Shiva Rose - Whole Beauty: Daily Rituals and Natural Recipes for Lifelong Beauty and Wellness

SHIVA ROSE

Whole

Beauty

Daily Rituals and Natural Recipes for Lifelong Beauty and Wellness

Photographs by

NGOC MINH NGO

Artisan | New York

To my Sun, Colette, and my Moon, Charlotte

and

To all those who choose to walk in beauty

Contents

Preface

I spend hours in our garden, gathering pansies, roses, cherry blossoms, and all the other vivid, scented plants that catch my eye. I collect the petals in a small copper bowl, add a little water from the pond, and with a pestle, mash them until they form a fragrant and vibrant paste.

I take my seat at the edge of the pond and dangle my feet in, piquing the curiosity of the goldfish, sending them swimming to ripple the lily pads across the surface.

I take my flower paste and rub it on my face, breathing in the aroma of the flowers. This is Iran, this is the beginning, but if I close my eyes now, many years and thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, I am there again. I can still feel the wind on my cheeks and the tickle of fish nibbling at my toes and hear birds singing as they dance by overhead.

I was young enough that I didnt think of these pondside rituals as beautifying or acts of self-care. I just saw them as a way to bring myself even closer to the natural world, reveling in the way the yellows, reds, and purples looked before my eyes and how soft the petals felt as I crushed them with my hands. It was a pure moment of creation that amplified my senses and gave me a small gift of beauty to carry with me even when I was called away from the garden to tend to my chores or go to bed.

The first several decades of my life were marked by trauma. In 1979, due to the Iranian Revolution, my family was in danger, my mother being an American citizen and my father a well-known liberal TV personality. They felt it was best that we leave the country, so we escaped Tehran on one of the last flights out. We resettled in Los Angeles, where my parents had a lot of tumultuous times before they divorced when I was a teenager. Not long after that, one of my closest friends was murdered on her way home from a party we attended together. To escape these challenging times, I immersed myself in acting, eventually going on to study theater at UCLA.

I married young and gave birth to my first daughter, Colette Blu, in my midtwenties. Motherhood hit me hard in ways I did not expect. I was achy and tired all the time, and the dark circles under my eyes were visible from a mile away. I was juggling being a mom, being a wife to a successful actor, and pursuing a career as an actress. I kept waiting for a bounce-back that never came. I eventually went to a doctor, not because of how I was feeling but because of a bruise that appeared on my back. That was when I was diagnosed with scleroderma, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis and told that unless I took drastic measures, I might not have more than a year to live.

This was a fate I refused to accept, and I began the process of healing myself through organic foods, herbal medicines, Ayurveda, self-care, and adding healthy fats to my diet. Though my quality of life was less than optimal, I improved. I learned how to manage my symptoms and live with chronic pain. I didnt realize how much pain I was in until years and years later when it subsided. At the time, I counted this minor relief as a small success.

Then in 2008, the perfect storm hit and blew everything to pieces. I had just given birth to my second daughter, Charlotte Rumi Rose; my sixteen-year marriage was crumbling; and to top it off, I was being sued for trying to save a two-hundred-year-old oak tree. Due to all of this stress, my symptoms began to return.

One night, I finally broke. Wearing nothing but a slip, I ran barefoot out of my house into the darkness, not sure that I could handle my life anymore. I was running from my marriage, running from the fractured life that I had created, running from my illness, running from childhood traumas, just running.

Id been running for an hour when the thought of my baby daughter stopped me. Her face, her violet-blue eyes, propelled me to turn back. This time was undoubtedly my darkest moment, but in that abyss, something bright still glimmered. My maternal instincts compelled me, but I also drew strength from the courageous women of my familys pastthe mothers, wives, and daughters of nomads who had crossed the mountains of Persiaand from the powerful combination of my Euro/American lineage: the Native American blood on my mothers side along with that of the hardy souls of my English ancestors. I knew that they were watching me and urging me on. They had known trauma; they had known grief. They had survived, and so would I.

The only good thing about hitting rock bottom is that you have nowhere to go but up, and as I limped home that night declining a ride from a kind neighbor who saw me and pulled over to the side of the roadI knew it was time to wipe the slate clean. I could choose to treat my anxiety and depression, which were symptoms of my pain, or I could face the pain and overhaul my being. I chose to do the latter, because I knew that I didnt just want to survive, I wanted to thrive.

I had to start over from an earthier place, burn the house down and rebuild. I got divorced, and I didnt take much with meclothes, books, a poster. I set about finding a new house for my tiny tribe: my daughters and myself. I didnt know where we would land, but I knew that we had to be surrounded by green.

In Iran, I had grown up near the mountains. Close by were bustling marketsa far cry from the supermarkets of Americaand bursting gardens, and I resolved to reestablish that connection to the natural world. I wanted to dig my fingers into the earth. I found solace in feeling and smelling the soil. I grew my own vegetables and learned how to compost. I then began raising chickens and eventually honeybees.

Everything that followed was a natural progression. I focused on being in rhythm with the cycles and seasons of nature. I started to make my own skin-care and cleaning products. Inspired by my new philosophy, I was drawn to a community of like-minded people who had a similar ethos. Overhauling my life and sharing my experiences became my work, and I realized that I was doing what I loved. Once you are on your true path, opportunities will present themselves; the important thing is being open enough to recognize them.

I started my blog, The Local Rose, because I wanted to share and document what I was doing. I met all of these incredible practitioners along the way as I was changing my life, and discovered that there were a lot of us searching for inspiration. I wanted to show that it was possible to be green and conscious and still be chic, and have a platform to talk about what was important to me without being preachy. At the time, almost eight years ago, natural beauty was mostly relegated to health food stores, and was seen as mundane cleansing rather than pampering. I felt like it deserved to have the same elevated elegance of the luxurious (yet often highly toxic) products from high-end beauty counters. As women began to come to me with questions or to share their own stories, I realized that while my journey was a personal endeavor, the benefits of it radiated far beyond me.