What is True Beauty?

We live in a world where the word “beauty” is thrown around constantly. You probably hear the word at least a dozen times a day, and you’re certainly exposed to it nearly everywhere you look due to mainstream media.

And that’s largely how we, as society, define beauty: by the media’s definition. These messages can often make you feel like you’re not enough. You may feel that there’s no way you can live up to the current standard for beauty. Well, good news: You don’t have to.

Today’s video focuses on defining true beauty, which is not limited to the physical and superficial. Rather, it’s rooted in our hearts. It’s something we are all naturally born with, and it’s time we remembered that we are all inherently beautiful.

The Four Cornerstones of Beauty

To be truly well and healthy, you need to nourish the four major areas, or cornerstones, of your life: your physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional well-being.

Feeling good means increasing your overall level of health and wellness, connecting with your body, experiencing personal growth, being in tune with the true needs of your body, and having more clarity in making lifestyle choices that leave you feeling energized and healthy.

In this lesson, you’ll learn all about the four cornerstones of beauty and how to nourish each of them so that, in turn, you nourish your whole being.

The Power of Ongoing Cleansing

Many of us engage in a daily simple act: cleaning. We shower, wash our hands before and after meals, and clean our homes. Doing so gets rid of dirt, grim, and germs that, if left unchecked, can cause harm.

But how often do we clean the inside of our bodies?
Our body’s systems benefit from ongoing cleansing, too.

This lesson focuses on the power of ongoing cleansing in our bodies and its impact on our overall health and well-being, including energy levels, mood, and skin health.

Beauty is Not Defined by Dieting or Counting Calories

Calories and grams of carbs, fat and proteins alone do not give an accurate, holistic picture of how healthy a food is within the human body because calories and macros do not take into consideration how nutrient-dense a food is, or how much fiber food has in it.

In essence, using numbers alone to determine what we eat is a very limited approach to health and nutrition.

Today, we'll learn why counting calories won’t ensure that you eat foods to promote beauty. As we begin to cleanse the body, our systems will start to optimally absorb nutrients, and we will start feeling full faster. Simultaneously, we will shift into consuming mostly nutrient-dense and fiber-rich foods, which will allow us to take in nutrients with far fewer calories, whether we are consciously counting or not.

The Link Between Feelings & Inflammation

Inflammation is a vital part of our body's immune response and a way to heal itself. Acute inflammation is the short-term redness, swelling, warmth, or pain that arises with things like a cut, bruise, twisted ankle, or the flu - as well as soreness from working out.

There’s also another type of inflammation: the modern epidemic of chronic, ongoing low-grade inflammation. This type destroys the balance in our bodies and lowers our vitality, making us more susceptible to diseases that range from autoimmune conditions to heart disease.

The following lesson focuses on how our emotions impact inflammation and how, in turn, the more inflamed our bodies are, the worse we feel. Yep, there really is a link!

Bottom line: Taking care of our emotions is a critical piece to living healthfully.

Eating in Alignment with Your Body

Did you know that your intestines are about 12 times as long as the length of your torso? Your intestinal body is designed to be long so that there is adequate time to absorb the minerals and nutrients from plant matter, since it breaks down and moves through our bodies much faster than animal protein does. In fact, humans have 10x less the amount of stomach acid than carnivorous animals. A quick examination of our anatomy shows that, while we are omnivores, we are clearly meant to eat a plant-centric diet.

Plant-based eating, based solely on how our intestines are designed, allows for less toxicity to accumulate in your system. While it’s not all or nothing, eating a mostly plant-based diet offers nutrients you wouldn’t get elsewhere - and these nutrients are key to feeling good.

The Importance of a Morning Ritual

How you start your morning affects how everything unfolds for the rest of the day.

One of the most powerful, effective ways to ensure you have a great day is to create a morning ritual. Often, we start the day already frazzled and disconnected from ourselves.

A consistent morning rhythm gets you into a good flow. It sets the tone for how your day will go. You’ll start the beginning of each day feeling strong and grounded, energized, poised, and focused. This one daily routine alone can have a lasting, positive impact on your life.

