In this episode, we dive deep into the hidden layers of beauty beyond appearance and societal expectations exploring how feminine energy, emotional healing and self worth shape the way we experience and create beauty.

Understand how to embrace your inner and outer radiance, reclaim self permission, and reconnect with the sacred, nurturing aspects of feminine energy that make everyday life feel more vibrant, meaningful and aligned.

Keywords: feminine energy, self-worth, inner beauty, emotional healing, mindfulness, slowing down, self-care for women

Work with Phi

Hello my love,

You may have seen my recent Instagram post last week where I spoke about healing is in the feeling, in that very same meditation what I felt came through was the desire to speak about beauty. It came through softly, an invitation from the divine and universe to explore more about feminine energy, that’s both magnetic and complex. To be honest it doesn’t come as a surprise to me as Flow, the luxury self care feminine energy retreat I will be running again in Vietnam next year in May 2026 will be launching at the end of this month (if you’re interested please get in touch!).

When we talk about beauty, so many different feelings arise. For some, it’s admiration or inspiration. For others, it’s comparison, longing, or even discomfort. Beauty can be something we desire, something we chase or something we feel the need to downplay. It brings up questions of worthiness, identity, visibility and validation.

In the feminine journey especially, beauty holds this multifaceted energy it’s something we’re often taught to seek and celebrate, yet it’s also something that can bring unwanted attention, judgment, or pressure. Society tells us beauty is power, but it also tells us to be careful with it, to not shine too brightly (especially tall poppy syndrome which I’ve mentioned a few times on the podcast). Beauty is something you may have complicated relationship with something that, in its essence, is natural and sacred.

In today’s episode, I want to unpack that. What beauty really means beyond the surface, how it shapes our sense of self and how we can begin to reclaim it as something soulful, embodied, and free.

There’s so many layers to beauty from such a young age, we’re shown what beauty should look like in magazines, on screens, in the faces and bodies that get shown to mass audiences. Somewhere along the way, we start to measure ourselves against those images. We learn that beauty equals approval, attention, acceptance. It’s like this silent curriculum that teaches us how to be seen, sure, but not necessarily how to see ourselves.

Then as women, we live this strange contradiction. We’re told beauty is our currency, but also that it’s dangerous. It’s confusing bringing alive different parts of our self: one part of us craving to feel beautiful, radiant and alive and another part shrinking from the attention or judgment that might come with that.

What if the unlearning is that beauty is simply the energy of being fully yourself…. fully present, fully alive? The way you move when you’re connected to your truth. The light that radiates from you when you’re at peace in your body, in your heart, in your mind, in your life. That’s a different kind of beauty = one that doesn’t depend on validation or visibility. It’s raw, it’s sacred, and it’s yours.

When I think about healing and beauty together, I realise they’re not that different. Both ask for honesty. Truth. Very much the collective energy we are being asked of with the recent super full moon in Taurus. Both ask us to feel, to soften, to come home to ourselves.

So if we expand this thread of beauty as energy that’s what I feel the yearning and desire to speak to you about.

There’s beauty in the pure desire to make things beautiful. One of my dear friends Aimee really inspires me in this regard. Like she will really think of the aesthetics of the room, she’ll light beautiful pillar candles when she journals.

Honestly, how lucky are we as women to be the ones who create beauty in the world and stereotypically seen as beauty too (don’t get it twisted men are beautiful too!). To gather around long, sunlit lunches with decorations and custom menus like as women we’ll choose colours and textures, to make the table itself part of the story and experience itself. There’s something so innately feminine about that… the way we make spaces feel alive, loved, intentional.

It’s not about extravagance. It’s about care. It’s the Venus, Aphrodite likeesque in us that impulse to bring warmth and sensuality into the ordinary. To say, “this moment matters enough to be beautiful.”

Those little things: a table laid out with fresh bread, a linen napkin, jazz music playing in the background — it feels like ceremony. Like we’re weaving beauty into life and maybe that’s what the feminine does best: we beautify as a way of blessing.

It’s easy to dismiss those gestures as trivial, but they’re not. They’re sacred. They remind us that beauty doesn’t have to be grand to be meaningful it just has to be felt. The simple act of creating something lovely is its own kind of prayer. It nourishes not only the people around us, the universe itself and our own sense of aliveness.

