousness actions can run in two directions and as you probably already know or heard me talk about what we call the shadow pole, this idea that something that is in shadow, something that's not in our conscious awareness, typically has two ends of a pole. And one end is repression and deflation, and often almost looks like the opposite of the thing. The other end is an inflation, an overreaction, is something that's exaggerated.

And with beauty too, we can see this. So it could be one direction is that dressing to be seen after a period or years or a lifetime, as it turned out for me and my teenager, of feeling invisible or feeling ugly. It could be that kind of typical breakup thing of changing one's hairstyle to prove a point to someone who broke up with us.

And so these choices are coming from that kind of over-expression end of the shadow pole where we're trying to look more beautiful as a way of not feeling the pain of whatever this sense of lack of beauty is causing. And so beauty from this we may look beautiful, but it's not about that. It's about the fact that beauty is like a plaster that's over the wound, rather than something that is healing or an expression that's that's conscious and coming from loving awareness. The other end of that shadow pole is one of redrawal, refusing beauty altogether as a kind of protective aspect of this. Like I'm just not even going to open myself to the possibility of like even being seen as trying to look beautiful. And I noticed this I, as you may know, I almost always wear dresses for a number of different reasons and includes kind of my sensory sensitivities, but it also includes kind of how my soul wants to express itself. And so 99.9% of the time I'm wearing dresses. That's not how most women dress in this modern world, as I discover when I leave my house and go out into the modern world. so for example, over the years I've done various things. so I did an improv course a couple of years, was it a couple of years ago, was it last year? which was great fun by the way. I was saying the other day, I was talking to Jonathan, saying how much I learned. So this is a side tangent, bear with me.

How much I learned from this improv course that so often I realize really benefits me today in my ability to kind of really be in the moment and trust and just allow whatever's there to flow, which is somewhat how I already was, but there was a kind of level of play and trust that was definitely opened up during that improv course. Anyway, Completely irrelevant to the thing I'm trying to tell you about. But I saw then how it was it was like I was dressed really quirkily going to this improv course wearing a dress every week where almost all of the women were wearing, you know, very similar versions to of clothes to the men. So, you know, trousers or jeans and a top. Just because no judgment where whatever works for you, but there's a point I'm about to make with this. And then similarly, I'm in a choir. We're actually on a summer break at the moment. Sob, I'm really missing it. my gosh, sorry, I'm gonna go into another tangent, I can feel it already. I so see now how vital singing is to the human animal and It doesn't matter whether you think you're a good singer or a singer at all. There is something about being with other humans singing that it is just pure medicine, like opening to the divine, opening to community. So so beautiful. It's one of those things that I wish everyone would have the opportunity to do. So again, if you take nothing else from this episode, go sign up for an improv course and go sign up to a local choir. Anyway, Like with the improv course, most weeks I'm the only woman there wearing a dress. There's perhaps maybe a little bit more dress wearing in the choir, but still not very much at all. And I got curious about this. Again, not at all because it's like women should wear dresses and I'm right and they're wrong. Not at all from that place. but from this, like curiosity like, is there a reason that women no longer wear dresses that I've just, you know, not got the memo on? And so I then ended up having a lot of conversations with a lot of other women about why they wear what they wear and why they don't wear what they wear. And what I heard over and over again was related to taking us all the way back to me talking about this deflated under the shadow pole, how women feel this sense of almost like it's too revealing and I'm gonna be judged and I'm gonna be found wanting. And it's almost like I'm trying to make myself look feminine and beautiful in a dress, and I just rather protect myself from that even someone even thinking that's what I'm doing. So that it doesn't have to show up in that particular way with a dress, but that's an example. And of course, this, particularly for those of us on a spiritual path.

That can also go hand in hand, and particularly as a lot of them are very masculine spiritual paths, where there is also this rejection of the physical, of the body, and so it can kind of have this extra level of justification of caring about these things isn't really spiritual. And so it compounds this sense of just, you know, just see it as not it's a relief to give up that anyway. And so great, I can justify it.