Eating to Support a Beautiful Body & Spirit

Protein, carbohydrates, and fat are the three macronutrients found in food. Eliminating any of these from your diet or overemphasizing one macronutrient over the others will inevitably create imbalance in your body. Imbalance in any form is a surefire way to diminish beauty.

It’s important to learn how to eat in a way that supports you feeling your best. In this video, we discuss how to eat for balanced beauty.

Breakfast to Dinner: Eating Light to Heavy

It is not just what we eat that matters, but also the order in which we eat our food.

The concept of eating "light to heavy" is designed to enhance digestion. This approach helps you get the most out of your food and frees up energy. We want to optimally assimilate nutrients in our food and then efficiently release wastes. By doing so, we reduce gassiness, bloating, and wasted energy - all things that contribute to energy leaks, aging, and the diminishment of our beauty.

Food Combining Principles

Digestion is a very energy-intensive process, and if we strategically make it easier on our bodies with the combinations of foods we put together, we can free up large amounts of our vital energy.

Today, we'll learn how to strategically combine the foods we eat so we use less energy when digesting them. This, in turn, leads to having greater energy overall as well as healthier, more glowing skin, an easier time losing weight and slimming down, and more mental clarity.

Supplements for Beauty

Supplements aren’t absorbed as they should be in your body if your system is compromised. So, today we’re going to look at the three key supplements you should be taking not only for digestion but also to create overall vitality.

The Link Between a Healthy Gut & Beauty

Scientists estimate that we each carry 100 trillion bacterium in our digestive tract alone. These bacteria thrive in our digestive tract and work to control harmful microorganisms, while also helping to ensure maximum nutrient absorption, promote optimal immune function, and aid in digestion overall. 

Today’s lesson takes a close look at the “gut microbiome,” a collection of bacteria that live in our gastrointestinal tract. Research has shown that sub-optimal gut bacteria can have a profound impact on health. In other words, cultivating healthy bacteria is essential for looking and feeling our best. 

Nourishing the Body for Clear Skin

When we eat, we aren’t just eating for energy; we are providing nutrients to the largest organ in our body: our skin. 

In this lesson, you’ll learn tips and techniques to help you make the right lifestyle changes for glowing skin. These include cutting out inflammatory foods and increasing our consumption of plant-based foods, while continuing to cleanse your body of mucus and toxins.

Routines for Healthy Skin

What you put on your skin matters. Anything applied topically is absorbed into your dermis and then into your bloodstream. 

The following lesson is all about establishing a healthy skin routine using clean, non-toxic products. You’ll learn how to choose products devoid of parabens, phthalates, artificial fragrances, and other harmful chemicals that can pollute your body and even over time negatively affect the health and vibrancy of your skin. You'll also learn techniques like skin brushing to help you achieve glowing skin.

Abhyanga Explained

Your skin is your body’s largest organ. It takes in a great deal of information from the outside world and is connected to every part of your body by thousands of nerves. 

Today, you’re going to learn about Abhyanga. It’s a simple, effective self-care practice you can incorporate into your daily routine that has incredible health benefits. 

Abhyanga, an ancient practice of self-massage, is known to soften skin and contribute to overall skin tone by way of boosting circulation and detoxification. It is also believed to help enhance your sleep, while also helping to soothe and rebalance your nervous system, which is so vital to complete wellness and true beauty.  

Healthy Hair, Do Care

There is a link between what and how you eat and your hair’s health. Today, we take a closer look at how the nutrients you eat affect your hair, as well as how to best support your lymphatic system in order to keep hair follicles purified, cleansed, and nourished. 

Essential Beauty Recipe: Glowing Green Smoothie

The Glowing Green Smoothie is the powerhouse of smoothies, and today you’re going to learn how to make it. 

Packed with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and fiber, this smoothie also contains high-quality amino acids, which build protein, and countless other phytonutrients that work synergistically to prevent and repair damage in your body. It’s called Glowing Green for a reason! This smoothie will also boost rejuvenation and leave you feeling amazing. 

