Category Archives: Making Peace

December 10, 2015

Introducing Body Peace!

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I’m beyond excited to finally share what I’ve got planned for the Be Your Own Beloved workshops this year.

Introducing the Body Peace Program! This is a year long journey to make peace with your body using the tool of self-portraiture to shift from a critical to a compassionate relationship with your self-image and self-esteem. It follows up on the transformation and spark that the original Beloved has created in people’s lives and takes it a step further.

Made up of 8 powerful programs throughout 2016 and the compassionate community the Be Your Own Beloved programs are known for, the Body Peace program help you change the way you relate to your body and treat yourself.

The idea of doing a year long program was sparked a few years ago but took a while for me to settle in on the right balance of empowering activities combined with space to let it soak in, space to let ourselves go at our own pace. The plan was solidified about doing this program in 2016 after I noticed how many alumni of the Be Your Own Beloved were returning for multiple sessions even within the same year…it was clear that a more continued community experience as well as continuing to have selfie activities and encouragement was something folks who took these classes were yearning for.

The program launched registration last week and we just started to gather together in our community Facebook Group leading up to class and as folks join in on the program I’ll get you all set up and you’ll be welcomed with open arms into the community.

I can’t wait to see what this year brings and can’t wait to dig deeper into creating pockets of body peace with the folks who join in. This program isn’t about never having a negative thought about our bodies again, but rather building self-trust and our own voice about how we feel about our bodies to counteract what our inner critic might say.

Much like with all my classes, the activities are derived from my own practice of using selfies as a tool to heal negative body-image and make peace with myself through the camera. As I’ve been teaching these classes over the past 4 years, I’ve been noticing what changes when we continue this practice over a longer span of time and well, what I found was that life (and my relationship with my inner critic) just got a lot more peaceful. I’d been at war with myself for along time so this peace was a welcome relief.

So that’s a big part of why the program is called Body Peace. To give us space to make peace with our body and who we see it. To cultivate more spaces of peace from our inner critic.

The program is made up of 8 classes and you can find out about them all here! There is an option to pay in full or do 2 payments instead (and you can find them both on the Body Peace Page).

The first program is called Selfie Compassion and it’s actually starting January 1st! It’s our foundational program for the program as a whole and will help us root in tools of self-compassion and mindfulness that will carry us throughout the year.

You can also join in for the Selfie Compassion class on it’s own and find out more about it here!

While both of these were created with folks who’ve taken the original Be Your Own Beloved class, you don’t have to be alumni to join in! Though the original class is definitely something to be experienced so if you haven’t joined in yet, there is a new session coming up in February and you can sign up here!

If you have any questions about the classes (especially if you’re really nervous about taking a class but something is drawing you to none the less) don’t hesitate to connect with me via the contact form! These classes are naturally going to be outside our comfort zone and that’s who I created the for…the classes are designed to help us stand in our power, to see our own beauty, to cultivate our own voice about how we feel about ourselves and our body and that is all vulnerable work but that’s what makes it so transformative too!

November 27, 2014

Making Peace with Our Smile: Day 4

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So how do we make peace with our smiles?

While the activities we’ve done so far have been playful, they are also very much with intention!

Because from what I’ve experiences, making peace starts with breaking out of that comfort zone and with showing up in front of the camera, being willing and open to the possibility of seeing yourself (and your smile) in a different way.

But the process of actually making peace often doesn’t happen exactly as we may expect.

I think often we expect it to happen immediately or we even put pressure on ourselves to make peace happen! Sound familiar?

As I’ve been working on making peace with my own smile, I noticed a bit of a pattern that I thought I might share with you. As I’d take selfies capturing my smile, there was a slow evolution and change I saw happen that went something like this!

This is where it began a while back:

“Oh my…that is a whole lot of smile and all I see is critique. No love”

Then after continuing the practice it rolled into:

“Yup, there’s my smile again” And it almost became a place of neutrality where I wasn’t critiquing myself but didn’t necessarily see it with compassion yet.

Then it shifted and I started to appreciate my own smile in the same way that I would seeing a friend’s smile of someone I adored and feel like:

“Hey lovely” to the woman in photo or in the mirror!

And the shift to the last stage has always felt so subtle to me too. After a lifetime of body critique one might expect making peace to feel like crossing the finish line, but after walking through that place of neutrality for a while, it just feels like it becomes our new normal. You know what I mean?

And it takes time. I think that it’s so easy to feel like we should suddenly ‘get it’ and instantly feel wonderful about ourselves after having hidden that potential for self-love away for a long time.

I find that in my classes where people confess that they expected to take one workshop and suddenly not struggle but for many of us this is a lifetime of unlearning we are doing and if it was instantaneous…well, there would be a lot less women hating their bodies wouldn’t there!

It can really feel like work to make peace with our bodies. But it’s worth the work!

I wanted to share that with you today in case you’re putting pressure on yourself to immediately LOVE your smile or other parts of you that you are choosing to make peace with.

So I have an activity for you today (of course).

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What part of your smile can you already see with love or are finding yourself learning to? Let’s celebrate that today.

It could be:

the shape of your lips
the uniqueness of your teeth
the curve of your smile
the way your cheeks are when you smile.
or maybe you’re beginning to see your whole smile with love

It’s not for us to tell you either (though I’ve been loving the way folks are cheering each other on and sharing what we like about your smile). But you get to define what you want to celebrate and acknowledge what you may still be feeling neutral about! You get to do this at your pace!

It can feel like choosing to see our smile with love is one small part of learning to love our body as a whole, but we can also take a smaller step. There is no step too small.

What small step could you take today towards seeing your smile with love?

Let’s make this a practice. It may not happen overnight. But the more we can show up in the camera and the mirror and meet ourselves with inquisitiveness, with neutrality and yes with love….the more we open up to making that change towards self-love.

Be inquisitive.

Be open.

Be willing to take just one step first.

I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.

-Brene Brown

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November 26, 2014

Making Peace with our Smiles: Day 3

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?

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 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: