There’s a tendency to miss what’s right in front of us… How could we not, in a highly stimulating world with shocking headlines and filtered images, desensitization is a way we cope. In the frenzy, what subtler or sweeter tones do we miss?

In spiritual traditions around the world, BEAUTY is named a virtue. Whenever I hear a list of the others: purity, courage, reverence, respect, etc…, I nod my head in obvious and resonant understanding, but beauty always stops me.

What is beauty, as a virtue?

There are a variety of definitions and standards in our world today of what beauty can be, and I don’t pretend to know or speak on the solely physical aspect of this topic. From the vantage of virtue, I sense beauty is an inner quality that evokes and radiates vibrancy that can be physically witnessed by an observer.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and I myself am waning in “youthful beauty,” or because my proclivities are becoming more nuanced with time and after being off social media for a while. I’m seeing with new eyes.

One of the times I felt and witnessed a deeper quality of beauty was in a private spiritual circle, where we’d donate our time to serve Earth in her healing through us. “We don’t have to heal the Earth, she can heal herself. All we have to do is stop making her sick.” - Eliot Cowan

There was a Japanese woman there who I’d look up to from time to time, and in the hours and days of reflective meditation, I was awestruck by her. We were all as barefaced and as Earthy as it gets, and there was a particular quality in her that I could sense and feel was different. A radiance within her subtle complexity.

It wasn’t until I was sitting in a tea ceremony in Austin a few years later that I began to understand. After three cups of old-growth “living” tea in silence, the beautiful practitioner spoke about the chachē, the table setting, and how simple it was with one draping flower and a spring twig by its side. She shared that the setting followed a Japanese aesthetic principle called shibui, defined as “unadorned beauty”. Imagine an unfinished wood with visible grain or raked gravel and moss in a Zen garden.

I’m learning Japanese definitions are whole philosophies or ways of being, far beyond a reductionistic 2-word English translation. One way I’d define shibui is an innate inner beauty that naturally radiates, unencumbered. It is itself. It is a beauty that needs no embellishment when it is witnessed as the perfection it is.

This shibui was the quality I saw radiating from the Japanese woman in the circle years before. I have a hunch that because the Japanese could see this quality, they named it, or because it was named, they continued to see it. Thus it became a living treasure in her lineage that continues to shine through. The virtue of beauty kept alive through its witnessed value.

Sadly, I would not have noticed the shibui in this woman, my now-friend, if we had been in the bustle of daily life. It was the quietude, connection to presence, and reflective space that both of us were in that allowed her to shine and gave me eyes to see the virtue in her beauty.

I contemplate beauty because I love it. I’m an artist and admirer of Her (Beauty). I’m also fascinated by it because I was told, and modeled, that it is ephemeral. I never quite believed it.

At 18, I moved to Los Angeles for art and business school, and my newly divorced parents followed me out. You can imagine. I went to restaurants and bars at times with my mom, and I saw firsthand what happens when a culture gets distorted by material physicality and perceived perfectionism. At that time my mom was in her 40s and, unbiased, she was stunning. Even so, she and her friends chose to diet, botox, and “enhance” their way into a California form of beauty, and yet, many of the men still chose the young ones.

Witnessing this painful game was heartbreaking. I knew then that I would have to find another approach for myself as I aged rather than continuously grasping for youth that will inevitably and naturally wane. I coached myself and knew the healthiest approach was to develop passionate interests, create community, and pour into deep friendships. Most of all I knew I had to cultivate the inextinguishable: the quality of beauty that doesn’t fade but ripens with experience, laughter, and inner knowing. I had to love myself. To do that, I also had to exit what my somatic coach calls “the sexual marketplace” and remove myself from that paradigm and lens of beauty. It’s a losing battle that no filter nor filler will fix.

In the last years of my mom’s life, she changed. She was in her 60s now, wrinkled with grays since Los Angeles, and she was more beautiful than ever. I was often gobsmacked by the amount of light I saw shining through her energetically and physically. Yes, she let go of the hair dye and extras, letting her natural coloring show through, but more than that, she let go of the game, the distraction, and the lie that she wasn’t enough, simply, and profoundly, as she was.

I couldn’t be more proud of her.

She embodied shibui.

When the adornments, or in this case psychological programming and baggage fell away, radiance poured through.

In this monumental time we live in, when current beauty standards are best depicted in horror movies (cue Demi Moore in The Substance), a complete rewrite is needed, or at least that’s what I’ve needed!

I’ve deeply appreciated the authentic seeing that still exists surrounding beauty which I’ve found through the enriching words and worlds of Japanese culture, including: shibui, and other terms like ōbai tōri, which means that each person has a unique nature and timeline to bloom, and wabi-sabi, the beauty of imperfection appreciated for its journey and wear.

