Italian
If health is the energy that flows freely in our body, beauty is its expression.
When the body is healthy, vital, free from tensions, it is certainly beautiful. When we observe a healthy child, our senses are pleasantly struck by it.
We are attracted by her beauty, the brightness of her eyes, the color of her complexion, her proportions.
What manifests through the flow of sensations associated with the physical pleasure of the emotion of play, bestow upon him the grace and beauty typical of childhood.
With growth, this beauty often gets lost, fades due to the emergence of external factors that interfere and inhibit the authentic expression of oneself.
Pleasure is an expression of openness and release that expands the body and heart with joy; it makes us happy and broadens social relationships. In a state of pleasure, we move with grace and harmony, which are expressions of beauty in motion, therefore of living beauty.
We enjoy the company of a “beautiful person” because they know how to feel good about themselves. Those who experience disharmonious situations lack that stimulating inner excitement that is the cause of the pleasure that makes us feel good.
We observe the relationship between health and beauty, because health can be considered the truth of the body.
For example: healthy children strike us with their beauty, when we look at an animal we judge it based on vitality, grace, and exuberance.
If beauty is dissociated from health, it will also be in relation to the most significant aspects of existence. It will create a world of values divided into two parts: the first will favor physical well-being, while the second will refer to abstract concepts about beauty that will have nothing to do with health.
For the Greeks, the beauty of the body was an expression of physical and mental health. Then Christianity arrived, opposing the body and physical pleasure. Beauty became a spiritual concept, thus the division between body and spirit became part of Western culture.
A mechanistic view of the body emerged, in which physical beauty is seen as a random quality unrelated to health.
Bioenergy argues that pleasure is a sign of the healthy functioning of the body, so beauty is also a manifestation of health.
Beauty, in its most essential meaning, represents the harmony of elements in an environment or in a thing and is destroyed by the presence of disproportion or disorder.
However, a static painting is not beautiful. Harmony and order must arise from a state of inner excitement that radiates from the object and unifies its various elements.
The pleasure of beauty is based on the ability to excite our bodily rhythms and stimulate the flow of sensations in our bodies. If we have a pleasant reaction to a beautiful object, it is because we notice the excitement radiating from it. This leads us to enter a state of excitement. If this reaction is absent, no pleasure is perceived.
It can be stated that no sensation of pleasure deriving from the object is perceived. The excitement and flow of sensations associated with pleasure physically manifest with grace.
Grace is the beauty of movement and the completion of the beauty of form in a healthy organism. Like beauty, it is a manifestation of pleasure. In a state of pleasure, one moves with grace.
Pain has the effect of causing mobility disturbances. Grace is lost when one is not free to follow their own instincts and sensations.
A graceful person is open, warm, generous. They are open because no tension hinders the flow of sensations. They have not developed any neurotic defense against life. They are warm because their energy is not prey to emotional conflicts. They have more energy and therefore more feeling. They give pleasure to others effortlessly because every movement of their body is a source of pleasure for themselves.
The loss of physical grace is due to chronic muscle tensions that block the rhythmic movements of the body. Each set of tensions represents an emotional conflict that has been resolved through the inhibition of certain impulses. This is not a solution as the repressed impulses find another way to express themselves and emerge in disordered forms.
Muscle tension, inhibition, and distorted behavior are signs that highlight an ongoing conflict at an unconscious level. A person experiencing these conflicts is neither graceful nor pleasant. They are not mentally healthy, and considering the muscle tensions that overload the body, they cannot be considered physically healthy either.
So the beauty of the body’s shape and the grace of movements are the external and objective manifestations of health. Pleasure is the internal and subjective experience of health.
We all have an innate sense of beauty and grace. Children are particularly sensitive in this regard.
Many people are like the protagonist in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes: everyone denied their senses and applauded the emperor with his see-through clothes, until a child pointed out that he was naked.
People have been conditioned by accepting things in stark contrast to the objective truth of their senses.
An individual enslaved by fashion abandons personal taste in favor of conformity, focusing outside of their Self due to insecurities and remaining conditioned by the judgment and acceptance of others in order to find security, rather than centering on themselves and trusting their own feelings.
When we lose contact with our Self, we lose ourselves.
Maura Luperto
