Making Peace with Our Smile ~ Join Me!

Over the past year I’ve been sharing a series of posts all about ‘Making Peace’ with my body through taking selfies.

You can check out few of the Making Peace posts here: Making Peace with My Belly, Making Peace with My Body in a Bikini.  It’s been a personal project of mine outside of teaching this work through the Be Your Own Beloved classes, as I teach this work because I’m living it too and while I’ve already made peace with my negative self-image in ways I couldn’t even have imaged years ago, there is still some parts of me where healing still awaits.

I find that as soon as I have made progress with making peace with one part of my body, another one pipes up asking to be heard.

This time the part of me saying “I’m tired of being critiqued” is…my smile.

How do you feel about your smile?

Do any of you have a similar relationship with your smile?

If you take a peek at my Instagram feed you’ll see most of my photos including my face have a closed mouth smile.  That has been my comfort zone for a long time.

It isn’t my most vulnerable place of self-critique (that still is my belly for me) but there are a number of things about my smile that has had me keeping it closed in photos, knowing the one way to position my mouth in order to like a photo of myself.

And there is nothing wrong with that.  At all.  It has truly been one of the keys that helped me start to see myself with kindness through my camera. We get to learn our favourite angles, our way of holding the camera and how to take the most ‘flattering’ selfie we can (which I prefer to think of as ‘seeing ourselves with love’), and for the last 8 years this has been the way that I close my lips to smile.

But looking back on both Instagram and my Flickr Stream I’m really struck at how about 90% of the images with my face in it have that posed smile.

But in life, of course, that isn’t the case and that isn’t my real smile.

My unposed, authentic smile hasn’t been something I could see with kindness in photos.

Sometimes because of how I critiqued myself physically (how my jaw is crooked, how my teeth are coffee stained, how my lips are small and sometimes how I saw more of a double chin when I’d smile). Yet if I really tell you the truth, sometimes it was that when I smile I let out the ‘Real Vivienne’, the unposed, quirky, silly me and how sometimes that just feels too darn vulnerable.  With a closed mouth smile I could see myself as beautiful but without it I just had so many more old stories of enoughness and vulnerability come up.

So I found my happy place, that smile that I could use in photos and like them.

The thing is, for me…smiling is the best.  I feel most me in my body with a big grin on my face.  It lights up every cell in me.  I feel most me when I’m laughing or having a big grin on my face and I don’t tend to hold that back in connecting with people the way I do when I take a self-portrait.

I want to start telling that story in my self-portraits too and in a way, stop holding back my own light by only allowing myself to use that one posed smile.

It’s time to break out of that comfort zone and for the last couple weeks I’ve been actively experimenting with making peace with my smile. It hasn’t been as painful as I feared and I’m already seeing big shifts happening in the way I see my smile.

I’ve been trying a handful of different activities to make peace with my smile and it got me wondering how many of you out there might want to make peace with your smile too.  We may not have the same reasons why we feel critical about our smile, but it’s my hope that maybe we could rock this experiment together?

Want to join me?

Here’s how it is going to work:

• Next Monday through Friday I’ll be sharing a post about ‘Making Peace with My Smile’ on the Be Your Own Beloved blog.  I will (of course) include a selfie activity for you to try. As well, I’ll be including a question that might spark a blog prompt for you to combine with your selfie!
• You can blog along with the prompts on your own site. Or you could share your smile selfie of the day with us on Instagram in the #beyourownbeloved community.  Or you could keep your photo to yourself and honour it as a personal journey of making peace with your smile.
• It’s kind of like a free mini class! But with no expectations.  I’ll be sharing it over 5 days but you could take it slower if you’d like and try one per week for the next 5 weeks or start with the first one and know that there are other activities awaiting you when you feel ready for them.
• I’m also consciously calling this an experiment because I hope that for all of us it will be something we can approach with curiosity. We aren’t expecting ourselves to love our smile in only 5 days, but I have a feeling if we open heartedly experiment with making peace with it, shifts will happen (I’m always amazed at how much things start to shift for people in Be Your Own Beloved within the first few days).

That’s it!

I want to start spilling these prompts with you today but I’m gonna make myself wait for Monday!

If you are all good with your smile….rock on! I hope lots of you are groovy with your smile and haven’t been seeing it with critique all this time. You still may have fun with these activities anyways and perhaps a future ‘Making Peace’ post will help you get outside whatever your comfort zone may be.  But I also have had a lot of conversations with women over the years about how we feel about our smiles and I thought this might be a worthwhile one to share with you and invite you along for.

I also wanted to this with those of you who might have been wanting to join Be Your Own Beloved but feel a bit scared to jump in, in mind.  I hope this will give you a glimpse into the kinds of activities we do in the class. As well I have those of you who are Be Your Own Beloved Alumni of the class in mind and I thought this might be a fun activity to respark your journey or give you a new exploration to try!

If you think you might take part, I’d be honoured if you’d leave a comment and say Hi! I’m not doing this to collect email addresses or get your info in any way…I just wanted to invite you to join me as I journey through this myself but it would indeed be rad to know who is joining in for the experiment!

If you are going to blog along or share on Instagram or you can add your blog address to the link list below so I (and your fellow peace makers) can come find you!

Let’s make Peace with our Smiles!

Here are all the posts up for the Experiment so far: