Goddess Energy & Grooming Rituals

Grooming, when elevated to a sensual experience, is an act of self-care.

I call this goddess grooming.

Nowadays, I hear so many women spending thousands of pounds maintaining their 'regime'. Between the acrylics, false lashes, extensions, and all sorts of other additional beauty add-ons, it's a wonder the average woman has any money left to keep the heating on.

But while this is all fun, and I have no issue with it, if that's what you want to do, it is not necessarily synonymous with self-care.

Without being conscious of it, we have allowed the beauty industry, which was something that was supposed to be for us, to be something that no longer belongs to us, and makes us feel bad about ourselves.

As more and more treatments and enhancements become available to us, we feel pressured to keep up with increasingly impossible societal standards.

Rather than making us feel like the goddesses we are, it makes us feel like we just can't keep up, no matter what we do.

So in this post, I wanted to talk about grooming, the way I understand it and partake in it.

This is the type of grooming I was taught, growing up, by my mother, (who really does embody goddess energy in general). And it is the type of grooming that was more about self-love and self-care, than about vanity.

Doing these little rituals with my mother taught me so much about feminine bonding, but most of all, it taught me about the importance of valuing yourself, making time for yourself, and creating these little moments to bond with and show love to yourself.

It was nothing to do with being lavish with money, or buying things for a feeling of false importance or status or clout, it was about tapping into, and connecting with your inner goddess.

Grooming, to me, is not just beauty upkeep - although, of course, that can be part of it - but is instead an act of performing bodily self-care to demonstrate love and care for yourself. It is an act of self-love, shown as time spent for yourself, on yourself, in an attitude of gentleness and reverence.

We are used to talking about well-groomed people and understand them to be those who typically have their nails and hair done, clothes ironed, and look stylish, or neat and clean. But grooming has a much more profound meaning when it serves to affirm love for ourselves.

In the self-care journal, which you can download here for free, I gave an example of how teeth cleaning, which is usually something we do for health and hygiene, can be elevated to a self-care grooming ritual, depending on how mindful and how present you are while you're doing it. Basically, that is what goddess grooming is: a ritual that demonstrates mindful and conscious self-love.

The reason why grooming is such an important part of self-care is that it is so very tangible. Not everyone understands what self-love means in the broader sense. It actually takes a long time to really grasp the true meaning of self-love, sometimes even a whole lifetime.

However, almost everyone can grasp that performing an act of conscious grooming, whether it's mindfully brushing your hair, or doing some treatment for yourself, feels good. As such, it is a good entry point to practising more self-love, in general.

So, why does grooming feel so good?

It's because we are still basically animals, and a lot of animals (including human animals!) enjoy physical touch.

Cats love grooming. They really understand self-care. People who like cats, love this trait about them. Conversely, people that don't like cats usually say it's because they seem, well, selfish!

But the truth is, cats understand self-care and they teach us an important lesson: that absorbing ourselves in the conscious act of self-grooming is pleasurable and also that it is not selfish.

An animal doesn't have a concept of being selfish in the same way humans do, so if we are projecting those kinds of feelings, whether on an animal or human, (she is so selfish for taking care of herself!), that may point to some kind of guilt or envy arising from your own lack of ability to properly love yourself.

Sometimes we can't ask for the affection we want from others at the level we need it, or maybe they just are not able to provide it in the way we need. In any case, we should never completely rely on outside sources for the love we need. In such cases, it is heartening to know that we have the power, literally at our own fingertips, to fill that void ourselves.

Touch, being one of the five important love languages, is one way in which you can communicate your own love for yourself. That's why, when we do it consciously, grooming feels so nourishing and comforting.

Part of goddess grooming is allowing yourself to experience sensuality. It is this element of sensuality that elevates everyday self-care into an act of deep self-love that has the power to make you feel special, pampered and indulged.

Sadly, as we become increasingly disconnected from the natural world, our own bodies and our senses, we no longer have very much sensuality in our lives. And this disconnection from our senses divorces us from ourselves, and the ability to receive our own love, as well as inhibits the ability to receive love from other people.

In my next post, I want to talk about how to elevate everyday self-care to goddess grooming - and its nothing to do with how much money you spend or how many treatments you tick off your list. It's not about appearance at all really. But more about spending time in self-appreciation.

So tell me, how do you practise your version of goddess grooming?