And I'm gonna give another example of a more specific way this can show up. So talking going back to what I was saying earlier about the course I ran beauty potion and working with these mythic beauty archetypes, and there were seven of them, and one of them is the lover, which you I'm sure you know as an archetype anyway. And the way that I work with the lover in this beauty work is through looking at these different aspects of and again in this case the lover and looking at the shadows, looking at the light mirrors, the dark mirror, what her gift is. And so I'm going to share a little bit about the lover from this perspective because I think it will bring it to alive for you. And again, I could do this with any of the archetypes. It just happens this is one I've chosen. So listen and see if you can hear your own path, your own story in the lover.

And so the beauty gift of the lover is devotion. And her beauty isn't just pleasing, it's a transmission, it's a softness, it's a doorway to love itself. It gives others permission to feel, to open, to trust, to love again. But her wound is abandonment. Maybe back in childhood.

Or maybe later on, maybe in adulthood, but often we notice our original wounds are echoed again in adulthood. She was left, abandoned emotionally or physically, or both. And perhaps a parent left, perhaps her sibling or another woman was chosen over her, and so her shadow runs accordingly, as it always does. The wound creates whatever then this shadow expression, which is outside of our awareness, it creates this. And so on the kind of overcompensation end of the poll, this lover archetype and her beauty can show up as idealisation, overperfecting, over adorning, sometimes surgically, chasing that fantasy of beauty and youth often, and of being chosen, for this expression, this created expression of the lover, rather than embodying love itself. And mistaking that desire from others for devotion and mistaking attention from others for intimacy. The other end of the poll is withdrawal, and this shows up as bitterness, beauty, dimming in self protection, growing rigid, hard, severe, closed, being very cynical about ideas of romance. and again, that shows it all of these beauty archetypes are showing up physically as well. These are obviously deeper internal themes, but they show on our faces, they show how we in the clothes that we wear. And she may also be mocking the very love and devotion that is natural for her to embody in herself and in other women. And of course, beyond both of those poles, like beyond any shadow pole, is the lover reclaimed consciously. And she's not adorning with this idea of if I look perfect, if I look like this perfect feminine devotional woman, I will be chosen. And, not in this idea of I'll just keep myself safe and I won't even try to be chosen, but because devotion is just what's true for her. And so this is showing that from this place beyond the shadow pole, we can make choices that aren't from this automatic wounding where we don't even know we're choosing it.

And this isn't to say, of course, that we're gonna like ta-da, be all of a sudden kind of whole and sovereign. This is a path of the devotion itself, but to be willing to be honest, to look at am I orientating towards what's going to earn me safety or approval or desire that I didn't get back in childhood? or what will protect me from even being appraised at all? And The result, the outward appearance, those choices, those sovereign choices we make, could look like anything. And again, this is where the archetypes really show up because for one woman, that could be a very flamboyant adornment, or it could be really simple, very natural. And it doesn't matter. It is not about beauty looking a certain way, it's about the sovereign choice about what is aligned for that person.

Okay, so so can you tell from your own expression of beauty, your own practice of beauty, whether you are dressing from the wound, and that could be either into the shadow pole, or whether you're dressing from sovereign choice, something that's moving you towards wholeness.

Okay, so underneath Wild and Sovereign sits the third thing that all of this is actually in service of. And we're only going to be able to really touch on this today just because it's vast. and I I'm saying that because I really want to honour the how much is really here when we're talking about soul and when we're talking about soul through the lens of beauty.

This is an episode in itself. It's probably at some point, a course, and in itself. so we'll touch on this, but recognise there is so, so much more. I mean, there's so much more I could say on wild and sovereign too, but this one in particular. And so all of what we've been talking about, that wild instinct, the reclaiming, the sovereign agency, all of it exists in service of your own soul's expression. That particular, unique, unrepeatable shape that your soul is here to take in this lifetime. And beauty is one of the ways, and I would say one of the vital, unavoidable ways that that expression becomes visible in the world rather than staying locked inside as pure potential, as pure blessing, even.

