For years, really from the time I was 14 until my late twenties, I did everything I could to avoid what was going on inside of me. I didn’t know it then, but my body was carrying so much shame that it felt nearly intolerable to be present to it.

The way I coped was through numbness, dissociation, freeze states, and substances that amplified my disconnection. At the time, I thought I was just moving through life. In reality, I had little to no idea what was happening inside me.

It wasn’t until graduate school that I realized people who were connected with their bodies weren’t “crazy.” They were simply present, and I was numb. That awareness cracked something open.

Reconnecting with my body meant facing everything I had built my life around avoiding. It was painful, grueling, and to be honest, it still is at times.

But on the other side of that work is something I never could have imagined: the ability to feel goodness, presence, love, joy, and beauty.

Lately, beauty has been my greatest teacher. Over the last six to eight months, I’ve found myself deeply touched by it, whether it’s a song, a piece of art, a sunset, or even a short video. When beauty really lands, it’s not just an idea in my mind. It’s a full-body experience of immense pleasure. It fills me in a way that’s hard to put into words.

This realization has reinforced even more deeply how I think about healing.

Doing this work isn’t only about facing the hard things, though that’s part of it. It’s also about reclaiming our capacity to feel the good things, to feel beauty as a lived, embodied experience.

That’s why I’m making a conscious effort to seek out beauty in my everyday life, and I encourage you to do the same.

Beauty is medicine. And many of us are too numb to access it. But if we do the work of thawing out, of returning to our bodies, it becomes available again. And when it does, it changes everything.

I encourage you to do something today that adds just a little bit of beauty into your life.

With love,

Christian