The Wholestyle Manifesto

My apologies for the sabbatical in posts, my sweets!  With the glorious Miss Malaprop in town, I got a bit caught up in girl time. In the meantime, I’m delighted to share this post with you.

This post was reposted with permission by the lovely Jaka at Jaka’s Tea Party. You can read the original post & comments here.  She and Birdiee have created this beautiful piece that shares many values with my own.

The Wholestyle Manifesto

Designer clothes, shoes, jewelry, purses, makeup, perfume; fast cars; posh flats; the latest technology – these are the elements of style as we know and accept them.  They’re pretty and awe-inspiring at their best, shallow and empty at their worst.  But these things don’t make you classy, make you elegant, chic, or genteel.  There’s more to it than that; things that you can’t swipe a card for and take home.  In order to be stylish, truly stylish, you’ve got to glam up the inside, as well as the outside.  Expand your horizons; enhance your knowledge; engender wisdom; embrace your entire self.

You’ve got to step onto the path of wholestyle.

Via A Softer World

What is wholestyle?

It’s culture and education and style and art and self-satisfaction.
It’s not being ashamed of your sexuality.
It’s dressing as glamorous as you are and feel and want to be.
It’s being able to hold up your end of a meaningful conversation.
It’s doing things for the love of doing them.
It’s not making excuses for or hiding your wonderful body.
It’s being creative and injecting color into your life.
It’s understanding the world around you, taking brave steps forward.
It’s reaching out to and supporting others.
It’s beauty that turn heads; mind-bending, eye-popping styles.
It’s investigating the culture of our time.
It’s enthusiastically exploring every bit of yourself.
It’s finding inspiration in everything around you.
It’s expressing all your joy on your face because you can’t help it.
It’s becoming wise, as well as learned.
It’s hedonism, pansophism; introspection, illumination, fascination.
It’s celebrating being alive in exciting times.
It’s learning what you’re missing in the vastness of the world.
It’s exploring how to turn your beauty inside into beauty outside.

Via New Black Conspiracy

Modern women are trained (by a number of sources) to not only compete with men and each other, but also, and most unfortunately, with ourselves.  We struggle daily with inner conflicts that arise from deeply-seated beliefs about our bodies, our abilities, our function, our beauty, our accomplishments, our worth.  They’re beliefs that we may not even realize we hold.

The goal of this movement is to resolve these conflicts and move forward, together, as confident, beautiful, whole women through learning about our society, our culture, our world, ourselves, and to encourage others to do the same.

Until women make the decision as individuals and as a community to stop hating each other, hating men, hating society, hating their bodies, hating ourselves, we will never be able to honestly love.  Until women realize that we are not our clothes, our mothers, our bodies, our jobs, our clothes, our race, our stuff, we will never be able to achieve our true potentials.  We are so much more, so much greater, than all of those hates and perceived limitations.

We must stand tall (or short), proud, and lovely – as one and as many – and say that we are whole women.  Not only whole in ourselves, but whole together.

We will be bold, bright, beautiful stars.

We will love ourselves and each other and this magnificent life we’ve been given.

We will fully explore what it means to be a woman.

We are at peace with who we are and who we have been.

We are eager to see what new challenges life has in store.

We are whole and we embrace a lifestyle as such.

We perfectly embody wholestyle.

Drafted by Jaka Merriman and Birdie, protected by a Creative Commons – No Derivatives license