Okay, I'm gonna take a gulp of water and then I just want to touch on how we can look at this astrologically because I find this fascinating to look at often when we're doing group work and I I'm a glutton for punishment because as I mentioned we're currently in the Wild Sovereign Soul pilgrimage.

And not knowing how many people would join us, I offered to do everyone a distillation of their Chiron placement, which is the kind of wounded healer aspect of a chart. And we ended up being about 25 of us, and so I had to spend days and days and days doing all I didn't say had to, of course. I didn't have to, I chose to, and actually really enjoyed doing it, but it took a lot more time than I was expecting to do all of these distillations. but similarly, I love weaving in, astrology alongside whatever the journey we're on and so we're just going to touch on how we might look at beauty in our chart and again this could easily be at least an episode in itself and no doubt whatever this next course I do on beauty it probably will be woven deeply in it. Okay so there's three placements that we're going to look at.

There is definitely more nuance than I'm going to be able to cover here. but we'll just again touch on three things that will show you something. If again, you probably need to have a passing knowledge of astrology, or at least kind of if you know your own chart, these days you can find a wealth of information across the interwebs. So if you Go to, in fact, I would I'd really recommend if you don't already have your natal chart, go to astro.com. It's the website I don't I'm not affiliated with them in any way, shape, or form. Probably ought to be at this point, but I'm not. but it's the one I recommend. It's yeah, from what I've understood, a very reputable website. It was founded by people very deep into astrology and kind of founders in various ways. So go to astro.com and then Create a profile, and I think you go to extended charts, put in all your details, and then run a chart. I'll try and remember to put below that bit more step-by-step instructions to do what I just described. But Astro.com is your friend. and then once you look for the things I'm about to describe, you should be able to research and find out a little bit more. Okay.

So we're going to start with Venus, Venus herself, which we've talked about earlier via her different name, Aphrodite. So Venus being the Roman and Aphrodite being the Greek. And she as a goddess, and therefore as the planet, and each of the planets can be seen as archetypes, goddesses, gods in their own right. She is here as an expression of beauty and love.

And what we value, what we feel passionate about. And so where our Venus is in our chart shows us the sort of style that beauty wants to take. And also, so we've got the sign in the house for each thing, it's gonna have a sign in the house. And so it shows us the sign is almost like this is the role, this is the kind of adornment, this is the dress, that this particular planet takes and the house so one through to twelve the house that Venus sits in shows where in life the beauty gets to be expressed, gets to be lived out, gets to be seen. And just to give you a little bit of examples of this so if we were to look at Venus in Aries, Aries is that kind of like brand new life into the world And so there is this like boldness and immediacy, and kind of like that just very first spark rather than a slow burn. in Taurus, it's a really beautiful placement for Venus. Taurus is ruled by Venus, and so but Taurus gives this really deep embodied sense, very at home in the body, and so.

For a Taurus Venus, beauty can be sensory and embodied, and trusting how the body experiences pleasure as a way of knowing what is beautiful. in Libra, which again is ruled by Venus, it's very at home there. I'm as you may have heard me say before, most of my chart is Venus ruled. probably why I'm so obsessed with beauty, and most of my chart so I've got a Taurus moon and then I've got a whole chunk of my chart is in Libra. And so beauty if we have Venus in Libra, which I do, it's about beauty and harmony and proportion and an instinct for what creates that beautiful balance in a room, in a face, in a relationship. And it can be I guess

One of the placements where it's most at home in recognising there is something deeper because it has this sense of beauty and harmony together, it lends itself to seeing there is something beyond just appearance, where there is something, I'm talking just personally here, that is so calming, so opening in something beautiful.

In Scorpio, it could be intensity and depth and magnetism and a sense of kind of this something hidden rather than being displayed all at once. and in Pi Pisces, dissolution and enchantment and a sense of mysticism, this sort of blurring of of the lines of between self and other self and the beloved.

