If the body is the only home you will ever have, then its walls and its windows, its architecture and its atmosphere, will always reveal how deeply you have cared for it. We like to imagine that health is hidden, that it belongs only to the invisible terrain of how we feel inside, while beauty belongs to an entirely separate realm that can be shaped from the surface alone, something ornamental, lighter, less essential. Yet health is never invisible. It leaves its trace everywhere, writing itself into the skin, the eyes, the breath, and the way your presence itself is felt in a room.
Our culture insists that since beauty is purely subjective, then attraction is little more than personal taste. But attraction has always been tied to vitality, whether we choose to name it or not. It is not about symmetry or chasing a single ideal. It is in the warmth and glow of skin alive with circulation, in the steady pulse of blood moving freely, in the rhythm of hormones in balance, in muscles that stay supple and ready, in the coherence of a body at ease within itself. To be close to such a body is to sense that life itself is stronger there. That is the magnetism we are drawn to. That is health made visible as eros. And eros, when it roots itself in the body, does not remain abstract. It becomes flesh, radiance, a vitality coursing through every cell of your body, leaving its trace everywhere.
Your skin does not glow by chance. It glows because blood moves freely and warmly beneath it, carrying nourishment to every corner, leaving a flush of life that no cosmetic can reproduce.
Your eyes shine from the clarity that comes when your nervous system feels safe and has finally let go, when sleep has done its restorative work through the night, its repair, when inflammation has been kept at a minimum and balance has returned throughout your entire body.
You do not move with grace because of luck. You move with ease because your joints are oiled and fluid, because your muscles bend and lengthen without any protest, and because your energy is steady enough to keep going.
You also feel it in the lightness of your waist after a meal that nourishes you instead of dragging you down, and you feel it in the steadiness of energy that holds you through the afternoon without feeling like you are about to crash.
And when your liver is working well, there is a brightness in your eyes that no light can fake, and a subtle radiance in your skin that makes it glow from the inside out.
Before a word is spoken, health has already entered the room with you.
Of course, you can decorate and disguise. You can filter, mask, and cover. You can shape what you want others to see. But vitality cannot be faked for long. Cosmetics may imitate for a moment, clothing may sculpt for a season, but the coherence of a body that is filled with vitality belongs to a deeper order that no surface alteration can reproduce.
This is why I do not believe devotion to health is ever shallow. It is the deepest work of keeping yourself porous to the world, capable of feeling it fully, capable of offering yourself fully. Building strength and encouraging optimal circulation shapes the body into a better conductor of experience. Beauty, in this sense, is never a mask placed on from the outside. It is what happens when vitality overflows its edges.
I did not always understand the true meaning of this until it became visceral. Like most big lessons in my life, I learned it through practice, not theory. Back in 2016, I tore my right MCL, my PCL, and my calf muscle in an aerial silks accident. All moderate tears. I could barely walk for a month, and it took me an entire year of relentless, hard work to heal fully without surgery. That year broke me open in every way, not just physically but mentally and emotionally too. Never mind the sleepless nights from pain, never mind the long hours of physiotherapy. I couldn’t hike, I couldn’t run with my daughters, I had to rebuild my yoga practice from the ground up. I couldn’t even drive for the first month. Even walking through the grocery store was excruciating, and I had to move so slowly. But what hurt the most was not only the pain, but the sudden humbling of my identity, the part of me that had always equated freedom with movement. I had built so much of my identity around being strong, fast, capable and independent. And suddenly I couldn’t even carry groceries or go for a walk around the block without having to stop from pain. I couldn’t run with my daughters. I had to give up aerial silks completely. I couldn’t flow through any of my usual yoga practices, and had to start over from the very beginning. Being forced into the body of a beginner where I had once been advanced gnawed at me every single day. My ego took a big hit. More than the pain itself, it was that loss of freedom, of competence, of ease, that left me raw. This was harder to bear than the injury itself.
And in the middle of that rawness, I kept returning to a line from “A Course in Miracles”: “Every decision you make indicates what you believe you are worth.”
Somewhere inside all my frustration, humility grew, and alongside it, a lot of deep gratitude. Choosing to rebuild, to start again from the beginning, even if it was painful, even if it took so much work and dedication, was a way of telling myself I was worth the effort. I promised myself then that I would never take my legs for granted, and I haven’t.
Ever since then, I am often asked what I do for my legs, what rituals or exercises or products I rely on, what “secret” lies behind their shape and strength, and what is the best number one tip I can offer. But there is no one thing. As Dr. Perry Nickelston says, nothing in the body works alone, gets injured alone, or heals alone. My legs look the way they do because they are not ornaments but instruments (and I treat them as such), because they have carried me through long walks in every kind of weather, because they know the burn of steep inclines and the drag of ocean water, because I have kept my joints supple with yoga, and because I focus on optimal circulation just as much as healthy muscle. They look the way they do because I have magnesium baths every night, because I practice inversions daily and have been for over two decades, because I have always refused to accept cramps or swelling as normal, because I massage them, because I feed them minerals and protein through the food I eat, because I treat them as the vehicles of my freedom, not decoration.
Yes, my legs are long, and yes, I inherited them through genetics, but genes alone do not grant me resilience or mobility or the same range of motion I carried as a child. That comes only through devotion, through the discipline that I have transformed into reverence, through choosing health every single day, until function spills over into form. When you understand beauty this way, you realize it is not luck. It is the side effect of resilience.
This is what so many miss when they separate health from beauty. They imagine function is hidden, when in truth function writes itself across every inch of the body, across the skin, across the way you move, all the way to the depth and steadiness of your breath. This is why I will never call care for the body vanity. To me it is reverence. I have seen how quickly a neglected body collapses and deteriorates, and I have also seen how long a body remains luminous when it is cared for as a whole, when no part is allowed to weaken in isolation, when each system is honoured and nourished, when nothing is left to fade alone.
Once you understand all of this, you can start to see how beauty is not an accident or a mask, not a gift to be envied, but a signal. It is the body announcing the presence of health, the overflow of vitality into appearance. Which is why the work is never on the surface. It is always in the invisible that beauty begins, in the intelligent order of the body working as one, each part supporting the other, all its hidden rhythms aligning until vitality becomes visible. Beauty arrives when the body is tuned to live, not just survive.
And yet this is only the beginning. Because health does not end at the surface. The same biology that writes itself across your skin also scripts your moods, your patience, your capacity for joy, for intimacy, for love itself. When the body is misaligned, these too are rewritten, and the self you believe to be constant is also altered.
That is where I will take you next time.
Mihaela