In this way beauty is nourishment. It feeds the soul the way food feeds the body. When we honour that when we allow ourselves to revel in it without guilt we remember that being a woman is, in itself, a celebration of life.

There’s also this other side of beauty that I can’t ignore: the beauty that lives inside pain. I think part of this comes from being an emotional authority in Human Design and having so much water energy in my astrology chart. My world is felt before it’s understood. Everything moves through me like a tide, the ocean you’ll know when I do human design readings I talk about emotions being like waves and sometimes, that means I experience life in this really tender, liquid way. Honestly… I find that beautiful. I really do.

Not always easy but beautiful. A privilege to feel really. Is it weird that I find crying beautiful? There’s something so exquisite about it the way emotion builds and releases, the way your body becomes the ocean for a moment. It’s this sacred raw honesty that can’t be faked (for a moment can we suspend crocodile tears manipulative. When you’re an authentic genuine person you’re crying, you’re not pretending. You’re not performing. You’re just… real. There’s so much beauty in that. Realness.

Water in it’s purest alchemy: washing away what’s heavy, softening what’s tough and rigid, clearing space for something truer to come through. That’s what emotional authority feels like to me: not control but permission. Permission to feel it all. Permission to let the waves move through. Beauty is not the absence of pain but the willingness to meet it with tenderness. To stay open, even when it hurts. To find grace in the breaking.

When we allow ourselves to feel fully, even the hard things start to shimmer. The tears catch the light. The pain becomes poetry. To me, especially as someone who loves words, writing and  communication that is one of the most beautiful experiences we can have as humans: that raw, unfiltered intimacy with our own hearts.

There’s beauty in darkness. there’s beauty in the darkness those moments and experiences that feel heavy, uncertain, or lonely. We need the dark to see the stars; without it, their light wouldn’t mean as much. It’s the same with us our beauty isn’t only in our light, it’s in the contrast. The way we break and mend, hide and reveal, die and bloom again.

When you ask for flowers don’t be surprised when it rains. Can’t have one without the other.

The darkness feeds the growth. The tears water the soil and that links back to what I said earlier The things that feel messy or inconvenient are often the very things that make us real.

I think the feminine understands that better than anything that creation and destruction, light and shadow, beauty and pain, all exist together. There’s no shame in the dark. It’s fertile, it’s necessary, it’s beautiful in its own quiet way. Beauty isn’t about avoiding the dark, but embracing it: trusting that every season, every storm, is part of our artistry. When we let the darkness do its work, we start to glow differently. Softer. Truer. From within. This is the oracle, the feminine, the intuitive within us.

In the conscious intentional curation there’s beauty as I said earlier and the duality and what can also exist is there’s the beauty in mess. The honest, lived in, unpredictable kind. The pile of laundry on that chair, the kitchen counter splattered with ingredients after cooking (goodness me and a spaghetti bol), children’s artwork taped crookedly on the wall. The scattered notebooks, the tangled cords, the half finished projects. It’s life in motion. It’s evidence that you are doing, trying, living. There’s rhythm, there’s texture, there’s human. There’s a way it makes you pause, laugh, sigh or feel deeply.

Mess reminds us that beauty isn’t only about perfection or intention. It’s about presence. It’s about noticing, even in chaos, the small sparks of order, love, and colour. It’s about embracing the imperfection and seeing it as part of the story, not as a problem to fix.

So if your life feels messy, or if the world around you feels cluttered, remember that too is a form of beauty. Not polished, not perfect, but definitely alive and human: the most human kind of beauty there is I’d say.

There’s certain mindset insights when it comes to beauty.

There’s the beauty in simply being slowing down enough to notice the world and yourself in real time. It’s different from the beauty in pain, in mess or in creation. This beauty isn’t about doing or fixing or feeling. It’s about presence.

It’s in the way light hits a table in the afternoon making a rainbow love that, the sound of leaves rustling outside your window, hearing the rain fall down the window, noticing the way your own breath moves in your chest. It’s in pausing long enough to notice the small details you normally rush past. The beauty is in attending, in leaning into the moment fully, without expectation or judgment.

