Botox or Not Botox?
One of the most popular cosmetic procedures out there these days is to Botox away your wrinkles. But before you erase them, it can help to understand what those wrinkles could mean! Every line, every feature on your face has a message for you that can be important.
When it comes to wrinkles, there are basically two kinds: The first forms when you’ve learned a significant life lesson and gained wisdom as a result. The second kind I call a gift, an early warning sign that you’re navigating slightly off course in life. But if you know how to read that wrinkle’s meaning, it also reveals why this has happened and how you can come back into balance.
In the first case, you’d not want to lose that wrinkle, because it’d be a sign of having also lost the lesson learned. For instance, I recently worked with a woman in her late 40’s who was curious why a horizontal line she’d had removed from her forehead 3 years ago had suddenly reappeared.
She’d had a procedure to remove the line because she thought it was making her look old. Her forehead had remained smooth for the next two years, but now the crease was back again. In face reading, there is a point on your face that represents every year of your life, and this line was at the place marking her life experience at age 23.
When I asked her what happened when she was 23 years old, she said with surprise, “Well, that was a huge year for me – I got married without waiting to really get to know my husband and it was a disaster. I really gave my power away in that situation but I always felt I learned a big lesson to never let that happen again. And for the next 20 years it never did happen again. But then two years ago, it’s hard to admit – I did it again – I dove into a marriage too quickly and am now putting my life back together after my second divorce.”
What face reading would say was that the wrinkle marked the powerful lesson she learned from her first marriage. But when she had it removed, it correlated to losing the wisdom she’d gained in that original experience. And one year later, she found herself right back in the same kind of situation.
The wrinkle had returned only as she’d completed her second divorce, a sign she’d re-learned the lesson. My advice to her was to keep and honor that line in her forehead, because as long as she had it, she’d never make that mistake again!
The second kind of wrinkle has a different meaning (the one I call an early warning sign): It forms as a result of a pattern of thoughts and emotions you have on a regular basis. Even if your doctor alters that part of your face, you’ll still keep having those same thoughts and feelings that created that mark, and so eventually it’ll come back. Your face is just a reflection of who you are inside.
But once you learn the message that wrinkle has to offer you, you can use that information to make the inner change, the only kind that’s sustainable. For instance, a woman who attended one of my workshops earlier this year recently shared with me that she was amazed to learn the meaning of the single vertical line between her eyebrows – that it related to her especially difficult childhood relationship with her father.
She realized that experience was still a negative influence in her life, and resolved to actively do some personal work on the issue. Three months later, she was astonished to discover the wrinkle had disappeared!
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard results like this, and people have even had their families accuse them of secretly getting plastic surgery because their wrinkles have disappeared! Now, the goal of my work is not about eliminating wrinkles! But when you see a line ease in this way, you know that you’ve made an important inner change that will affect much more than the appearance of your face. In fact, you’ve been able to release an old pattern that most likely was a limiting one for you, and thus you’ve changed the direction of your life.