Blending also helps your body absorb the maximum amount of nutrients from the ingredients. We recommend chewing this smoothie like you would any other food to prevent bloating and, if you have compromised digestion, taking digestive enzymes before drinking it.

Essential Beauty Recipe: Kale Salad

Kale is beauty’s superfood. It’s packed with phytochemicals, fiber, and chlorophyll, which is a major blood builder. The cleaner our blood, the more beautiful we are!

This incredible salad provides a substantial mix of protein-building amino acids, enzymes, minerals (including important ones found in sea vegetables), and antioxidants. 

Essential Beauty Recipe: Vegetable Soup

This recipe has everything it takes to rejuvenate your body and soul, even though it is quite light.

It contains lentils for iron and protein, broccoli and other veggie powerhouses, metabolism-enhancing ginger, B-vitamin rich nutritional yeast, which adds a creaminess to the soup, tofu for even more protein, and flavorful herbs. And adding the lemon after you take it off the heat adds a fresh brightness to the soup.

Essential Beauty Recipe: Truffles

Not only are these chocolate truffles delicious, they're also good for you. That’s because cacao promotes feelings of love, joy, and opens up the energy of the heart chakra. 

Cacao also contains anandamide, often dubbed the “bliss molecule” because it helps create feelings of pleasure. As a neurotransmitter, it’s also involved in modulating memory, motivation, and appetite.

Essential Beauty Recipe: Golden Milk

Sipping Golden Milk before bed has wonderful benefits, including decreasing inflammation in the body and boosting the immune system. And it’s simple and fast to make. The base is unsweetened almond or hemp milk, which has a good amount of tryptophan. Tryptophan is an amino acid that helps your body with the production of melatonin, a very important sleep hormone, to ensure a deep, beautiful night's rest.

The Sacred Goddess Archetypes

In today’s lesson, you’ll learn about the three most prevalent goddesses: Lakshmi, Saraswati, and Durga. This is important to learn because of shakti -- or the subtle feminine energy that’s thought to move throughout the entire universe. 

Connecting and meditating with these goddesses is believed to act as energetic catalysts that can help call forth specific powers and qualities within you. We are all so much more powerful and beautiful than we realize, and connecting with these Goddesses can summon truth and strength to support us. 

Dinacharya: Finding Your Daily Rhythm and Balance

Dinacharya is the branch of Ayurveda that consists of daily self-care routines that provide structure and balance in our lives. Dinacharya is based on the philosophy that human beings run on a biological clock dictated by the patterns of the sun and the moon.

Following a daily routine helps you establish balance throughout your whole being on all levels. It is said to help regulate our sleep cycles, digestion, absorption, and assimilation, and create more equanimity, peace, happiness, and longevity in our lives.

Ayurveda & The 3 Doshas

In Ayurveda, Doshas are the forces that create the physical body. They determine such conditions like aging, health, and disease. Typically, one of the three doshas - Vata, Kapha, or Pitta - predominate, determining your constitution or mind-body type. 

Today’s lesson not only establishes a basic understanding of each Dosha but also addresses what happens in the physical body in a state of imbalance. You’ll also come away having learned how to balance these energies in your life and body. 

Feel Good in Your Unique Body

“Not-enoughness” is prevalent in today’s society. There’s never enough time, so we run around with a million things to do. And we’ve all felt at times that we’re simply just not enough and must earn our worth. 

Today, you'll learn how to reconnect with your true, authentic worth, which is your power and the source of genuine validation and love. That inner spark is the perfection within all of us, it’s a part of us, and it can never be taken away. It gives us access to perfect love because it is perfect love. It inspires us to be more loving in our lives. 

The first step is awareness, and this lesson gives you that. 

Moving Past Body Shame & Self-Doubt

Body shame is a deep-rooted toxin that many of us carry. Statistics reveal that even as children we start to experience shame about our bodies, often because of what we’ve picked up from our parents and the adults around us. 

