Learn to See Yourself with Compassion

February 27, 2017

Reaching Back Through the Lens

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Folks who join in for Be Your Own Beloved often have this instinct to plan out their photos for each prompt. And while this can help some folks thrive, for lots of us it gets us stuck in our heads (and amps up our inner critic) rather than getting us activity involved in the experience of taking our selfie and the unexpected healing and discovery that can happen there.

I approach my own self-portraits really differently than that. People are often surprised to hear I pretty much never plan anything out. There have been times where I’ve tried to but I soon realized that healing didn’t await me there, but it did await me in the unexpected and the unplanned.

I just take my camera out and see where it leads me.

Today I had one of those moments that reminded me of why I think not planning out our selfies can be a really important part of the process.

I took a walk down to Jericho Beach and took photos in a bunch of different spots before being drawn to the beach. I spotted this place where some dried Queen Anne’s Lace lined a small path to the sand. I’ve always been drawn to these kinds of perspectives as it reminds me of the beach town my parents live in. I took some standing photos before deciding to sit in the reeds.

It was there that it happened. I sat down and was flashed back to being maybe 4 and going on these walks after our big extended family dinners at my Great-Grandparents farm. We’d head up the long farm road towards the forest and back and as I sat there I remembered happily trailing behind everyone else (cause I was the youngest at the time) and finding a spot to sit in the tall grass. I remember seeing how tall it was around me and feeling so happy there and in that childlike wonder.

I felt held by those reeds and peeking out to see my family ahead on the trail. I remember my Great Grandmothers dog waiting for me, doing her job of herding me back to the rest of the pack.

And today there it was, that childlike wonder bursting through into a smile on the face of almost 40 year old Vivienne, drawn to places even now where I could feel the bigness of the world around me and feel held by it once again.

That’s why I don’t plan out my photos.

Because my intuition will guide me to these places. Because telling our visual story isn’t just about the present day story. Sometimes it’s about reaching out through the lens to a younger version of ourselves or even reaching forward to our future self who will look back at this photo.

And I couldn’t have predicted this today. I couldn’t have planned that I’d be reaching back to one of the happiest times, the most treasured places in my life, surrounded (or trailing behind) some of my most beloved family.

We don’t have to know what photo it is we’re going to take.

The lens will lead us there.

All we need to do is show up.

January 31, 2017

14 Days of Self-Compassion Photo Challenge

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I’m so excited to bring you something this February leading up to the start of the Be Your Own Beloved class on Valentine’s Day…a photo challenge!

Each day from February 1st-15th we’re going to take a selfie (or a photo in general if you’re easing towards taking selfies) inspired by the theme of the day.

You can see all the prompt below and join in each day taking a selfie of your choice. I encourage you not necessarily to try and plan it out, but instead to invite in the energy of the day’s focus and see what arises during your day as a moment you could tell your visual story and invite yourself into it in some way.

Or, come on over to my Instagram account at @viviennemcm each day where I’ll be sharing my response to each day’s prompt and giving some ideas and insight on how you might explore it!

As well, I’ll aslo be sharing the daily prompt over at the Be Your Own Beloved Instagram as well as featuring images of folks who are joining in!

If you’d like more inspiration to get you started on this journey, join the Photo Challenge mailing list (you’ll also receive my Be Your Own Beloved newsletters by signing up) and I’ll send you over a welcome post with more information about the 14 Days of Self-Compassion Photo Challenge as well as a free E-Book 30 Tips for Exploring Selfies (with Love) which contains 30 helpful tips to support you on your selfie path.

Join the 14 Days of Self-Compassion Photo Challenge Mailing List here to get your Free E-Book!

If you’re new to selfies but want to give it a try, you might want to get the Selfie Starter Guide where I answer all sorts of common questions that folks have when sparking the journey to see themselves with compassion through their camera!

Now without further ado, here are our themes for the 14 Days of Self-Compassion Photo Challenge! Keep watch on Instagram for some tips to get you started with our first theme on February 1st and be sure to use the hashtag #beyourownbeloved to share your response to the daily prompt!

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As well, be sure to check out the #beyourownbeloved hashtag on Instagram to get inspired by one another as we explore these prompts together throughout the first two weeks of February.

And this 14 Days of Self-Compassion is going to be a great warm up and way to dip our toes into selfies as a tool for self-compassion before the Be Your Own Beloved E-Course that begins on February 14th where we’ll dig even more into the process of using the camera as a tool to change how we see ourselves and I’ll guide you through the variety of kinds of selfies we can explore, tips for taking them and how the lens can help us reclaim how we see ourselves back from our inner critic. Come join in for Be Your Own Beloved as well as the free photo challenge!

