Learn to See Yourself with Compassion

November 26, 2014

Making Peace with our Smiles: Day 3

toomuchsmile

So far we’ve gone wild taking a whole lot of smile selfies, haven’t we! I’m super proud of y’all for just going for it!

How was that for you? Did you see some you loved? Did some feel more vulnerable for you?

For me, the candid ones feel like they feel much more vulnerable in two ways: the physical aspect and the ME-ness that comes through with them. It’s that second part that I wondered if y’all would be into digging deeper into today with me.

What is it about our candid or natural smile that can feel so vulnerable?

I’ve been pondering this and this is what keeps coming to mind for me.

Keeping my smile small and is a way of keeping me composed, feeling in control of my self image…without that smile I feel unmasked, exposed, vulnerable, too happy, too much.

The more I keep my guarded posed smile up, the more I keep my boundaries up and choose the story I want to tell in the photo. There is indeed something empowering about that and it is a vital part of reclaiming our self-image to feel in control of the story we tell when for so many of us, we’ve believed stories from outside ourselves for so long.

Yet the more I let that unguardeness go, the walls drop and you can see the emotion on my face and in my smile. That feels terrifying some days and I just want to keep it all private.

But at the same time I don’t want to keep myself small. I don’t want you only to know or to see the curated version of me. And I don’t only want to know the curated version of you.

I want to unmask the smile.

Unclench my jaw.

Unlock the guarded boundaries my smile holds back.

Unearth my ‘too muchness’.

To value my urge to smile over my worry about how it will be seen by others.

Yet I can’t help but also recognize how the physical elements of taking such a vulnerable kind of selfie bring up feelings of ‘not enoughness’ too. We are pushed and pulled by these two different strong emotions of not enough and too much!

Does the not enough & too much-ness sound familiar to any of you? I have a feeling it might. So many of us as women hold back, play small, keep contained for the sake of other people and that ‘not enoughness’ indeed keeps us in that place of smallness.

I want us to reclaim that today. Want to join me?

What would happen if we let ourselves be TOO MUCH in our smiles today?

What are we afraid of?

experiment3

The ‘Too Much’ Smile!

Let’s embrace being ‘too much’ today! Let’s not hold back, let’s not be composed, let’s not try to be ‘perfect’. Let’s embrace being our big, bold, vibrant, too much selves!

Let’s claim space.

Let’s not play small with our smiles.

Let’s take up space!

You might:

Put on lipstick! Especially if that isn’t in your comfort zone!
Get in close to the camera and make your lips and smile the focus of the photo.
Let your biggest grin out and not try to keep it small in any way!
What are the ways you feel like you compose or curate your smile? How could you go wild in the other direction? Don’t hold back your sexiness, your uniqueness, your vibrancy. Your YOU-ness!

I encourage you to start taking these photos without putting pressure on yourself to share them. Take them for YOU. That way we can probably let even more worry of our shoulders about being ‘too much’. Then after you take them, see if there is indeed one you want to share after all…but take them for yourself first!

If you do choose to share them today, tag them with #beyourownbeloved so we can cheer you on and leave a comment or add your link to the list below!

You’ll learn, as you get older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your terms, and never, ever apologize for it. Go against the grain, refuse to conform, take the road less traveled instead of the well-beaten path. Laugh in the face of adversity, and leap before you look. Dance as though EVERYBODY is watching. March to the beat of your own drummer. And stubbornly refuse to fit in.

-Mandy Hale

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November 25, 2014

Making Peace with our Smiles: Day 2

candid

Oh that made me happy seeing y’all go out of your comfort zone and share your smiles be they silly or subtle!

We’re going to dig in a little more today into how to make peace with our smiles as there are really two different approaches we can take to smiling in a photo: posed or candid. Have you found you have a preference?

During your experimenting yesterday you may have noticed yourself cross over from posed to more natural or candid photos and back again. Today we are going to play around with that!

Posed

Just like we talked about yesterday, we may have our comfort zone with smiling, a way that we like to smile that feels comfortable, even if it isn’t our ‘natural’ smile!

I know it might be natural for many of us to think of posed smiles as not being ‘real’ but I encourage you to let yourself out of that myth. A posed smile is just us, in our comfort zone.

One trick I like to do (and you could try today) is to remember that we smile with so much more than just our lips. I have an activity in Be Your Own Beloved (which I won’t totally give away…keep it as a surprise for you in class) but in it we explore looking into the lens thinking of someone we love. What I find happens when we do this is that our eyes light up, our smile becomes softer and its as though you can see the love in our eyes. Try this today and I think you’ll see how smiling is about so much more than just how we position our lips, isn’t it!

