Leaning toward wholeness. In a time of seeming unbeauty and suffering, we point to the beauty, as the joy of being alive. The sorrow and the loveliness.
Once upon a mythic time, the world lost its color. Kāma, the god of desire, wanted to connect with Śiva, and loosed an arrow of longing at him, as he sat in meditation. Śiva opened his third eye and burned him to ash. But the ash didn’t stay inert: from it arose Bhaṇḍa, the king (or demon?) of dullness. Under his reign, nothing quickened. Flowers ceased to open. Lovers stopped reaching for one another. The rains fell, but the earth received them without joy.
The gods gathered and built a great fire, offering everything they had into its flames. From that fire emerged a young woman, rose-colored, carrying a sugarcane bow, five flower arrows, a noose and a goad, born from the fire-pit of consciousness. They called her Lalitā, the one who plays, and Tripura Sundarī, the beauty of the three worlds. With her armies of goddesses she defeated Dullness, and restored Desire to life with her glance. The world began to move again. In restoring desire, Sundari restored the very conditions through which beauty is experienced and expressed: through the movement of longing and connection.¹
Our land in Hawaiʻi is called Sundari, in honor of divine consciousness and the outrageous beauty that pervade all of creation.
In bhūr, the earth, she is the fern unfurling in a perfect spiral and the papaya split open to its wet black seeds. In bhuvaḥ, the atmosphere, she is the smell of rain an hour before the rain, and a rainbow standing over the ocean. In svaḥ, the heavens, she is the Milky Way over a dark ocean and the moon pulling the tide up the lava.
Om bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ. She is the galaxy and the pomegranate and the wholly holy body. She is the visible and invisible that surround us, and that which remains forever beyond our knowing.
Standing in the garden at dusk, the three worlds arrive at once, the soil underfoot, the warm air, the first star. My body remembers it belongs to a cosmos that is, at every scale, astonishing.
Today, a meditation on Beauty as a way of life, a downloadable sharing from my Living Tantra 201 unit on the mood of beauty, and a new bouncy chant I wrote to honor the metaphysics of Sundari, which sound a lot like David Bohm’s holomovement.
All love,
CMM
Here is chant written for Sundara Devi (on streaming platforms on November 5, 2026). Thanks to Sean Boyd at Art Farm recordings for the collab on my vocal track here. XO
Where attention rests
Still, so often, we center the ugliness. Attention runs to what is wrong: the crack in the wall, the sharp word from yesterday, the headline, the one critical comment among a hundred kind ones. Psychologists call this the negativity bias (author Rick Hanson says the mind is like Velcro for bad experiences and Teflon for good ones!). Perhaps it was a gift to our ancestors, to scan for danger, but now, it’s too many manipulated signals of danger for one body to reliably interpret and process.
I have come to see the negativity bias as working like a neuroendocrine addiction. Each time we find a problem, the body answers with a small surge: adrenaline and cortisol to mobilize, and a hit of dopamine for having spotted the threat. The chemistry rewards the search, so we search again. Over years the nervous system gets trained for problem seeking, and a quiet, lovely afternoon can start to feel strangely flat, even suspicious, until something goes wrong and the familiar charge returns.
This vigilance can be retrained.
The body can learn a new reward: the slow, warm chemistry of delight and awe. What we look at, we grow.
Spend a day receiving what is lovely, and feel how beauty steadies the eye so it can see the whole, the broken and the blooming together, and how it helps us tend what needs mending from a place of fullness.
If attention snags on what is wrong, notice it, take one breath, and then let the eyes find one beautiful thing in the same field of view: the light on the wall beside the crack, the warmth in the voice behind the sharp word. Then choose what to do about the crack. The beauty is also always here.
Centering beauty is muscle, we train it and it becomes an embodied atmosphere: I become a receptive instrument for beauty.
“I am a receptive instrument for beauty.”
This is the sankalpa, the declaration, for the path of beauty.
Receptivity is a first move: we soften to receive. We soften the belly, the gaze, the mask of the face, the mind itself bows to the heart, we open all the gates of the senses. The judging mind and the vigilant mind that braces find some spaciousness, and there is more room inside for the world to resonate.
The word for the person who has become this kind of instrument: sahṛdaya, one with the heart.
The body has always known how to do this, and the science is catching up. In The Nine Gifts, in the chapter on wonder and awe, I gathered some of what researchers have found.
Symmetry and natural proportion read to the brain as signs of health and safety. Fractal patterns, the branching of trees, the edge of a coastline, the frost on a window, calm us measurably; Lance Hosey reported that simply being near them can reduce stress by as much as 60 percent. Even a window onto green landscape helps people heal and think. Beauty, it turns out, is one of the ways a nervous system learns it can stand down. The field even has a name: Neuroaesthetics.