So I haven't covered all of them again because we would be here all day. I'd happily talk about this all day, but we have got other things. and then we've also got the ascendant, so the rising sign. And so in your chart, if you're looking for it, it will be abbreviated to A S C. And this is seen as the physical vehicle, as in like who we show up as, and so this includes like the how we actually look, our body, our features, that first impression we make on the world. And it's often seen as the kind of more literal beauty placement. And if you also recognise it's kind of sitting just at the edge of the first house, which is is the house also of the physical self and kind of coming into incarnation, and in some traditions, seen as the

placement of like the head and face. So looking again at our ascendant, we can see how our beauty shows up physically. And if we just look at it elementally, a fire ascendant, so one of the fire signs is going to be, you know, like pow, very vivid, hard to overlook, like immediately seen, very bold. an earth ascendant.

It has a more grounded sensual beauty, sort of again slower and inviting and steady. an air ascendant is going to carry beauty through more of this kind of like expression and animation and movement and life. my actually I'm about to get to mine. so water ascendant, is going to be more like depth and mystery and often felt and sometimes kind of like somewhat not graspable. and so as I say, my ascendant is in Pisces and so it it it can give this I'll just talk about Pisces a little bit because it's the one I know but in in my own self those It gives often this sort of changeable quality. Often the eyes are mentioned when people are talking about Pisces ascendant, and my eyes are often one of the features that people mention most about me, and the fact that I have a very changeable eye colour, so it's neither blue nor green and can appear both ways. So that's a very typically Pisces look and can be described as like dreamy and kind of not of this world, kind of like half in this world, half somewhere else. So that would be a very typical Pisces appearance. Then as I touched on earlier we have Chiron. And so Chiron is this wounded healer part of our chart and if you're looking for it in your chart it's like a little letter K, like a key. And so this can be and it depends on it's relationship between it and other parts of our chart. So if we've got, for example, an opposition between Chiron and Venus, for example, or a square between Chiron and Venus, we'll often recognise that there's going to be a strong beauty wound there, a place where that person's sense of beauty, worth, or lovability was wounded. And often again before conscious memory and

It will mean that this will be a place where when conscious attention is placed here, when we reclaim our relationship to beauty, this can bring about healing on a much deeper level, much broader level. and so looking at, if you have already or have some sense, looking at your own Venus, Ascendant, or any aspects of Chiron, what does your chart suggest about your particular path with beauty?

And does that match how you're actually living and relating to beauty?

So something I'm going to touch on and again this is what I'm about to say is fraught with baggage and projection and nuance and caveats are needed. I'm gonna touch on this and again likely this is something that I'll go much deeper on in a different setting.

Part of how our soul's expression finds its way into the world is through relationships, through being witnessed. And so when it comes to beauty in particular, there's something that I'm going to name, frankly, even though I know that it's going to be quite unwelcome and even triggering to some. What I've noticed is many women, and of course I'm talking heterosexual women here, but maybe not entirely heterosexual women.

They often need a masculine other in order to fully orientate towards what their own feminine beauty really is. That deeper sense, like what is it that I'm being called to? What is true for me? And it's like the witness what the witness longs for is kind of calling out that expression of beauty within. And of course, If we see that from a kind of pathological lens, it looks like falling and dependency and you know very unhealthy. And I believe, and I've witnessed personally and in my work with other women, as we make this conscious, we can work with it in a way that actually takes us towards truth and wholeness. And so, as I mentioned earlier, the Jungian analyst James Hollis, writes about this in the Eden project in search of the magical other. I always keep saying the subtitle because I love the subtitle. And as I said, he talks a lot about projections and kind of this whole way that instead of God and religion, we've created romance almost as this place to put our projections, put our projections of the beloved, of the divine. And that's okay, apart from.

For most people, that's not made conscious. So those projections stay as if they are fact. What we see in another, and again, particularly in an intimate lover, is I meant to say other there, but I said lover, but lover will work too. we treat as though it's fact. And of course, much of the time our projections are coming from past experiences, particularly wounding, particularly conditioning.

