Category Archives: Self Love

December 1, 2014

The Magic of Taking Shadow Selfies

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Each session of Be Your Own Beloved there is one prompt inviting you to capture your shadow. I confess that it is one of those activities I have in there to balance out the ones that take people really out of their comfort zone, as a soft place to land after getting super brave with the prompt before.

Because for so many of us, shadow selfies are pretty inside our comfort zones as they aren’t an actual reflection of ourselves. As the light gets later in the day, our shadows shift and change to be so very different from our actual selves.

I find that the more dramatic the get (like my long legs above) the less my inner critic can possibly be invited to the selfie-party and the more it makes me want to just get playful with my shadow.

In Be Your Own Beloved, I participate alongside with each session and each time there tends to be a prompt that I experience really differently even though I’ve done it so many times before.

This time, much to my surprise, our shadow activity felt like a spark to me. Ever since then I’ve been noticing my own shadow more than ever before.

The thing that surprised me this time was noticing how much of the story of our day a shadow selfie can actually tell. Of where we were, of what we were wearing, how our body language shares a bit about how we are feeling.

I truly believe that one type of selfie isn’t more worthy than the other, be it a reflection, an arm’s length selfie or by putting the camera down and stepping into the frame.

For me the most healing happens when I put down the camera, set the timer and step into the frame, but this week is reminding me that there is storytelling and healing awaiting us in all types of selfies. If we choose to explore it!

Plus, taking our shadow selfie can feel like it’s embracing our childlike self too.

As I mentioned, part of why I have it in the class is as a soft place to land, an activity within our comfort zone that we can return to when we feel like keeping it gentle and playful. And I guess what I’ve realized by taking so many shadow selfies lately is that maybe I’m craving that gentleness, that soft place to land.

Because taking selfies isn’t a competition or comparison game (at least it doesn’t need to be). What if we were to gift ourselves the permission to take really gentle & simple selfies and take off the pressure to conceptualize or plan out a selfie.

What if we really just offered ourselves a simple way to say to ourselves “I’m here”?

Want to try it? Keep watch for your shadow today and capture a photo of it!

And don’t hesitate to use the #beyourownbeloved hashtag (anyone sharing their selfies are welcome to…you don’t need to be in the class to use it)!

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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).

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:

October 22, 2014

It’s Time to Stop Being Your Own Bully

I’m fat.

Sometimes I say chubby or curvy but today I’m going to say it. Fat.

There are so many assumptions that come with that word, or when people see fat bodies.

That you don’t take care of yourself.
That you don’t love yourself.
That you are ashamed.
That you are not healthy.

That fact doesn’t mean that I don’t love myself, that I don’t take care of my body or that I am not worthy.

You see, I’m slowly learning how to not be ashamed of it.

I’ve spent 15 years of my life bullying myself in the mirror and I’m done. I’m not playing that game anymore.

I sure that isn’t the only time lately that you’ve heard a big woman state that her worth as a person should not be judged by the size of her body.

It seems like this week we are not contented to stay silent.

Because it is my body, one that I feel blessed to get to adventure this world in.

And I believe that each and every one of our bodies is beautiful.

In the exact size it is at this moment.

I know it is not easy to try to walk the world feeling totally empowered in the body you are in at this moment.

Sometimes that mission gets derailed though, without intention (or sometimes with) by others’ words.

Barely a day goes by when I don’t hear or read someone make a comment about their own or someone else’s body size in a derogatory way.

“My back fat is so disgusting. No one likes back fat”
“No one should be wearing jeans that give you a muffin top”

These were two that I heard this week alone.

I wanted to write about body shaming and fat positivity this week because October is Anti-Bullying month and Fat Shaming of others and ourselves, well… it too is bullying.

But I think the worst bully is the one closest to home. The one in the mirror.
Luckily, that is also the one that we can change.

Shall we start with Ourselves?

Truth be told, many of us would never even think of bullying someone else, but then we look in the mirror and speak incredibly negative words to ourselves.

So many of us have been trained to bully ourselves and think that it is okay.

It’s time, and it is possible to unlearn this self-bullying behavior.

Here a few more unconventional ways that have been helpful to me:

• Find beauty mentors. Now, by this I don’t mean find people who you want to become or emulate. What I do mean is to find people online or in images that share similarities with you in the ways that you want to heal. For me it might be body size, but for others it might be something quite different. Seeing someone else as beautiful who looks like you helps us mirror it back onto ourselves.

• Take Photos of Yourself! This has been the biggest tool for me. Whether you get someone to take photos of you that help you see yourself with kindness. Take control of your self-image by taking charge of the camera (and if you aren’t sure how to start going about that, join me for a session of Be Your Own Beloved). Or hire a photographer who’s work you love to help you see your unique self mirrored back at you.

• Don’t go it alone. You aren’t alone. Connect with friends and talk about body positivity.

This self-bullying can spread like wildfire too. I think often we unintentionally are spreading a web of negative reinforcement (aka fat shaming) to those around us who may be trying their darnedest to build up positive body image by speaking derogatory things about our bodies or the bodies of others. One way we can not only help ourselves, but help others is to check ourselves and the way we speak about the bodies of others.

I’m just a woman healing, like you, so I don’t have all the answers either.

But I do know if I do look back at this time and regret being the size I am, it will be minimal compared to the regret I would have if I don’t start loving myself.

Here and now.

Let’s stop bullying ourselves. Today. Now.

Let’s cultivate body love,

Originally posted at Kind Over Matter.