Candid

Our ‘natural’ smiles on the other hand, are those kind that we probably don’t think about that much…that we just do!

I love starting my in person workshops asking the question “What is your favourite photo of yourself (be it a selfie or a photo of you)” and so often one of the favourite types of photos folks have is that one that someone captured of you in a moment of laughter at an important time in your life (like at a wedding or a family gathering).

But we can totally have our candid smiles in selfies too..and we’re going to explore that today!

I know for me, these kinds of smiles feel a lot more vulnerable and indeed we are going to dig into that further later this week as I have a feeling I’m not alone in that!

A few questions for you:

How do you feel about your candid smile vs your posed smile?

Are there any photos you’re getting that are surprising you?

Does one type of smile feel more vulnerable than the other?

So today let’s experiment with our candid smile (as it probably is the kind that is less common in our photos)!

experiment2

Take a Candid Smile Photo!

So how do we do this? Indeed, we are going to continue on with the playfulness we started with yesterday!

You might:

Put on your favourite video…you know, the adorable animal ones that make you laugh or grin (my favourite this week is the one of the Golden Retriever totally failing an agility test in the best kind of way)! Keep your camera handy and capture some selfies as you find yourself cracking up or smiling.
Or get someone in your life to make you laugh! Or look at someone who just makes you smile to be in the same room as them…and try capturing some selfies as you smile or laugh! You could look into the camera, or not…do whatever feels right to you!
Or try looking right into the camera and okay…I know this is going to feel silly but make yourself laugh! I know that at first it feels fake but soon it can’t help but shift into real authentic laughter!
Or try just looking into the camera and playing around with what feels like your authentic smile.

Share your favourite shot with us or you could even pair a posed and a candid shot together like today’s example photo (I used the App Pic Jointer to pair these two together)!

Come share your candid selfie with us today using the #beyourownbeloved hashtag or add your blog or Instagram link to the list below!

A smile is the light in the window of your face that tells people you’re at home.

-Author Unknown

November 24, 2014

Making Peace with Our Smiles: Day 1

I don’t know about you…but this is outside of my comfort zone.

Of course, the selfie part isn’t for me (but it may be for you and that is totally welcome) but the smiling part is.

I mean, I love to smile. I like to walk the world with a big welcoming smile on my face, to greet people with a grin and to welcome the radiant smiles that they send back to me.

In fact, in my path to feel less invisible and more connected in my daily life, smiling has been at the core.

What about you? How do you feel about your smile outside of photos? How do you feel about seeing your smile in photos?

But as I mentioned in the first post introducing this experiment, when I look back at the last 8 years of taking self-portraits especially the past few years of really trying to not hide my smiles in the world…I don’t see that story told there at all in my photos.

Yet there is another one told there. One of a woman learning to see herself with kindness through her camera and that story includes finding a way to smile that in photos that doesn’t invite in my inner critics. One of a woman who found her smile comfort zone and has been really happy there!

As I’ve been teaching Be Your Own Beloved and other self-portrait classes over the past 4 years I’ve noticed that often we go through a cycle much like I have been with my smile.

When we are entering taking selfies and seeing ourselves with kindness through our cameras, everything is really vulnerable at first. Our inner critics may rise up and try to stop us. So we seek out comfort zones, ways to take our photos that we feel good about, angles we like, ways of shooting or processing our photos that feel good to us. This rocks. We are allowed to create comfort zones for ourselves and every one of us have them.

Then after we’ve happily been hanging out in our comfort zone for a while, things outside of that comfort zone ask to be heard. That’s really were this whole project has come from for me and I’m excited that you are here and wanting to explore your comfort zone (be it creating one or breaking out of it) around smiling in photos!

A few questions for you:

What is the story of your smile that you normally choose to tell in your photos?

What do you think your comfort zones might be?

Let’s chat for a second about what our goal this week might be?

While my goal is really to try to see my authentic smile with kindness and let a little more ‘me’ into the photo, to be less composed…your goal might be to find a way to smile (be it posed or unposed). There is no right or wrong goal to have this week.

This is an experiment too…so you don’t have to have a goal at all! It might just be to see what happens!

So how do we begin this journey to make peace with our smile?

Since we’ve chatted a bit about what our smile comfort zone might be…now break out of it! I promise this will be fun!

Here’s your first selfie smile experiment!!

Let’s get outside of our comfort zone! Here’s your task! Take a whole bunch of smile selfies, one after another! Go for it…try all the possible smiles you could do on for size. Get silly. Let your awkwardness or fear out. Try not to let your inner critic get in the way!