It helps me deepen into the virtue of beauty, immersing myself in cultures that value all its facets, and drinking in perspectives that relish and celebrate beauty’s wholeness.

I hope peering through my eyes of beauty for a moment helps you see yourself and the world in a kinder, sweeter, and more enriching way.

P.S. Exciting update! If you’d like to experience this cultural reverence for beauty with an amazing group of like-hearted women, I’m honored to announce that I’m co-facilitating a Japan Women’s Retreat next May with my dear Japanese friend Nori (the woman mentioned above). Click Here to Learn More »

Bridget Nielsen is a Sedona-based retreat facilitator, spiritual artist, intuitive healer, Youtuber, and host of the Wild & Awake podcast. She has led more than 50 retreats worldwide over 15+ years, specializing in women’s embodiment and circles, and is passionate about bringing people together in person for connective experiences of humanity.

Today, so much emphasis is placed on talk therapy to untangle our mental frenzy. We wait for the perfect quiet for a deep meditation or spiritual insight that often doesn’t come. We yearn for a lifestyle or awe-inspiring form of expression that we only dream of experiencing from behind a screen.

In Eastern medicine, from a simplified vantage, health depends on whether there is more heat in the head or in the lower body (Hara or Dantien). When excess heat or energy accumulates in the head, disease can follow.

Unfortunately, this is where Western culture tends to live: in the mind, in concepts, and in chaotic flurry.

A recent phrase softened everything for me, as a solution to the noise.

“Are you painting?”

This literal question, and the broader analogy behind it, beckons us to create in whatever form that takes: music, art, gardening, pottery, cultivating friendships. This reorientation turns the current toward what the East would define as wellness.

Are you moving energy out of your head and through your creative center, called Hara in Japan (located at the area of the womb in women or at the sacral chakra for men), inviting it downward?

Often, the remedy for our challenges and angst is found in simplicity. The solution may not be easy to face, but the resolution arrives when we step back and become a vessel of flow, with the divine within us in action.

Admittedly, one of the great flaws of New Age spirituality, and of modern life behind a screen, is stopping at intention or wishful thinking and living solely in the energetic unmanifest. It’s a trap I sometimes fall into myself. It misses the physicalization needed to make things manifest and the spiritual principle that you are a creator!

So create! Paint, write, dance, rap, knit!

The science now echoes what our ancestors knew and, out of necessity, lived. In a Mayo Clinic study of nearly 2,000 older adults, those who regularly did crafts like pottery, quilting, and sewing had a 28% lower risk of developing mild cognitive impairment over four years. Meanwhile, AI use is on the rise, and early research from MIT found that people who used AI to help write essays showed weaker brain connectivity and felt less ownership of their work than those who wrote unaided. As technology accelerates, handwork and physical crafts may become an increasingly important way to strengthen brain connectivity and mental wellness.

When we use our hands, wonderful things happen for our minds and spirits. In a 2016 art therapy study, cortisol levels dropped in 75% of participants after 45 minutes of art making, and prior art experience made no difference.

The palm chakras within our hands, are an extension of our lower creative center, so using our hands moves excess energy from the head down to the Dantien (Hara). Through that, we create, internal harmony, a calmer mind, and true wellness.

This isn’t new. Our ancestors filled their days crafting their lives into reality with their bare hands. There’s satisfaction in it, not to mention a gratifying reward response and the reflected feedback of their actualized creatorship. What you DO, MATTERS. It becomes matter. Empowering and enlivening.

Over the past year, life has asked a lot of me. My refuge in deep challenge was getting my hands dirty on our renovation projects and picking up my paintbrush again. When grief, project timeline pressures, and endless details seemed to invade my inner sanctum, a knowing serenity would emerge fairly quickly once I let myself get lost in a drawing or new painting.

I had set down my physical creations for about a decade while my online career soared on Youtube. I was grateful for the “excuse” to paint for our home and rental properties. In my experience, crafting for the internet is satisfying, but creating in real life is deeply fulfilling. It hits a different note of knowing and harmony that stirs my soul.

Here are a couple of paintings from the past year. Some are still in process, but I like seeing and sharing the journey of art.

What about you? What calls to you to be made, created, and experienced?

This invitation to move from head to hands and Hara, and from the digital to the physical world, is no small ask.

I’ve heard a lot lately about how millennials stand on the cusp between the pre-digital and post-digital worlds. When I was 16, I spent 20 hours at my dining room table hand-drawing Grace Kelly’s face for a school project. You can only play Mario Kart and text your friends so many times, so I found other interests that drew my attention away from the screen. I forged and cultivated “real reality” skills that help me today move my will from scrolling to form.

It’s still challenging, especially when you’re venturing into an exciting but new skill. I recommend taking an in-person class or joining a group to help with the learning curve and build physical momentum. Our will needs support in these times.

