Category Archives: Self Portraits

December 30, 2014

A Look Back at 2014 in Self-Portraits

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Each year I like to make a point of pausing at the end of the year to look back at the visual story of the year that my self-portrait practice has created.

Wanna try it? It can even be as simple as taking 2 minutes to look back at your Instagram or Flickr Feed (where ever you share most of your photos) or use this as a prompt for your own blog post and ponder things like:

Which ones feel like they tell the story of your year?

Which ones embody the ways you have grown/healed/changed throughout the year?

Which photos jump out at you?

What about this year feel important to be a part of the narrative you want to tell about this year (cause remember…we get to be the narrators of our own story)?

It always feels powerful to gather the photos together. Which ones feel important? Which just make me smile? Which ones do I even leave out and why?

I suppose I really do these posts for me (which is why I wanted to invite you to offer yourself the same) but I also hope that they’ll be of inspiration to pull out your camera more next year and be in the visual story of your own life!

You can check out the 2012 post here.

And the 2013 post here!

I confess 2014 began intensely. My beloved Grammy passed away in late January and my heart was broken. Self-care had to be at the forefront as grief took hold and I really wasn’t sure how the year would go. Thankfully, as the year progressed it gave way to lots of adventures, time with family and of course, a whole lot of teaching and self-portrait taking. Looking back on these photos I see the stories woven in the spaces between these photos, the ones that you have to have lived it to know.

I see a woman who has been truly lucky to go on some mighty fun adventures this year to the Bay Area, Nashville and who also really began to take advantage of the beauty that my own city holds and get out exploring it more! I also see a woman who returned again and again to taking photo walks as a way to offer myself care and compassion, especially in a year like this one where it felt more vital than ever. I also can’t help but notice how the way I dress has changed. I felt less afraid to show my body this year (though my body didn’t change…I did) and there are more bare arms and more short wearing in these than I could have imagined!

I see peace making, adventuring, grieving, healing, walking, wandering, light catching and a whole lot of dancing!

So here is a look back at 2014 in self-portraits (all taken with my DSLR)!

January

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February

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March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Especially if you have started taking selfies this year…what about gifting yourself with doing a post like this? Look back on each month of the year and pick your favourites or pick your top 12 of the year as a whole?

Why not gift yourself with this time even if you just look back on your year and acknowledge what happened, what has changed and how far you’ve come with stepping into the story of your life through your camera?

Or if you’re wondering how to make 2015 a year where you get your camera out more and step into your visual story…join me for the Be Your Own Beloved E-Course or if an E-Book is more your style, check out the Beloved Camera E-Book!

December 27, 2014

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!

December 1, 2014

The Magic of Taking Shadow Selfies

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)!

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 14, 2014

Why I Dance in my Selfies

I put the camera down

Press the timer

And I move.

At first I had to invite myself to. It was a way for me to shake off nervousness and get grounded in my body to take that photo.

These days it happens automatically. I set the timer & the playfulness begins.

99% of the time when I go out on a photo walk, I don’t have a specific goal in mind. Sure I might have something in mind but truth be told, the photo walk seems to always have its own direction it wants to take me in, always embracing the unpredictable. That 1% of course is when I need a super specific photo for a class!

All of these photos you see on the website are taken as I’m living what I’m teaching here, as I’m trying out activities or just trying to shift my own energy of that day.

In so many of my photos, I’m dancing.

It’s been that way for years and I think from the outside I bet it looks playful, joyful and even like a woman who feels at home in her body. While it wasn’t at first, it has led me there and I wanted to share a bit about why I dance in photos.

At times I have this voice in my head as I’m just about to press ‘Post’ on Instagram and share another movement photo that says “Is this really accessible for people, all these dancing photos?” “Do you really want to post another one”.

But here’s the truth.

I don’t take or show them for any purpose of showing off.

I take & share them because this is where the deepest healing of my self-image has happened.

When I move.

Someday I’ll share my full story of the depths of where I began with my negative self-image (its spilling into my manuscript) but a big part of my journey before taking self-portraits had me feeling like I needed to contain myself. To sit on my hands. To stop moving. To control how I existed in the world. To be contained & still.

And for whatever reason it may have manifested in our lives, I have a feeling I’m not alone in having felt deeply disconnected from my own body for much of my life. Is that familiar to you at all?

So when I realized that taking self-portraits was a place where I could relearn how to be in my own body, it was all about the movement.

It is the one sacred place where I’ve found I can reclaim that sense of autonomy of how I move in the world, where I have found a freedom that has allowed me to feel more at home in my body. It may look like fun, and indeed it is. But it has a deeper purpose for me than one viewing the photo might think. That can be such a powerful piece of taking selfies, the place where they can embody powerful stories of healing for us, even if the viewer sees something different.

Interestingly enough, photographs only capture that one second of the movement and package it into stillness again in a way, but somehow it doesn’t diminish the freedom that I felt in the moment. Because the experience of the freedom & healing that happens is in the lived experience of it, not just the outcome. The photographs are an invitation to return back there.

To keep moving.

To revisit that place of healing we can create when we make space to move our own way.

So this….this is why I dance.

Have you explored moving as you take a selfie just for fun or even as a tool for healing disconnection from our bodies?