20 Posts to Inspire your Self-Love Path!

As 2014 comes to a close, I like to gather up all the posts I shared here at Be Your Own Beloved over the year that explore the core message I share here: Seeing Yourself with Compassion which of course includes body acceptance, healing our relationship to our self-image, cultivating self-love and self-care and talking openly about my own experience of healing my relationship to my own body image and self-esteem (in hopes it will be helpful for you on your path).

When I sat down to write this I had no clue that I wrote 20 posts on the subject this year! Click on the ones that resonate most with you and I hope that they’ll help inspire you on your own self-love & selfie path!

I truly can’t wait for 2015 and what I have in store for you here on the blog and with the E-Courses (with something new up my sleeve)! Presently there are 2 classes open for registration…The Cultivating Self-Care E-Course and the much loved Be Your Own Beloved class (exploring self-love through self-portraiture)!

So we go…20 posts exploring self-love & self-compassion for you to enjoy!

Our inner critics rise up when we’re leaving our comfort zone, don’t they…which indeed happens on a path to heal our relationship to our bodies. This post is all about how our inner critics reflect our actions. When we stay small, they feel no need to attack us but when we rise up and make change (like seeing ourself with kindness rather than critique) they rise up too.

When we’re on a mission to heal our self-image (and in life in general), it can be easy to get in the constant cycle of working towards our goal that we don’t realize how far we’ve come!

This one is actually a series of posts called Making Peace with Our Smiles and you can find links to all 5 of the activities on this page! You can try the activities any time and use the hashtag #beyourownbeloved to join the community of folks exploring the prompts!

It’s time to stop being our own bully! Seriously…it’s time. Cause so many of us speak to ourselves in a way we wouldn’t even fathom speaking to someone else (which is of course, the idea behind this website and e-courses)!

This post came in response to the comment I know lots of us must get when talking about learning to love our bodies…that “we aren’t our bodies” or “shouldn’t we focus more on ours spirit?”.  From my experience, disconnecting the self-love journey from how we exist in our bodies hasn’t served me.  It is happening within a body. About a body.  To disconnect the self-love journey from my body is to discount a whole deep well of potential healing.

How does movement and dance help us feel more embodied? This post explores that and explains why I dance in so many of my selfies (hint…its all for the healing)!

Are you missing from the visual story of your life? This post explores how choosing to let ourselves be in photos can be deeply healing and also feel like we are finding our voice in telling the story of our lives.

Reclaim your power and be the narrator of your own story! This is a big part of exploring selfies as self-love as it is a tool for us to reclaim our sense of personal power and step into being the narrator of how we see our bodies and the story we tell ourselves about our lives. We get to choose the kind of story we want to live!

Making Peace with my body in a bikini! Oh my gosh…I still can’t believe I shared this post but I’m glad I did.  There are lots of amazing plus size gals rockin’ bikini’s this year (now that thankfully, companies are making that kind of bathing suit in our size). For me, wearing it felt great but when I paused to take a photo, old stories rose up! But that’s what happens when we go outside of our comfort zones, isn’t it!

How do we know when we’ve found our way home to ourselves? There has been a song lyric that has felt like a guide for me that says “When the voice that is talking is never your own. Then who’s going to tell you that you’ve finally come home” by Ferron.  Cultivating our own voice is such a big part of healing how we feel about our bodies.  This post digs into that journey!

Inspired by a talk at Creative Mornings by the awesome Kim Werker, this post explores the idea of the story we tell ourselves about failure, especially the story we tell ourselves about failing at being photogenic!

The post Making Peace with my Belly  explores the good/bad, love/hate cycle I’ve been on in relation to how I feel about my belly and how I want to get off of that roller coaster and feel at peace with it!

Selfies get flack for being self-centred and for being a way that people seek attention. But so many of us aren’t taking our selfies for anyone else, but for ourselves. This post shares a story of how I got caught up in wanting people to like my selfie one day and how it became a reminder that how when we can ground ourselves in how we feel about ourselves, other people’s perception of us feels like it holds less weight (and we find we aren’t seeking others approval)!

A question I often get at in person workshop when digging into self-love through self-portraiture is…”But how do I take a flattering photo” and this post explores another way to view ‘flattering’ that invites in more self-compassion!

What do we do when the critique is coming not from ourselves, but from people in our lives? This post shares some tips for dealing with not just our inner critics but our outer critics too. I explore it in the context of sharing our selfies but it definitely applies to other experiences of people commenting on our bodies or our choices!

Do photos ever catch you off guard and your inner critic rises up? I had an experience of that and am sharing some tips for what to do when that happens!

If you’ve been wondering how this whole self-love through selfies thing works…this is for you! Cause really…it’s not just about the photo. The photo (and the camera) are tools, just like you might seek self-compassion in yoga or meditation! It isn’t just about the end result either, but about the journey we take in getting there!

I don’t know about you, but when my inner critic shows up it usually tells me that I’m doing it wrong (you know, whatever I’m trying to do be it cook or run or dance). So if your inner critic rises up when you’re taking a selfie and tells you you are doing it wrong…this is for you.

When we say “When I’m thin I’ll…” or “When I make _______ change I’ll….” and we imagine a life for ourselves other than the one we are living. This post digs into the idea of living that ‘parallel life’ (inspired by one of my favourite authors, Geneen Roth).

And last, but definitely not least…Her Body Was not Wrong.  And neither is yours!