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The
Venus Mambo:
Loving Our Bodies
by Dana Gerhardt
Sometimes you don’t know what
you’re missing—until a little too much wine at a trendy restaurant
inspires you to say yes to the flourless mocha cake and one
indescribably delicious bite later, you realize this is what
you’ve been hungering for all your life. That’s how it
was the first time I saw Laila Ali (daughter of Muhammed)
on Dancing with the Stars. Her big beautiful sensuous
exuberant confident dancing made my jaw drop.
I didn’t know women could look
like this.
Before Laila, I thought females
came in two models: the lucky ones with tight-tummies thin-thighs
full hair high-cheek-bones… and the awkward rest of us who
just don’t measure up. The first type can go to job interviews,
gym classes and grocery stores without anxiety, while the
rest of us move apologetically, furtively, wearing long sweaters
to cover our thighs, as we try to sport good personalities.
We go to "goddess" workshops and affirm to each
other that all women are beautiful—goodness, many of our men
try to tell us we’re beautiful—but secretly we know better.
Beautiful is being 5 foot nine, weighing 119 pounds.
I don’t know how much Laila weighs.
But I know that her beauty, power, sensuality and grace are
so far beyond the range normally allowed a woman, that she
has forever altered how I see the feminine. I get it now.
We’re all that beautiful. All shapes, all sizes. If only
we’d just drop the anxiety and mambo through our lives.
True beauty is the vibe that says we like ourselves and we’re
having fun.And that’s what Venus wants us to know
Sensuous, sassy, unapologetic
Venus demands that we savor the delights of earthly life—in
a body (yours!) with five senses (oh! doesn’t that smell nice,
doesn’t that feel silky, doesn’t that taste heavenly, doesn’t
that sound divine?). To serve the goddess, walk or dance in
pleasure, feeling strong, patient, vibrant and unperturbed.
Look: Venus is everywhere—in the blossoming roses, in the
breath-taking dogwood blooms, in the elm and oak leaves gossiping
in the afternoon breeze. Venus is in you too, just itching
to do the mambo.
Astrology says there
are at least twelve different ways to express the feminine—indicated
by the Venus sign when you were born. And yet, most of us
have been brain-washed, limited by our culture’s imagination.
There’s such a poverty of feminine images to work with—that
when the goddess stares back at us in the morning mirror,
we just can’t see her smiling through our eyes. We need
the Lailas of the world to wake us up. As one participant
in Venus my research project wrote:
I remember
a large woman I went to school with … by medical standards
she would qualify as obese. Yet she had my envy every
time I saw her. She was the sexiest thing that ever walked.
She oozed it. She was ALWAYS dressed in the cutest outfit,
her hair was always curled and fluffed and she always
wore makeup. But this wasn’t what made her so remarkable.
It was the way she moved and spoke. She acted as if she
was the smartest sexiest woman in the room… and well,
guess what. She was. The smartest sexiest woman in the
room. Whatever room she walked into, ALL of the men turned
to look. She thought she was IT and so she was.
If I had a magic wand to grant
one for you right now, it would be that the next time you
enter a room, you do so knowing you are IT, a delicious expression
of the divine. Venus rules "self esteem," but that’s
such a blah way to describe the practice of accepting your
own beauty and worth. Just follow Nature’s cue: Doesn’t that
little pink weed, growing through a crack in the sidewalk,
blossom as though it were IT? Right now you’re breathing.
With the next breath you take, inhale as though you were IT.