Judging yourself and your appearance sets up impossible standards that prevent us from seeing clearly or acting in ways that are beneficial to us. What matters is that you have a heart - not just the organ that beats in your body but an essence that is connected to something greater than us.

Practicing compassion toward ourselves is an essential part of our healing. 

The Power of Affirmations

Paramahansa Yogananda taught that properly practiced affirmations can be powerful enough to permeate the subconscious, thereby influencing the conscious mind. In his technique, he advises practicing affirmations often with deep conviction and to not focus on or get frustrated by your present situation.

You can choose affirmations that are framed in the positive and help you let go of limiting beliefs and obstacles like self-doubt. We can go forward to create in life what we truly want, like a life of manifesting our truest beauty.

The Benefits of Grounding & Connecting with Nature

Tapping into our true beauty isn’t just about connecting with our bodies, it's about connecting with the expansiveness of the whole, which includes nature. Nature exemplifies the very essence of beauty. 

Today’s lesson takes a closer look at the health benefits of grounding, which refers to the healing that takes place from making direct contact with the earth. Benefits include a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and heart attacks, improved heart rate variability, and alleviating muscle soreness. You'll also learn some general tips to help you "get grounded."

Your Chakra System: The 7 Energy Centers in the Body

Chakra is the Sanskrit word for “wheel.”

Think of chakras as areas of concentrated energy. These energy centers receive, process, and express your vital life energy. If there is a deficiency or an excess of energy in your body, it can create dissonance, or a blockage of energy flow, in one or any of the chakras. When this happens, physical, emotional, spiritual, or mental imbalances can occur. 

It’s important we understand our own energy body and the seven chakras so we can work to heal and balance them. Understanding our chakras is another essential tool to deepening our understanding of ourselves. 

Meditation: Connecting to Your Chakras

The more you connect with your wholeness, the more you can tap into your true power and your truest beauty. 

This meditation is designed to help you connect with your chakras, your seven energy centers. By knowing them and accessing them, we can work with our own energy in a deeper way, and that, in turn, affects our overall health and vitality. 

Beauty in Motion: Healthy Practices for Movement

We are naturally creatures of dynamic movement. On all levels of our being, from our blood flow to our spinning electrons and beyond, we are constantly in motion.

If we want to live a life of our fullest beauty, we need to embrace our natural state of being and live a life with regular and nourishing movement.  In the following lesson, we cover important do’s and don’ts of exercising, specifically in regards to benefiting your beauty and bolstering your vitality.

The Beauty of Sleep

Sleep is so important in our lives because it plays a key role in helping us look and feel our best. Many of us are so busy, we often feel that we can skimp on sleep in order to get ahead in other areas. However, it's hard to feel beautiful when you’re exhausted.

When your body is well-rested, you not only function better, but you also are more likely to be in a better, more positive mood. The focus of today's lesson is on improving sleep through important daily choices and rituals. 

Upgrading Your Sleep

In a study published in the Journal of Residential Medicine, magnesium supplementation brought about statistically significant increases in sleep time, sleep efficiency, and melatonin production.

Today's lesson is all about tips designed to help you improve your sleep. Combining good nutrition with mindful awareness of the importance of sleep, along with certain daily supplements and rituals, will not only help you to sleep better, but it will also ultimately transform all aspects of how you live.

The Importance of an Evening Ritual

If followed daily, a regular evening routine will help you prepare mentally and physically for sleep by giving cues to your internal clock. In today’s lesson, we look at what that means for you by reviewing best practices for creating an evening routine that benefits you best. 

Stillness & Connecting with the Source of Beauty

Be still and know. You’ve likely heard that before, right? In today’s lesson, we’ll discuss how to tap into your unwavering inner knowing. Also and often called your intuition. Also covered in the lesson is why being connected to your inner source of beauty is so important. 

Pranayama & Meditation: Connecting to Your Inner Power

Today's video is a simple Pranayama and meditation practice for helping you achieve a deeper level of stillness. By doing this meditation, you’ll connect with the true, deepest source of beauty that’s inside you.