Ugly is a Courtroom: Rethinking Beauty, Truth, and the Body

What Bayo Akomolafe Means by “The Wrong Courtroom”

Reading Bayo Akomolafe’s LinkedIn post about the blobfish, the creature often called the world’s ugliest animal, made me laugh. Not because the fish looks funny, but because as he points out so eloquently that the judgment says more about the lens we use than about the fish itself.

How often we forget that we already have a frame of reference, a story, a way of seeing the world before we even begin to think about anything else?

Akomolafe captures the paradox perfectly:

“The problem is how we make its body stand trial in the wrong courtroom.”

and

“…what counts as beautiful, rational, or true is not objective at all, but a matter of which world one is breathing in, which pressures one is shaped by, which stories one is swimming through.”

Objectivity vs. Subjectivity: How We Misread Our Own Bodies

If we can misread a deep‑sea fish, imagine the distortions that arise when we judge our own bodies, our symptoms, our emotions, even the mind that narrates every experience.

That’s only the first level of the infraction. Every thought carries a vibration that influences the body; the body, in turn, vibrates back into the world. Think of the research on qi fields, or the way Gregg Braden describes the heart as the brain in your chest. In Zhineng Qigong, Master Jianshe invites us to cultivate a bambini heart, a childlike openness that allows us to be open without our opinions.

The Reductionist View of Health—and Why It Fails

In many Western narratives the body is a problem to be solved: lose weight, fix posture, boost neurotransmitters. Science offers tidy equations, and we cling to them because they promise certainty. Yet the moment we strip away context - environment, socio-economics, history, emotion, we end up prosecuting a version of ourselves that never existed outside the reductionist courtroom.

My Personal Journey: From Body‑Shame to Body‑Wisdom

As I’ve aged, gaining weight has felt like a challenge I’d figured I'd be exempt from some inevitable signs of aging (ha!). Looking in the mirror (or, more honestly, avoiding it), I realized I was seeing myself through a lifelong opinion that things should be other than they are. Yet, that same viewpoint has helped me in other areas of life. The trick is learning when that frame is useful and when it isn’t. The body signals its discomfort through felt emotion and physical tension. The moment I sense the judgment, as literally the weight on my shoulders, that is the moment I can let the story go.

True freedom, for me, is the ability to decide, moment by moment, whether to accept or reject well‑practiced thoughts about my body. It also means recognizing how deeply our culture shapes those thoughts.

If qi fields exist, then in the same moment, I’m absorbing both the disapproval and the approval that society projects onto my body.

Cultivating the Wisdom of the Body (Qi, Heart, Breath)

Wisdom does not emerge from dissecting the body into isolated variables; it arises when we allow the body to speak its own language - our aches, our rhythms, our cravings. When we stop asking How can I fix this? and start asking What is this trying to tell me? the courtroom dissolves, and a dialogue begins.

Practical Steps to Rename the Courtroom Inside You

Just as the blobfish is perfectly adapted to the crushing pressures of the deep sea, our bodies are tuned to the pressures of our environments, social, cultural, ecological. Recognizing that adaptation, rather than labeling it ugly, opens a space for humility and for our shared humanity.

Next time you catch yourself measuring worth by a scale, a BMI chart (this is a bullshit test, btw), a blood‑test result, or even a work evaluation, pause and ask: Whose courtroom am I entering? Whose standards am I imposing on my own flesh? The blobfish reminds us that beauty, truth, and rationality are not universal mirrors but relational lenses. When we shift the lens, the world, our world, looks remarkably different.

So, What Will You Rename Your Courtroom?

The invitation is yours.