BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE & HEART OF THE BEHOLDER…
By Kevin Smith
Every so often I get an email like this: “I’m interested in touch practice, but I only like hugging people I find attractive. How will I know if we find each other attractive? Should we exchange pictures first?”
My practice is the work of connecting to someone’s insides, on a soul-to-soul level, and building compassion and non-judgmental posture towards someone so that they can feel totally comfortable in their body and accept all of who they are physically. I come to practice with the intention of accepting all of who they are physically, and holding a space for them to do so. The work is actually built from inside out. However, this was not always so clear in my mind. When I was younger and less skillful, I often tried to build the connection from the outside in.
I used to like sitting with people I perceived as “physically attractive” or “hot” more than I liked sitting with people I didn’t see that way. A young college guy with a great body was slightly more interesting to me that an older guy with an average body. As I’ve done this work over the past few years, I have changed.I no longer tend to see people as physically attractive or not; instead, I’ve learned that when I sit with people with the correct intentions towards them, whomever I happen to be with BECOMES physically attractive. I have found that at the end of an hour, I have profound appreciation and reverence and care for whomever I have been doing the work with for the past hour. In the course of the hour, they become incredibly attractive.
I seem to slowly be losing my judgments and opinions about people’s outsides– how they should look, what’s attractive, what’s not— I don’t feel those judgments as often as I used to, and I try to refrain from acting on them when I do. I didn’t try to go in this direction; it just happened, by accident. This in Buddhism is a quality called equanimity where we have less of a tendency to push things away (those things we don’t like) or grab at things to pull them closer (those things we do like) but acquire an ability to “just sit” with whatever is in front of us.
I actually prefer NOT to see pictures of people I will be working with ahead of time, and I encourage others to meet me without knowing what I look like. The single greatest prognosticator of whether someone can benefit from this work is whether their first contact with me is a two word e-mail: “face pic?” At this point in my practice, I don’t even bother to answer those responses, because typically I have dozens if not hundreds of e-mails to respond to. But if a person asks about face pics in the course of a longer email, I try to discourage the exchange of pictures in advance and here’s why.
What happens when people look at pictures is we make up things in our heads—we invent a story about the person. We form mental constructs, assumptions, about what this other person must be like–we have no way of knowing, actually, but we make it up anyway, and then we talk ourselves into either attraction (grabbing to get closer) or aversion (pushing to get further away.) The Buddhists in the room would tell us that attraction and aversion is the cause of all suffering. Knowing what someone looks like ahead of time has a negative impact on my ability to connect deeply to them on a spiritual level because it predisposes me to judgments about them that I’d rather not make. Once we’re in the room together, it’s possible to forge a connection between any two willing partners.
If I sent you a face picture of me, you’d still have no idea who you’re meeting! I could be a nice guy, or an ax murderer, and you wouldn’t be able to tell from the face pic. We have both had experiences where we made a guess about what someone would be like from how they looked, and we ended up being wrong, right? One good example is that sexual predators are often very nice, friendly, normal looking characters; it’s their ability to blend in so well and be attractive that makes them so utterly dangerous.
Whether your brothers are attractive to you or not depends on how you look at them. If you see a man who is not attractive, then I would say you haven’t found quite the right way to look at him yet— because all men are deeply attractive, deeply lovable, if he’s open to you and you’re open to him. If you decide to let yourself open completely to the person sitting in front of you, you will fall in love with him. That is not a function of the shape of his outsides; it’s determined by the condition of your insides!