Opting for the analog is a great step. As an example, I’m writing this on pen and paper, in a coffee shop sipping on a warming cardamon mint tea versus on the computer.

Our spirits and equilibrium are fed, nourished, and balanced by actualizing our creatorship. Creative acts of embodiment cultivate wellness and wholeness. They are simple, healing balms to restore peace in frenzy and calm in chaos.

I’d love to hear what you’re creating. Please comment and share below!

So, are you painting? What are you making with your hands this week?

Bridget Nielsen is a Sedona-based retreat facilitator, spiritual artist, muralist, intuitive healer, and host of the Wild & Awake podcast. She has led more than 50 retreats worldwide over 15+ years, specializing in women's embodiment and circles, and is passionate about bringing people together in person for connective experiences of humanity. Originally posted on bridgetnielsen.com.

Sources:

• Krell-Roesch, J., et al. (2017). Association between mentally stimulating activities in late life and the outcome of incident mild cognitive impairment, with an analysis of the APOE ε4 genotype. JAMA Neurology. [add PubMed link]

• Kosmyna, N., et al. (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task. MIT Media Lab (preprint, not peer reviewed).

• Kaimal, G., Ray, K., & Muniz, J. (2016). Reduction of cortisol levels and participants’ responses following art making. Art Therapy.

I feel the mystery swelling in the crisp morning air and unseen communication stirring... my senses awakened by the smells of earth and chai. It’s the ‘thinning of the veil’.

As Samhain (Halloween) approaches, I feel the exhilarating strength of my creatorship: to weave, wield, and manifest.

A deep stir of intuitions awakens, and it feels very different from popular cultural beliefs around manifestation, often laced with unrealistic pressure to be perfect and to fixate on the self .

In this connected knowing, some of the most potent visions of manifestation I hold are not for myself, but for others... not in an altruistic way, but as a beautiful aspect of interdependence: because their flourishing is woven with mine.

This week, two close friends separately sent me voice messages of celebration and acknowledgment of my challenges over the past year. They felt like a precious balm, uplifting my spirit and life, leaving me witnessed, held, and loved.

In receiving their words, I remembered that offering to one another, and receiving in return, is an integral part of creatorship. It takes some of the pressure off, and allows us to create for each other what our humbly human selves sometimes can’t hold or see for ourselves.

Their words were a beautiful spell, casting light over my life, home and family. A prayer of joy, and a blessing of ease and grace.

They offered this because it’s their nature, an overflow from the wellspring of their hearts to me. When we get out of our own way, this current of Creation flows strong, and rises into the wind that fills each other’s sails with inspiration.

They offered words, but it could have been acts of sharing or care... For example, this week I made a new mom a hearty batch of soup and helped my elderly neighbor with her weeds. A kind act or word deeply touches in today’s world, and that act of giving holds an important dose of the fulfillment and humanity we seek. Offering to others rekindles a very natural codex and way we once existed together in belonging with one another.

I’m sure you’ve experienced how easy and obvious it is to witness a solution for someone or see their gifts, strengths, and way forward, yet we ourselves are sometimes blind or in the dark about our own gifts and way forward.

Within the tribes, communities, sisterhoods, brotherhoods, and families who thrived, we created together.

Yes, we look out for ourselves, but we are designed to hold and birth more than that, (stop, really take that in) to billow and overflow goodness to each other, spirit, and nature.

I feel how much our Western culture values independence and self-reliance. As a history lover, I’ve learned that part of this ideal came from Roman conquest and the later spread of Christianity, which displaced much of Earth-based ways of life across Europe. This shift cast a long shadow and separated us from the village and the Earth. I think we still carry an ancestral fear of gathering in circle and remembering the truth of our interconnectedness with each other, nature, and life itself.

Togetherness and mutual support are our power, as women, as men, and as peoples.

Each autumn, when the veil is thin, I feel an invigorating strength within myself because I’m reminded, through the palpable otherworld, that I am connected to the ancestors and women who came before me, to my friends, to community, to family, and to nature.

I pass on an traditional Irish blessing to you today, overflowing to you, who are near and dear to me in my community:

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind be always at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face,

and rain fall soft upon your fields.

And until we meet again,

And God (or Goddess) hold you in the palm of His (Her) hand.

…

Bridget Nielsen is a Sedona-based retreat facilitator, spiritual artist, muralist, intuitive healer, and host of the Wild & Awake podcast. She has led more than 50 retreats worldwide over 15+ years, specializing in women’s embodiment and circles, and is passionate about bringing people together in person for connective experiences of humanity. Originally posted on bridgetnielsen.com

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I’ve been away from here, but with you in spirit!

This is the longest I’ve ever been away from content creation and communication since I was in my early 20s, but I needed it.

I needed to mourn my mom’s passing, without needing to share or say anything about it while I was deep in the process. Time heals and I’m about ready to share my journey with death as an initiation, and grief... Both are essential human passages for the dying and the witnesses, and so little of it is known or talked about in our culture... so more to come on that.

