.png)
It might surprise you (or perhaps not at all) that my goal with all things Be Your Own Beloved isn’t actually to convince you to take selfies everywhere, all the time.
I think that’s something that we’ve been told to panic about selfies. That we’ll be addicted, that we’ll take them all the time everywhere. And some people will (and why don’t we just let them)!
But most of us won’t.
Some days I might fill up a memory card full of selfies, other days just 1 or a few are just right. Other days, none at all.
It’s not an addiction, it’s a place for us to cultivate a relationship with ourselves and the world around us.
Sometimes we might need a lot of that self-care, other days we might not.
Sure, we hear of teens being addicted to taking selfies and yes, presently this is their tool for self-expression. But those teen years are a time where there is the most pivotal self-definition and self-discovery going on. What if they just need these tools a bit more than we might later in life?
But really, this isn’t about how many selfies we take.
It’s about why we might want to take them.
You see, my goal here in these courses isn’t to get you to take a certain number of photos or have new profile pictures (though the later is definitely a perk). My goal instead is to help you get to a place of neutrality with photos. Where you don’t see your body as good or bad in them. Where you are able to see yourself clearly.
Here’s the thing though…it is through taking photos, not avoiding them…that we get to that place where we are no longer triggered by them.
It is through filling up that memory card, being willing to have ‘outtakes’ that we find that neutrality, that we create a habit of cultivating compassion though the camera.
I feel mighty grateful to get to engage with folks daily who are on a body-positive or self-compassion journey who have put SO much effort into healing their relationship to food or exercise, to finding that place of compassion for themselves here and now. Yet SO many of them still have this tenuous relationships with photos.
And it is something we can push to the side. But then we are avoiding being in photos, which in a big way is engaging more in a negative relationship with photos than what we fear might be awaiting us when we actually see the photos.
The fear is harder than the action itself.
We can’t go around our struggle with seeing ourselves with photo.
It will still be awaiting us on the other side.
But we can go through it.
We can step into the fear and claim that space, like we’ve been claiming it in other parts of our lives.
And, I expect that your experience will be much like mine when I started on this self-love through selfies journey. I ended up having far more fun than I expected and feeling like I was not only getting photos that allowed me to see myself reflected back in that neutral way, where I got to see my body just be my body…I also became more able to deal with those moments of tunnel vision that happen when we have the opposite, when we see photos and feel triggered into old body stories.
It’s by going through the camera, not around it, not avoiding it…that I truly believe we can find our way to a more compassionate relationship with our bodies in photos and in our lives as a whole.
So take a selfie today…I dare you. It’s not going to open the door to narcissistic behaviour…but it just might open the door to a future where you no longer get tunnel vision when seeing photos that focus in on your perceived ‘faults’ and instead can see your body in a photo with compassion.
Or come join me for the Claiming Space E-Course starting May 1st! Or the Be Your Own Beloved E-Course (if you haven’t taken it yet…it’s a great place to start this journey) that runs this July.
.jpg)