Beauty and Dualism
Long before the coup and even the pandemic, I spoke to Luissa Burton, a British fashion model who began an advocate for sustainable living, while also becoming transformed through vipassana meditation. She visited Myanmar a few years back, where she took her first meditation course and was deeply impacted by her interactions with the people. We spoke about her spiritual journey arising from a modeling and acting career, and where her path was now headed.
“Through vipassana on this journey, I can see in myself how I think differently or respond or react differently to the same exact same things.”
Luissa Burton: About 10 years ago, I remember people speaking about spirituality, and I just looked at them very confused! I just didn't understand… there would have been judgment, I guess, because they’re doing something outside of the norm. Even though the modeling industry properly likes to see itself as very forward thinking and groundbreaking, every group has its attitudes or norms and socially accepted kind of things. And that [meditation] would definitely have been something that was outside of what would have been thought of to have been normal in the modeling industry. So there definitely would have been questions.
Host: Right. So following in line with this intersection, I'm curious how the Dhamma wisdom you've developed, born from your recent meditation practice and spiritual background, has informed the very worldly concepts you have dealt with in the modeling industry. I'm sure you might have thought a bit about the idea and concept of beauty. So you were personally confronted on your own journey with your very obvious imperfections on your skin, in an industry that promotes this idealized sense of physical beauty. Then, fast forward to today, where you're encouraging your followers not to fall into an addiction of phone apps that beautify the face, or ultimately make young people uncomfortable with how they actually look. So I wonder how you personally have explored this notion of sense desire, and its relation to beauty, especially as someone on an inner spiritual journey and having taken a vipassana course. To be more specific, I could say like in Buddhist philosophy, sense desires and cravings are things that we work to try to develop detachment from. So to put it in the form of a question, where have you landed with your present understanding of the concept of beauty? And to follow up on that, where does this understanding fit into like a wider spiritual view where the aim is to come out of any sense of a dualistic notion of liking and disliking of calling this ‘beautiful’ and this ‘non-beautiful’, both of which are concepts having no objective reality. So where have you had the worldly concept and the profession of beauty intersect with the spiritual experience and wisdom of beauty being somewhat of a dualistic notion?
Luissa Burton: Yeah, that's a beautiful question. Beautiful. And I'm grateful for that. So there's definitely been an awakening within myself in terms of how what has shifted for me from the way that I used to think and the way that I think now. It was an amazing question!
Well, it was about getting comfortable with myself first, and picking likes and dislikes on myself to begin with. Because in the modeling industry, you're critiqued a lot about, like, ‘This isn't good enough, that isn't good enough.’
I remember I used to look in the mirror and be like, ‘Oh, this or that is like this, and then it's just, wait, hold on a minute, every part of me is perfect!’ That's not to be said in a big-headed sense at all, but rather, every single part of us and every single one of us should be grateful for what we have. This shift into the mind-body did so much for me.
It helped me to release picking myself apart, when I looked in the mirror about was like, ‘Oh, this bit isn't good, or that bit isn't good.’ And then it was taking that and then applying it to other people, because we all at times can catch ourselves making judgments, like when people first see you, they always say first impressions count. So people encourage you to make a good first impression, and what does that even mean?
So it's just taking that and just applying it and just understanding that there's beauty in in every single person and in everything! You can see this in in the modeling industry, this shift from how it used to be very just like, tall, skinny, white blondes. As we're growing and collectively you can see that shift in the modeling industry happening to like, I don't know if you've seen Rihanna recently, but her show, well she included transgender models, plus size models, people of all different shapes, sizes, everything you could imagine. Victoria's Secret has said a few years ago, ‘Oh, we don't want to include diverse models or people with disabilities, because it ruins the fantasy.’
But Rihanna's show, it had a picture of people from all different backgrounds, and it just got rave reviews. Through vipassana on this journey, I can see in myself how I think differently or respond or react differently to the same exact same things.”