Adrienne Gold is one of the main speakers on this trip. She is phenomenal and it would take a book to describe her - so do yourself a favor and just look her up.
She started our day today with an hour long presentation of beauty and the media. She had worked in the industry as a stylist and as a talk show host. She always struggled with the industry standards of beauty and eventually realized she had to get out. She had so many thought provoking things to say and was spot on.
One of the things I learned from Adrienne today is that a
physically evocative outward appearance masks a lack of confidence
When people try so hard, one would think they're looking for attention but really they're disappearing in plain site - they're essentially saying don't look at me but look at my image.
In Judaism there's a notion that the external world should be a reflection of your inner safe. Panim is the word in Hebrew for face - the word itself is a plural word meaning the reflection seen on the outside is of what's on the inside as opposed to the word face coming from the French word facade aka a false front. In the beauty and media industry, women have power if they have youth and beauty. Men are attractive if the have power and if they have money. Again in Judaism, the notion of beauty comes from having endured the seasons - beauty in the Torah comes from internal depth not from what H+M in their digitally created human forms in their ads tells us that beauty Is.
So why were we born?
To manifest that which is inside you - we are born to be great and to help fix the world
Our external body carries the soul so Adrienne told us that we must work on our insides not just our outside. Our current world is so fixated on external beauty that we miss other aspects of beauty that deserve our attention and self -love. Why? A lot of this stems from mixed messages in advertising all of which are creates to make us feel disdain - nothing is ever right! Ads make us feel bad about ourselves on purpose so we go out and buy what they're selling to get us to fix what they think is bad. As a woman, my job is to reclaim my dignity in the face of advertising. The notions of beauty are so messed up that signs of good health and prosperity have become the look of émaciation and starvation. It used to be that being full and robust was a sign of great wealth and fertility. The misrepresentation of the female form leads to many self loathing issues. There is one protection in this world from all this and it is love and depth.
Boy did I feel as if she was talking to me. I have felt that I was never tall enough, thin enough or pretty enough at times. I never had that long think blond hair that models had growing up. I was the one with kinky curls and thick eyebrows. Now I see so many women around me subjecting themselves to so much physical pain to rectify what they think is wrong - tattoo eyebrows, permanent fake lashes, fillers and chemicals all because they are chasing a dream? She showed us an H and M ad of 4 women that were identical because they were digitally created. The perception of women has become such that there aren't models to find that can represent what the beauty industry representation of the female form is. She also gave an example of a washing machine ad casting 12 year old kids with mom doing laundry. The model cast to play mom was 19. She surveyed 10 women in the room with 12 year olds. They were all between 40 and 48 years old! So this concept of youth and beauty is beyond completely unattainable.
We also saw two great videos about women and notions of beauty in the media:
She closed the session by having us stare into the eyes of the person sitting next to us and told us that when you see your reflection in someone else's pupils, you are seeing a diminishment of your ego and only then can you celebrate the person in front of you. WOW!!
Session 2 -Lori Palatnik
Lori is the founder of JWRP. Her talk was on discovering the real you - body and soul. So for this they gave a great handout and I wrote all over it and attempted to analyze myself and my family in the process. Basically there are 3 types of souls and bodies and each has its own characters. We all have them inside of us but some more prominently than others. Here are my notes:
Some of this made instant sense. And other parts left me scratching my head!
Shabbat preparations and the Kotel itself Friday night was CRAZEE! That is a post into itself!