Slowing down allows beauty to reveal itself quietly in textures, colours, sounds and rhythms that are usually drowned out by the noise of doing. It’s not flashy, and it doesn’t need anyone else to validate it. It’s subtle, intimate, humming, living a reminder that the world is full of wonder if we simply take the time to see it.

This is the kind of beauty that feels gentle but powerful. It nurtures the soul without demanding anything from it, and it invites us to practice simply showing up with our senses wide open.

More mindset driven insights emerge when we examine our relationship with beauty not just how we see it, but how we value it. The ways we invest in beauty, or choose not to, often reveal deeper stories we’ve carried about ourselves, worth, and survival. For example, if you feel like spending money on beauty is frivolous or “not worth it,” that hesitation might not be about vanity at all. It may reflect an internalised sense of scarcity, a survival mindset that you don’t have enough so you need your money for something else even when honestly you actually do have an overflow of money for example.

It might reveal a pattern of putting others first, of believing that your needs, your pleasure, or your self expression are secondary. In this sense, beauty reveals your relationship to abundance, self permission and care. Perhaps beauty dances with deserving. Do you feel worthy of receiving pleasure, adornment, and care?

I’ts not about guilt or judgment. It’s about awareness. Noticing these patterns allows us to explore the subtle ways we either honor ourselves or deny ourselves. Choosing to invest in beauty, even in small ways, can be a radical act of self recognition and self love. It’s a declaration that you are worthy of attention, delight, and care: that your body, your presence, your being matters.

Sometimes, the act of adorning yourself, of surrounding yourself with beautiful things, is less about the things themselves and more about what you’re saying to your own soul: I see you. You are valuable. You deserve to feel pleasure and delight.

Rejecting beauty entirely can also be informative. It can reveal resistance discomfort, or even fear perhaps from experiences where beauty attracted unwanted attention, judgment, or pressure. It may be tied to beliefs that beauty is a performance, a currency, or a trap. In recognising this, we can begin to separate external pressures from our own authentic desires. I suggest you start asking yourself: what kind of beauty serves you, nourishes you, and reflects you inner truth? Beauty is a a language, a form of self expression and a tool for understanding and embracing our relationship with ourselves.

Remember beauty doesn’t have to be about excess or indulgence. The paradox is that you can fully enjoy beauty without overextending yourself or going into debt. Mindful conscious engagement with beauty keeps it grounded and sustainable. It’s about intention, presence, and discernment: choosing what resonates with you, caring for yourself in ways that feel authentic, and allowing beauty to enhance life rather than become a source of pressure or performance.

The way you pause in awe of a sunset, the way your heart softens at the sound of laughter, when you catch your self smiling at the married old couple or the girlfriends have a giggle over wine, the way you notice the shimmer on the ocean that recognition isn’t random. It’s resonance. It’s life showing you yourself.

The beauty you see in nature, in art, in another person’s face… it’s a mirror. It’s the part of you that’s awake enough to notice it. You are that beauty, perceiving itself.

That’s why beauty feels so personal, so moving. Because it’s not just “out there.” It’s in you, looking back. It’s in your eyes, your soul, your presence. It’s in your willingness to see.

So when you catch yourself captivated by something beautiful: a moment, a texture, a scent, a light remember that what you’re really witnessing is your own soul saying, this is me.

Beauty in nature. Beauty in creation. Beauty in you. It’s all the same pulse of the same divine frequency expressed in a thousand different forms. Oneness. It’s like hey the universe created beauty around you for you.

Ultimately, beauty is both a reflection of and a conduit for feminine energy. It’s the part of us that creates, nurtures, and embodies pleasure, care, and presence. It’s when we notice the world around us, in the rituals we cultivate, in the courage to feel deeply and allow ourselves to be seen. Beauty shows up in our tears, in our mess, in the sometimes chaotic messy emotional unfolding of life, and in the devotion we bring to our own lives and the lives of others.

As we’ve explored today, beauty isn’t just external or performative it lives in pain and vulnerability, in stillness and presence, in the messy, imperfect, lived in aspects of our human experience. It’s the rhythm of creation, the pulse of feminine energy.

So as you move through your day, I invite you to notice the ways you create, receive, and recognise beauty in yourself, in others, and in the world. Beauty is not something you chase; it is something you live, feel, and allow to shine through every part of you.