Here are a few examples of getting out of how I’ve gotten silly with this activity (you know…just in case you were worried about making a fool of yourself…I thought I’d make it easy for you and do it first)!

Part of the reason I want to start with breaking out of our comfort zone is well…because this process of making peace with our bodies can be playful, especially with our smiles. Now, after you’ve gotten silly, keep taking a few more smile shots as I have a feeling that’s when we might see our most relaxed & authentic smile too.

Alright, time to give it a try! Grab your camera or phone and go for it! Take at least a dozen photos if not more!

The more photos we take in this process the more likely we are to see that one photo that has us say “Oh my, that is a smile of mine I’ve never seen captured in a photo before”.

Then share your smile with us!

You might choose to share your favourite of the bunch of your photos you take today. Or you might want to share a collection of them! These mosaics of photos are just taken by taking a screenshot of my ‘Photo Stream’ on my camera, but you can also use an app like Party Party to make a mosaic or you can also make it into a GIF out of them too!

One of the powerful things about the Be Your Own Beloved class is that we take it in community (as opposed to a self-paced class) and we can support and encourage one another. Which of course we can do this week too.

Share your favourite smile shot using the #beyourownbeloved hashtag on Instagram and we can cheer one another on too. I’ll be eagerly awaiting your smile photo to cheer you on (and if you haven’t already, you can also list your blog or instagram link below too so we can come find you)! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments here!

Okay, let’s get smiling!

If you smile when no one else is around, you really mean it.

-Andy Rooney

November 21, 2014

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:

November 15, 2014

Pass Your Camera to Someone Else!

I know, Be Your Own Beloved is all about taking our own photo, right?

So why am I telling you to pass the camera to someone else? Here’s why. I want you to be in the visual story of your life, but it could be through taking your own photo or through saying to someone “Hey, will you snap this photo for me?”

Either way, you are the one saying that this moment is of value and that you want to have a moment to remember it.

I love starting off an in-person workshop by asking everyone to introduce themselves and share what their favourite photo of themselves is (be it a selfie or a photo someone else took…and at any point in their lives). I love the way people light up when they answer this question!

Often our favourite photos end up being candid shots of us that someone took without us knowing. We had such fun in the How to Rock a Selfie Photo Shoot class taking our own candid selfies (it can be done) but it also got me thinking about how sometimes we just need to say to the people in our lives “Hey, this is a special day for me. Could you be in charge of snapping few candid or posed shots of me throughout the day?”

It can feel vulnerable when someone else takes our photo though, right?

So one thing I recommend is to ask them to indeed take it on your own camera, not theirs. That way you aren’t waiting for someone else to send you the photos, nor are you getting the ones they think are the best shots. This way, you have the photos at hand and can choose which ones feel like the one’s you want to keep or share. Of course we can be our own worst critic, but a big part of this Be Your Own Beloved journey is to reclaim our personal power in photos and well, we aren’t going to do that by not being in photos at all.

We can also say YES when someone offers to take a photo of us too! At Lucky Star Art Camp last weekend someone asked if they could take a photo of me with the gorgeous sign for my class and I said yes and it made me so happy to come home and see this one on my camera, that I wouldn’t have thought to take myself.

I’ve been trying to do this for friends too lately. Saying “Could I just see your phone for a second so I could snap this moment of you”. Usually they say yes, but we all have a right to say no too, of course. As we each get to decide if we want to be in a photo or not. But it’s been bringing me joy to see that indeed they say yes! Sure I could capture it with my phone, but why not send it away with them to choose if they want to use it and process it the way they want. To help them be more in the visual story of their lives but in a way that isn’t me snapping their photo for my purposes but capturing them with their consent and to leave the power in their hands.

I do often have people who come across me taking a selfie say “Do you want me to take that for you?” and usually I don’t….so I don’t necessarily mean taking over someone’s selfie moment, but instead seeking out a moment that you just notice that they look so blissed out holding that baby and just might like a photo, or you see the light pouring on them and just think they look so radiant today. It can be a way that we can offer kindness to others and share what we think is lovely or special or beautiful about them!

So could you pass your camera to someone this weekend?

Or maybe a moment will arise where you ask someone else if you can capture a photo of them when they may not have thought to capture the moment?

We usually only use the hashtag #beyourownbeloved for selfies but if you do ask someone else to take your photo inspired by this and want to share it with the Be Your Own Beloved Community…don’t hesitate to use the hashtag to share it!