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We’d LOVE to have you join us for this powerful class! We get started in only a few more days so come on over to the Curvy Yoga site and get registered before its to late!
I’m so excited that Anna & I are bringing back Practice: Embodying Your Curvy & Beloved Body for one more session. I love teaching this class with Anna & admire her work with Curvy Yoga so much!
When we created Practice, it was really powerful to see it come together and I was amazed at how many overlaps there are between Yoga & Self-Portraiture…you might not think so, but as you’ll see in the class, indeed there are.
I took Yoga in my 20’s but it was only a few years ago that I really started to see the way it could help me listen in to my body and what it needed. It began when I actually got a running injury, a stress fracture, and was dealing with a lot of pain. It so happened that my awesome Mom was doing her yoga teacher training at the time and we started to do weekly Skype Yoga sessions.
It was since that injury and recovery that I really started digging into listening more to my body, since that was exactly why my bone ended up cracking, because I was pushing too hard and not listening to my body even though it was saying STOP.
Yoga felt like an invitation to slow down and listen.
And doing it in the comfort of my own home, with my Mom as my teacher, allowed me to listen in deeper and to not compare myself to others. It felt like a way to quiet the outside noise of “more” “push yourself” and just slow down and listen.
Which if you’ve explored self-portraiture with me, you’ll know that is a part of the work of Be Your Own Beloved too. While it seems like it might be a place to compare ourselves to others, it doesn’t have to be. It can be an invitation to slow down, to make space for yourself, to listen in and find your own voice about how it feels to be in your skin, to move your way. I know…you’d think that last sentence was about Yoga but this is where they overlap.
Which is exactly what we are digging into in Practice!
I’m oh so excited that we’re bringing this class back (and this will definitely be the only time we are offering it in 2014) so if you are interested in exploring more of the places where Yoga & Self-Portriature overlap and deepen your relationship to your Curvy & Beloved Body, come join us!
Class starts Monday May 19th and registration closes the night before.
Oh and have I mentioned Anna & I wanted to keep it at a super accessible price of $49 (which is truly a steal of a deal…as you’ve got two teachers ready to support you in the process)!
I hope to hang out with you in Practice!
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I am SO excited to share that Anna of Curvy Yoga & I have brought back our collaborative class called Practice: Embodying Your Curvy & Beloved Body! Its a beautiful 4 week exploration into using both Yoga & Self-Portraiture as tools for connecting with your body & yourself.
Now, if either Yoga or Self-Portraiture is outside of your comfort zone, you’ll be happy to know that you need not be a yogi or a photographer to take part. Each week in the class we explore a different pose and there is such a beautiful mix of activities in the class. You can be an absolute beginner to take part and don’t need to have any sort of fancy camera for class either (iPhones are most welcome as your tool for the class)!
Registration is Open & class starts in 2 weeks on May 19th!!
You can find out more info & grab your spot in this affordable class over at the Practice Page!
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This past weekend I headed over to Victoria on Vancouver Island to do a Beloved Session (yes, if you are in Victoria, I’m hoping to come over a few times per year to do Beloved Sessions for you lovely Island gals…though of course they are regularly available in Vancouver).
I was staying with a friend and on Friday night we headed out for a dog walk over to this gorgeous place called Summit Park. It was dusk and the light was leaving quickly yet I was wildly smitten with this place. It was a Garry Oak Meadow, something I had been learning about through a book by another friend of mine Maleea Acker called Gardens Aflame and there is something truly special about these places.
Of course there were the oh so unique Garry Oak trees but the park was also filled with the gorgeous purple Camas flowers. So the next day, I got up early and headed out on a walk with my DSLR (of course…because I like to participate alongside the participants in my classes so I wanted to take part in the activities we are doing this week in the Beloved Camera Class) back to the park and other than 1 person walking their dog had the whole park to myself to adventure in.
While we have beautiful parks here in Vancouver, they are quite manicured but this place was downright wild (as it should be…preserving these very special Garry Oak ecosystems). There is something about wildness that I crave in my self-portrait taking. Its like the less manicured the park, the more space I have with no one else around, the more wildness…the more it feels like I can really let go of thoughts of how others might see me and the wildness feels like it opens the door to these moments of self-portrait taking as being even more healing. So having a quiet park to dance & move in felt so beautiful & sacred.