And so just kind of confirming that kind of like more limited sense of self. Whereas if we can work to make those projections conscious, we can then start to reclaim them from within ourselves. What are they telling us about ourselves? And so coming back to beauty, which of course is often so kind of connected and activated with intimate relationship if we are orientating our beauty toward a masculine other it isn't automatically a problem is probably quite natural and again goes back to what we were talking about right at the beginning around that in the wild strand that instinct towards adornment what matters is whether we're devoted to making that conscious and so when it's left unconscious, it can be a search for permission that we're just not able to give ourselves. But if we begin to make this conscious, it becomes a deliberate offering to this chosen witness who, in a way, is standing for our soul. We're doing this on purpose through devotion. And this allows us to connect even perhaps beyond that witness, that masculine witness as a representative of our soul and actually as the divine itself. So it takes us full circle in the way that relationship has replaced religion, the church, this kind of trajectory of moving towards the divine. And this is another way that we can reorientate back to something that really, I believe, is what's calling all of us home.

And again, this is something I can only touch on here, but talking about this union with our soul, with the divine, with well, some of the traditions I've studied talk about the beloved, which can act as though it's almost like it's this outer person, but it's kind of like this North Star for our soul. And it's not necessarily another person, but another person can kind of help call us towards that, help make that conscious. And again, look at that through this lens of beauty. If we are called to offer our beauty, offer our devotion to beauty in relationship in that way, this union with another, or the orientation towards union with another, is allowing us to move towards union with the radiance of our own soul.

And so again, this idea of the beloved can appear in this kind of human person that we project onto blindly, and we can allow this to become a conscious mirror, something that is showing us something about ourselves and calling us into our own radiance. And so I guess coming to some form of completion for this episode.

What I'm really inviting you into is to see that beauty, if we practice it consciously, might be this ancient path, this potent path, this path that I see is often very natural for women, where it allows us to be fully in our body, fully in this sensual world. It calls us further into our body and our senses rather than only our mind and can be a place that again often if we already notice we either have a strong draw to beauty or a strong rejection of beauty can be one of the most potent paths for us.

And so I'll finish with a few questions. Who or what have you been orientating your beauty towards without ever asking why am I doing this? Why did I choose this? What's behind this?

And if beauty is a path back to the beloved, what's the next step for you on that path?

And finally, what could it mean for you to honour beauty as devotion?

And so if this episode has stirred something in you that you want to follow deeper, as I say, I don't actually have an offering kind of lined up. This was just something I felt moved to do. I will be running something probably this autumn and I don't have again because it's I don't know what that is, I don't have a page for that, but I believe you could register your interest on the existing beauty potion page, which isn't open for enrollment, but you can register your interest. So that's at wildsovereignsoul.com/beauty If you register your interest there, whether it's beauty potion or whether it's something else that is kind of connected to beauty, we'll let you know when that does arrive into my consciousness and make it out into the world.

And going deeper on your soul path is also exactly what our Wild Sovereign Soul Fellowship Unio is for. And we meet twice each month in live guidance circles where Jonathan and I will meet you exactly where you are with whatever is arising in your life. And honestly, it can literally be anything. I mean, the variety of questions and requests for guidance we had over the years is quite something. And so you certainly won't be judged or you know, no one's going to think you've got a silly or pointless question. Really, they will not. So if you're ready for that kind of company and support on your path, come find us at wildsovereignsoul.com/unio. And again, we've made the subscription tiered so that money is never what stands in the way between you and walking this path.

The show notes and links to this episode. I've mentioned a whole bunch of links, so we'll do our best to get them all on the show notes and in the various descriptions. The show notes won't be live right now at the time of going live, but they will be there by the time we've released this episode everywhere next week. And that's at wildsovereignsoul.com/podcast/560

And if you don't want to miss, have we got an episode going next week? Because we're about to enter our summer break. So I think this episode is usually we're weekly. This episode is our last one before we break for two weeks, and then we're back with a bang. So if you don't want to miss us when we're back with a bang, this is a very special episode, follow or subscribe wherever you're listening or watching. And until then, thank you so much for joining me. I hope this stirred something for you. I hope it gave you permission to go deeper into something perhaps you already were being called into. And until we meet again, I'm sending you all my love as you walk your wild sovereign soul path.

 
 
Lian Brook-Tyler
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