Camatkāra, the mood of wonder
The moment beauty stops you in your tracks, when your jaw drops on the floor, the involuntary utterance of delight, the instant when tasting the world becomes tasting your own awareness. The moments of fusion with the one, when you are astonished to be alive at all. These are called camatkāra (chuh-mut-KAH-ruh), the mood of wonder.
Wonder can be cultivated. The Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra is full of invitations to it: gaze at the open sky until the mind becomes as wide as it is; when you taste something sweet, let the taste fill the whole body. There are tiny doorways everywhere!
Once you begin noticing, the capacity for wonder builds and you live on the frequency of the poet-mystic. One night it is a whale breaching off the point. Another it is the light coming through a glass of water on the kitchen counter. Right now it is the light morning rain on fat tropical leaves, a drum section of nature. I expect astonishment, and the world, generous as she is, keeps obliging.
The private and public life of beauty
Beauty begins small and close. A cleared shelf, a candle, a stone from the beach, a flower in a jar. In Reverence: Creating Ritual in Modern Life, we called the home altar a beauty spot: a place where the sacred and the timeless are invited into the ordinary flow of a day. Gather what is meaningful, go slowly, and include the elements: something of earth, a bowl of water, a flame, a feather for the wind. Add something for the cosmos and the space between, an egg or an image of the stars. Change it with the seasons, bare branches in winter, budding ones in spring, acorns in the fall. Then visit it. Refresh the flowers and light the candle. Some mornings it takes two minutes.
These gestures look private, and their effects travel. A person who tends her altar at dawn walks into her day already tuned. She notices more. She speaks more gently to the person at the counter. The beauty spot on the dresser becomes plating or dressing or feeding the stranger or the garden strip along the road that strangers slow down to see.
The public life of beauty is a civic good. A well-made bridge, a library with tall windows, a street lined with trees: each lowers the collective heart rate a little and tells everyone who passes that they belong to a world someone loved enough to tend. The private gesture and the public good are a singular movement of care.
From coherence, more beauty
Coherence is generative. A choir in tune makes room for harmonies no single voice could reach. A household where people feel met becomes a place others want to gather. Beauty creates the conditions for more beauty, and it compounds.
The coherence comes from meeting the fragments. Every life holds scattered pieces: the part of us that rushes, the part that numbs, the grief set aside to finish later, the desire tucked away.
Tantra treats each of these as Shakti too, energy waiting to rejoin the whole. When we turn toward a scattered piece with breath and warmth, it comes home, and the instrument holds one more note.
This is the gift in Lalitā’s story. Bhaṇḍa’s reign was a world in fragments, each being sealed off from its own longing. Her answer was play, and a glance that restored desire to the world. Beauty did the repairing.
So begin anywhere. One altar. One meal laid with care. One evening spent receiving the sky. One conversation in which you meet the scattered piece of yourself that showed up, and welcome it in. Then watch the ripples.
All love,
Christine
For my paid subscribers, Download the 42 page guide with 8 teachings on Beauty as a Way of Life.
Below the subscription line is Beauty as a Way of Life: Eight Teachings from Tantra, a 42-page printable companion to this essay. Each teaching opens with a daily practice and one Sanskrit word to hold it, then goes deeper into the tradition, with links to the music and books that carry it.
The practices include:
I am a receptive instrument for beauty
Receive before you name
Taste it all the way through
Collect the moments that stop you
Keep a beauty spot
Tune the room
Choose what brightens
Make beauty as an offering
Print it and keep it by your altar. Try the practices and let me know how it lands for you. XO
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Called to beauty? Come to Hawai’i in November.
My new book, Wake Down: Bringing the Light All the Way Into the Body, arrives November 21. Preorders ship on release and include free access to the practices library.
The Ṣaṭkoṇa, laid in marigolds and rose petals. Its two interlaced triangles are Śiva and Shakti: the upward triangle of pure consciousness and the downward triangle of creative power, the Goddess. Where they meet, at the heart, the world comes into form. In the Śrī Vidyā tradition of Lalitā Tripura Sundarī, the goddess of this essay, their union is the source of all beauty.
Notes
¹ This story is drawn primarily from the Lalitopākhyāna, a section of the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa, which recounts the emergence of Lalitā Tripura Sundarī from the fire-pit of consciousness, her defeat of Bhaṇḍāsura, and the restoration of Kāma, the god of desire. Her thousand names, celebrated in the Lalitā Sahasranāma, illuminate her nature as the supreme Divine Mother and the beauty and consciousness pervading the three worlds. The connection between desire and beauty offered here is a contemporary philosophical interpretation inspired by these traditions: desire as the animating impulse of life, drawing all things toward relationship, creation, and the unfolding of beauty.