Even though I was away from here, I wasn’t able to create a healthy space for my grief. My mom’s death came with many blessings and new beginnings, including two big renovation projects that circumstances required me to manage.

Let me back up... to catch you up.

While my mom drew her last breath, we closed on our house in Sedona. It was one of her dying blessings for us to have a rooted family home that we love...

The timing was pretty wild though, because a couple of days after her memorial I was on the job site, and I became a full-time general contractor — a role I’ve now held for the past 10 months...

Let me back up again, a little more now...

Growing up, my parents were real estate developers, and knew, and often did, every lick of the process. I’ve realized over the past many months that more rubbed off on me than I knew... and somehow I had the ability to do it too... for better and worse, lol.

It was good to have something keeping me moving, and especially creating during this time, but it was often too much given where I was emotionally. Though I had time at night to get cozy and curled up in our back casita — the main house was under construction — to weep and wail... And being under the glittering presence of the stars and ancestral red rocks in Sedona has been, and continues to be, magnificent... supportive and needed.

It was very important for me not to bypass or push down any part of the grieving process, because I know “feeling is healing” and I had been warned about the consequences of not grieving by our hospice team and others...

It was amazing transforming our neglected house, creating a home on its solid bones... and in the process, rebuilding parts of myself and my family with it.

As summer is waning and the projects are nearing completion, I find myself coming back from my deep descent into grief and praise... and am regaining my balanced center, changed... stronger and lighter than before.

I feel a much deeper capacity for... everything, a prayerful compassion for human existence, and a burning passion and gratitude for life.

We are so fortunate to have this body... to love... to feel... to have time... and to have this life.

I cherish it deeply and am humbled by its fragility.

In not speaking or sharing, really since my mom’s decline last August, I’ve realized that I authentically have a lot to say... and I’m grateful for the tempered circumstantial restraints to my outward expression, and feel imbued with more wisdom and experience that will hopefully translate into my words yet to come.

I appreciate your care and love very much.

…

Bridget Nielsen is a Sedona-based retreat facilitator, spiritual artist, muralist, intuitive healer, and host of the Wild & Awake podcast. She has led more than 50 retreats worldwide over 15+ years, specializing in women’s embodiment and circles, and is passionate about bringing people together in person for connective experiences of humanity. Originally posted on bridgetnielsen.com

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My heart is feeling full, yet tender today.

I have so much billowing love in my life and have experienced deep loss...

On this day of love that was anchored as an energetic passage by St. Valentine and the countless sacred unions he supported in the 3rd century...

I want to speak about the heart today.

The heart is an intelligent, nuanced, and multifaceted space of feeling with immense capacity for everything wonderfully human and beyond.

In the Toltec tradition, the heart is seen as a flower... and it is a gift from Life to experience the fullness of its blooming...

Now how do we do this?

Surely, love (of self and other) is the core of this blooming... and I’ve discovered throughout my life that there are feelings that create space for even more of it!

Rose bushes need to be cut back in the fall farther than seems comfortable, so much so that without experience it feels like it may kill the whole darn plant... back to the thick stems, the resilient core of the plant...

And like this cosmic pruning, experiences in life can cut us deep, rip us open, break our hearts, and create massive pain but this is the secret gift that quite literally makes us stronger and, even more, creates space and greater capacity ~ if met with compassion and by feeling ALL OF IT ~ for more of our heart flower to bloom...

The rose bushes that get cut back have more blooms in the spring -- bigger and more fragrant, and so we are offered the same opportunity that is granted through the simple and sometimes excruciating act of feeling...

Not just feeling the pain of loss or heartbreak, both of which I’ve experienced in the depths...

But also the feeling of courage to open... and the vulnerable act of loving, and even more, very risky ability to receive love from another (be it a person, living being, or the universe itself).

A couple of years ago I stood before St. Valentine’s bones (relics) in Dublin, and my heart felt warm, expansive, and almost aching with love...

Part of what cultivated this virtue of LOVE that still emanates from his bones today was courage, and the risk to break free beyond the bounds of the rules of that time to actualize what he knew was true in his blooming heart...

The sanctity of love and union with ourselves and others, which is our birthright as humans...

And sometimes, the path to this glorious bliss and ecstatic truth is paved in pain, challenge, and compassion that sets the stage for this expansive blossoming!

May you receive the blessing of love that is seeking you... that is you.

Sincerely,

Bridget

P.S. A reflection from nature inspired this email. My orchid dropped its final withered blooms last spring, and instead of throwing it out (yes, I’ve done that in the past :( ). I trimmed back the brown stem and tended it more... patiently loving it where it was... almost a year has passed, and a new stem grew, buds emerged, and today (yes, today on Valentine’s Day), it bloomed!