Pia Chaudhari Cameron is our Woman of the Week, nominated for her work on the healing properties of beauty, both in her role as a Jungian psychoanalyst with a theological degree and as the founder of an interior design business with a new book. She also recently led Axia’s first-ever in-person retreat on Healing Beauty, which was an extraordinary day. We asked her to tell you how she got from where she started to being someone linking these two roles for the healing of others:
“As a little girl, I loved to play house. I loved decorating and rearranging, and my Danish mother was a decorator, antique dealer, and shopkeeper. My grandmother also had an incredible sense of style. She studied flower arranging before WWII, and later had a shop with home decor from Norway, and so all that sort of thing was part of my family life. When I set out in terms of trying to follow more intellectual professional interests, I was guided by what I would call a love of healing. At one point, I wanted to be a doctor. I traveled a kind of roundabout road and then along the way became Orthodox, which in my mind was very much about healing. In seminary, I found a real connection with depth psychology, and more specifically Jungian Psychology. I pursued that and then along the way also needed to make a living as an academic and a trainee–which I'm sure people can relate to - especially living in Manhattan. I started my own business and have been running those two tracks parallel for a while, and they're starting to come together more.
“I'm starting to really sit more with how beauty is healing. I find that my work with clients as a decorator is heavily influenced by my background and my training in the healing profession. In that way, I bring a slightly different bent to it than most decorators would. There's something in it that is nourishing for them and often opens up new doors of enjoyment, pleasure, and satisfaction. I don't think we're a culture that values beauty, but I think everybody appreciates it when they walk right into it, maybe in a park or a museum, or in front of a beautiful piece of art. In the Orthodox church, we value beauty more than most, but that's not the prevalent stream in our culture. We don’t always realize how profoundly important beauty actually is - that it's not just a luxury (although I admit that interior decorating is often a luxury). But being surrounded by beauty shouldn't be, and there are ways we could focus more on that in our whole culture if we wanted to.”
Axia!
Our Woman of the Week is Pia Chaudhari Cameron, nominated for her work on healing beauty as a psychoanalyst and interior designer. We asked her to give you some examples of how you might focus on beauty either personally or in society:
“I think the first thing is to become aware that beauty is important. To allow it to be important, in the right way. We're such a culture of ‘doing’ all the time. Everyone lauds productivity as such a great thing, but nobody ever asks, ‘Was it beautiful?’ You know, ‘How was your evening? Was it beautiful?’ ‘How was your day? Was it beautiful?’ Obviously, ‘beautiful’ can mean many things. Other cultures I have experienced, like in Italy or in France, place a premium on the sensory experience that you're about to have, and it matters. They ask things like, ‘Does this clothing feel wonderful in your hand?’ ‘Is this architecture beautiful?’ I don't hear us in North America talking that way very much. It's not that we don't appreciate it when it's given to us. But often, it feels like a checklist of productivity rather than being with something and letting it profoundly be with you as well, which I think is what beauty does.
“It sounds trivial to say that there's more to life but there actually is. There are other ways than just being productive and meeting some kind of superficial aesthetic ideal. Women more than anybody know what that's all about, of trying to meet that standard. That's not beauty either. I have always thought, and I say this to clients, that making your space beautiful, although it's a luxury to hire someone to do it for you, doesn't have to cost a lot of money. It doesn’t need to cost a fortune to have beauty around you. Beauty is more of an orientation, a question of a little bit of attention to the space that you're in.
“I remember many years ago I spent a summer in Denmark studying. I lived in a tiny, nondescript dorm room with only a desk and a bed. They have these beautiful flower markets in Copenhagen, and I went out and bought a bunch of roses and put them in a cup I borrowed from the canteen. I remember being so struck by how this room, which was totally boring and uninviting, suddenly became beautiful. It was the roses that were beautiful, but that was all it took to turn that room into a space that I was happy coming home to every day.
“Bringing beauty into your own life isn’t something you have to put off until life is calmer or quieter, or you can afford it, or whatever. There are small ways of making a big impact that really nourish you. If you can't afford fresh flowers, can you go into the woods and clip some branches with pretty leaves on them and bring those in? It's the desire to bring it in that will do it, and what you find to be beautiful.
“As to the bigger question of why or how we don't value beauty in our culture, I don't see this topic in public discourse ever. In fact, on the contrary, if anything it's become suspect. I'm not an expert, but in certain architectural circles, the desire for beauty has become suspect, as it is associated with enforcing a kind of superficial aesthetic. Historically, beauty has been associated with symmetry and harmony: the beautiful proportions of a space and how all these things affect us when we're in them. It’s the difference between, let’s say, Grand Central Station and Penn Station as they currently are. Which do you feel better in? That can give you an idea of the correlation between people's well-being and truly beautiful public spaces.
“I think most of us would agree that we're not in a great place in our society. A lot of people have talked about the onset of smartphones in 2007 as a cause of that. Increasingly, I'm aware of the subtle message of dehumanization that we get all the time from various angles, whether it's rampant capitalism where profit is the only bottom line, being squeezed onto an airplane where your knees are hitting the the front, going through the labyrinth of Penn Station or being inundated with ads on Instagram or whatever. You're constantly being told that you are a profit bottom line and you don't matter, that you're a cog in some sort of utilitarian project. I’m not against capitalism, but this is what you're being experientially told even while politicians are saying, ‘We value you. Human rights. Blah, blah, blah.’ But the actual life most of us are living is one of survival against huge forces. That's partly why beauty is suspect. The worst of human instincts have gotten faster and louder and larger and imposed on us. And I do think that beauty is a revolutionary pushback against that.
“Beauty expands your humanity, it doesn’t contract it. It's as if for that moment in an encounter with beauty - whether you believe in God or not - that something in the universe is affirming your existence. To paraphrase David Bentley Hart, it's lovely and gracious and it includes the creature in its end. And we respond to this: we get to be part of it, and for once we’re being affirmed and validated as beautiful and lovely and invited, rather than co-opted and used.”
As usual, we asked Pia Chaudhari Cameron to tell you about her morning routine:
“This year for the first time ever we started a little garden in our backyard. So since spring, we’ve had the lovely and delightful routine of getting up and making coffee. And the first thing I do is take the dog out, and go up to the garden and sit there with my coffee and look at all my plants and count which ones are coming up and which of the bulbs are showing and which are not, and watch them make progress. Now it's just about the cusp of when that period is about to end with the first frost - most of those plants will be finished, so I'm enjoying the last little bit of it. But that sort of became the morning routine, which was really nice with a cup of coffee and a wander up to the garden. And then, you know, back in and start the day.
“The garden is a nice place to try to pray sometimes, too. Although I pray better in front of an icon, there's something about being out there that is very pleasant. It's a little hard to get up when it's cold and I would rather stay in bed for another half an hour! But once I’m out there and the sun is shining and I’m walking, it just feels so good.”
Thank you, Pia!