I’ll see you over on Instagram where we’ll dig into the first challenge Feb 1st! Everyone is welcome by the way! Even if you’re not comfortable sharing your selfies publically yet (there’s no pressure to) you might invite a trusted friend to join you and text one another your daily selfies! Tag someone in the post that you’d like to invite to join you for the free challenge!

December 30, 2016

A Love Letter to You. The Past, Present and Future You.

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Picture yourself this time next year. You are the same but so different. Because something you never thought possible has happened. Those critical thoughts that have followed you through your life have shifted.

They are not fully gone (they never do) but now, you hear a different voice, your own voice of compassion that believes in you. And you see your body differently, especially in photos. Rather than seeing someone where with elements that are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (depending on the day) you see well…yourself.

You put those ideas you had about body acceptance into action and here you are. You feel it.

You realize you finally just get to be yourself, not someone who is failing or succeeding at fitting any certain standard of beauty or worthiness. And you put your hand on your heart and take the deepest breath of your life.

Because you didn’t believe this was even possible. You couldn’t have pictured this a year ago. But it is here.

And it wasn’t always easy. You showed up in the prompts that kept arriving in your inbox. Some days you really didn’t want to pick up that camera and show up for yourself. And some days you didn’t. But you built resilience. You kept showing up. And slowly but surely it felt more peaceful to see your body in photos.

It was as though someone came and cleared the lens you were seeing yourself through, and they did…you did. And what you now see is yourself, awaiting you there saying “You were always enough. I’m so glad you see that now”.

And you do. You see it. You see yourself without the layers of expectation of what your body ‘should’ look like. A metaphorical weight has been lifted off your back.

This act of resiliency, of reclaiming your power back has created a ripple effect beyond the camera too. You are more visible in your own life. You are more present in your own body. You are showing up for yourself and your life in ways you couldn’t have imagined.

You feel this tingle of excitement because now that you know that what you thought was impossible, that you could see and treat your body with compassion, you wonder what else you believe that isn’t true. You wonder what other possibilities await. Because you always knew that you weren’t put on this planet to spend your life hating your body and you know now that all that time you spent focusing on your body hate now gets to be put towards something else. And you can’t wait to see what unfolds.

You have left a trail of old stories that no longer serve you behind you and your feel the excitement of possibility.

So you pick up your camera on this day, a year from now and look into the lens with love, step in front of the camera with ease. With gratitude. With deep pride in all the photos you took but not just cause they look amazing (which they do) but because they tell the story of the past you becoming the present you and they remind you that nothing is impossible.

That you truly are resilient and powerful and worthy.

And if you ever forget again, you have these images. To bring you back home to yourself. Again and again and again. To come home.

Today I’m standing between this past year and the one coming ahead. I’ve had the absolute honor of spending the past year guiding an incredible collection of folks through the Body Peace Program, which is a year-long program made up of a series of classes (with breaks/rest time in between) inviting you to explore and cultivate body acceptance through your camera. Oh, and take photos you’re deeply proud of too. That’s a fabulous side-effect of doing this work.

But here I stand this journey to a close and I’ve been thinking of the folks who joined this time last year and wanted to write them a love letter to remind them of how far they’ve come. And to write a love letter to the folks joining in right now for the 2017 session of Body Peace who are probably deeply nervous yet are feeling drawn to this program. To stand on the other end of 2017 with a trail of old stories left behind them. To stand on the other side of 2017 and look back just like the folks this year are, and realize you did what you thought was impossible. And in a way it’s a love letter to a part of myself too, the part of me that deeply believed for most of my life that these stories would be with me forever and while they had been left behind me before this year, I’ve been changed by this work too and feel a body neutrality I never thought possible.

So this is for you, a love letter for this time next year.

When you’ve rewritten your old stories into a new love letter to yourself, visible in the images you see before you. The story of you, re-written.

October 28, 2016

Entering back into the Conversation

We are all in conversation with ourselves about our bodies, aren’t we.

But for many of us it’s a one sided conversation where our inner critic leads the dialogue. So much so that we think it’s our own voice. But it’s not.

Often our voice has been silenced. Or we haven’t given ourselves permission to hear it, to dare to contradict our inner critic. Or we don’t know what else to say, our inner critic has been telling us one thing for so long, we can’t see the possibilities outside of it. Or at least that’s how it was for me.

Before I found the camera as a medium I remember feeling like I knew that I could change that conversation, even if I didn’t know what to say yet. But I needed a vessel for the conversation to happen. I needed a tool.

Little did I know that the camera could be that, would be that. I just thought a photo was a photo, and honestly…was a place where I felt the opposite of self-compassionate.

But it was. And I became the narrator of my own story and slowly began to hear my own voice again, loud and clear. And when we can hear our own voice, our own self-perception…our inner critics voice doesn’t hold the same power over us that it once did.

