Category Archives: Selfies

December 27, 2014

20 Posts to Inspire your Self-Love Path!

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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 10, 2014

A Beloved Sale! 20% Off EVERYTHING, Site-Wide!

I’m having an EPIC 20% off site-wide sale to thank you for your support during this past year and celebrate the coming year ahead!

Enter the code: BELOVEDHOLIDAYSALE to get the discount!

Yes, the means the February Session of Be Your Own Beloved!
Yes, that means the Self-Paced Class you’ve been eyeing!
Yes, that means the Beloved Camera E-Book!
Yes, that means the Mentoring Sessions too (via skype).
Yes, you can even get 20% off of a Beloved Portrait Session (offered locally)!

Gift yourself with the experience of a Be Your Own Beloved program and explore seeing yourself through a lens of compassion! If you’ve been a bit nervous to sign up for the class I hope this discount will help you say YES to the class and to your choice to see yourself with kindness!

You can most definitely use the code to buy a gift for someone else (just let me know if it’s a gift in the ‘Notes to Seller’ or use the contact form to connect with me about your gift)!

And thank you, truly…for all the comments, retweets, repins, likes and especially to those of you who got brave and said YES to seeing yourself with compassion this year!

The Fine Print: The Sale Ends December 12th at 11:59 (no exceptions). The only thing not an option for the sale are those workshops listed on the Workshops page (which of course are not hosted by me or not mine to offer a sale on)!

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 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.