So here are a few photos from my morning photo adventuring! And if you are the type who is up early waiting for everyone else to wake up….I highly recommend going out on early morning photo adventures…when the world is oh so quiet and it feels even more safe to dance and get playful with our cameras!
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It happens every so often, that a photo still catches me off guard and sends me back into that tailspin of self-criticism.
In fact it just happened this week.
Last Sunday I ran a 10km race here in Vancouver called the Sun Run. Me and 45, 182 other people take over the downtown and do this race around the city. Its my 3rd year doing this run and a big part of why I do it isn’t the run itself, but is a running clinic that I take for the 13 weeks before at the community centre near my house. Its such a lovely community of folks that I get to run with each week and it helps me keep inspired to run big time. It never feels like anyone at the clinic (or the leaders) make any assumptions why people are there to learn to run and it makes for a body-positive space where there is not that assumption that everyone exercises for reasons of weight loss.
So this past Sunday I ran this race for the 3rd time. I had hoped to cut down a bit of time, but didn’t at all! Alas, a reason to keep on going to my beloved running clinic (and really, showing up and running 10km is something to be proud of unto itself)!
A few days after the race they send out ‘race photos’ where any image in which your number is captured, they can somehow tell it is you. So I had an email linking me to 4 or 5 race photos, taken right as you come into the finish line.
And oh my, the just spoke right to my inner critic.
All those old stories came rushing back about my body. About the size of my thighs, the way my shirt rose up above my hips showing my belly. I felt embarrassed. Even though I truly had nothing to be embarrassed about.
It felt like it overshadowed the fact that I had just run 10km! Oh shame, you sure do have a way of stealing our joy don’t you.
Now, you may have seen this post about running I wrote a while back about how suddenly I found myself feeling comfortable wearing running tights and how it was shrinking body shame that helped me do that.
I’ve been so grateful that the body shame I had around my thighs had stayed away and it felt really beautiful to be able to run without shame running alongside me.
But on this path to seeing ourselves with kindness its not always going to be a love-fest, is it. There is ebb and flow.
There will be moments where we get swept away by old patterns, old stories, and get to shift ourselves back to our new perception of ourselves.
I’m so grateful that as my own path to self-compassion has moved forward, there are less and less of these moments where my inner critic gets fierce (especially compared to how it felt to have them feel constant) but they still happen when I least expect it.
And these photos brought them all back.
So what do we do when we see photos that bring back old stories and make us choose shame over the new stories these photos tell…
Here are a few of the tricks I try to notice (and depending on the day at least one of them will work to pull me back to centre):
- Notice how the photo was taken. Was it taken at an angle that I would have never shot a photo at myself? Am I judging myself through someone elses perspective as they took that picture?
- Grab my camera and take a self-portrait and reclaim that feeling of being in control of my own self-image
- Send the woman in the picture love. In this case, she was probably a few meters away from the finish line, SO ready to stop and walk after almost 10km of running. So I want to send her love and thank her for showing up for herself in her running journey and that I’m proud of her for crossing that finish line (and rockin’ running tights as a plus size woman).
- Putting the photo in context! I was running a frickin’ race!!! Or sometimes I look back at old photos of when I was a postpartum doula and doing endless night shifts. I just look SO tired. Yet if I put it in context I can remember what was going on for me and why that is a part of the story of the photo and something I can choose not to criticize.
- Give yourself some time & space from the photo. You just might feel differently about it a few days or weeks later…
- Go on a photo walk! I always feel so much better after getting outside for a photo walk (its healing, I swear).
- Share it with a trusted friend or group of friends who you know you can ask for positive and supportive feedback from, who you trust can see us with kindness. Let their words soak in. Sometimes hearing someone else share how proud they are of us can help us see ourselves that way through their eyes.
I don’t have the photo to share with you (as it was the kind of thing where you had to buy a copy of the photo) but I bet we all have had an experience of seeing a photo that brings back an old story that we had thought we had already healed.
Let’s remember next time that happens that we can trust the wisdom we learned in healing that part of our relationship to our self-image and that resilience in the ebb and flow is a part of this journey to see ourselves with kindness!
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