That’s the thing about this work…it might look from the outside like it’s all about getting good photos. That it’s all about our external self, how our body looks, how we are seen by others. But once you’re in it (whether it’s an arm’s length selfie, a reflection, a shadow selfie or a full body selfie) you get that it goes far beyond just the photo.

The photo is a doorway to this conversation. A place to find our own voice again even if at first all we can say is “I don’t know what to say to you dear body”.

But that’s how we invite ourselves back into the conversation. We begin. We get curious. We invite in compassion when we can and show up anyways when we can’t.

So yes, the Embody E-Course that is about to begin is about taking full body selfies, but it’s about so much more than that too. It’s about starting a conversation about our body, and inviting our own voice to be heard. It’s about not letting our inner critics voice define how we see ourselves in photos and inviting ourselves to be seen. It’s about YOU making space to recognize yourself in photos again and take images that feel empowered and embodied.

Come spark this conversation with yourself. Class starts Tuesday but over the weekend you’ll get a pre-class PDF with tips for the technical side of taking our self-portraits. The activities themselves aren’t focused on the technical side, as that often keeps us in our heads and a pivotal part of this is conversation is inviting ourselves back into our body. Of course, alongside the technical support PDF I’m also available to help you with the technical side while class is in session!

Come join me for the Embody E-Course. We get started November 1st but I recommend joining in today or over the weekend so you can have time to explore the Pre-Class PDF before class starts.

October 25, 2016

Standing with the Questions

I remember the moment when I first got brave and put down my camera on my bag in the ravine near my home at the time. I set the timer and stepped into the frame.

And a rush of fear appeared along with a constant flow of questions:

“But what do I do now?”

“How should I move?”

“What should I do with my hands?“

“How do I do this?”

The questions overwhelmed me and made me want to grab the camera and walk away.

But this time, I didn’t.

Because somehow, on this day, I really HEARD the questions. Heard what they were actually asking me.

How do YOU want to move?

How do YOU want to feel about your body?

How do YOU want this experience to go?

How do YOU want to treat yourself in this moment?

I remember it so acutely because it felt like for the first time, I was asking myself to be in charge of how I say, felt about and experienced my own body. I mean, it might sound like something we should all inherently be in touch with but for so many of us, we don’t feel in a place of personal power around our body.

We don’t feel like the narrator of our own story. We don’t feel like our bodies are inherently worthy. We don’t feel in charge of our own self-perception.

In that moment I felt, for the first time that I could narrate my own story. I felt the whisper of my own inherent worthiness and I felt like somehow (in what felt quite miraculous) that I had created a safe space…a bubble between the camera and I where I was in charge of my self-perception.

The fear shifted in that moment and it was the first time I remember hearing that other voice, the powerful one, the protective one that my inner critic had been shouting over for years. And it said this:

“Guess what…this space is yours to answer that question each and every time. For you to forget how you’ve been told to move, to stay still, to make yourself small. This is a space where you get to reclaim how you move, to find that feeling of embodiment that you lost all those years ago.”

I talk lots these days about starting a compassionate conversation with ourselves and in that moment, hearing that new empowered inner voice…the conversation changed.

But here’s the thing. It isn’t a scripted conversation. It may not go as we predict. And at first we might not be used to speaking up for ourselves in this way (I wasn’t) and it might take a bit to find our voice.

It’s now been years since that moment but the conversation continues. The more I step into the frame, the more the voice of compassion and I get to hang out. The more space I give it to be heard. The more time I give it to gently emerge from it’s hiding place. The louder it becomes.

Is the inner critic still there? Of course. But I now have a grounded inner voice to return to rather than having my inner critic as my only point of reference in how I saw myself.

And the questions still accompany the conversation. I still, each time, get to ask that question…how do I want to feel today? What is the story I want to embody? How do I want to move today? How can I stand in my power in this photo, in this moment?

It’s the questions that, for me, gave way to the answers.

I know the questions that come up when we take photos of ourselves are terrifying and vulnerable. I know they might want to make us grab the camera and not take any. But the act of taking our selfies become the medium for the questions to be heard through.

And the photos become the reminder of the answers we found that day.

The reminders of the story we are stepping into.

The voice we are cultivating (especially outside of our inner critics).

The body we are choosing to embody.

The story of our lives we get to choose to tell.

**If you’re interested in becoming the narrator of your own story, join me for the Embody E-Course this November where we explore inviting our whole body into the frame. Or if that’s feeling like too BIG of a stretch beyond your self-comfort zone. Join me for the 10 day Beloved Beginnings class (self-paced, available any time) or the February Session of the 30 day Be Your Own Beloved E-Course (community based online class)! **