How To Create A Healthy Positive Body Image

One of the missions I have in life is to help encourage people create a healthy, positive body image. The first step to this mission, is to practice myself, the second is to educate, and finally help emotional healing to occur.

So, I've done work on myself with therapist and will continue to allow my journey and story to evolve. With this practice of self-love I continuly propel myself to be in means slowing down, eating a balanced diet and practicing yoga. Today I want to address how helpful it can be to your mental health and body image, to create and cultivate a yoga practice.

Yoga And You

Find a teacher and a space to do yoga where diversity and inclusion is celebrated. Stay focused on what makes your body feel good. There are classes where having a certain body, or "nailing" the pose isn't the point of the class, those are the classes I encourage you to find. It may take a few times, but I know they are out there.

One of the first tenants of yoga is ahimsa (nonviolence)—do no harm to yourself or others. The media often is creating unrealistic images of beauty that is harmful to you. Therefore, it’s up to you to set those images aside, love yourself and be kind to yourself. You are beautiful as you are.

In your physical asana practice, focus more on what you can do and less on trying to be perfect at it. Mainstream media will continue to post picture perfect images, but I encourage you to change the esthetic and broaden the idea of what yoga looks like. There are entire organizations calling for yoga to be more about the practice and less about the body. In addition here in Denver there are even instructors that focus on being diverse, such as big booty yoga. I encourage you to post pictures of yourself doing your poses, to help break down what others believe about body image and yoga, as well as to celebrate you just doing you!

Why I choose doTERRA

My passion in life is to love and be wild in love. I found doTERRA when I went to an emotional healing through essential oils class. By the end of the class, certain emotional evoking oils were passed around due to their their tendency to often provoke reactions in us. The oil that an individual responses to most is the oil that is said we need the most. I respond most to was patchouli, the oils that is to evoke self love and linked to personal body image. When i found out that link, my ground was a little shaken since it was so directly related to what I struggle with. I decided to immediately meet up with the women that taught the class, and buy a bottle of patchouli. 

In that moment and ones to follow I gained a new sense of wonder with my body and what I put into it and on it. I started listening to what my body was asking for and allowed my self to respect what I was hearing. As a psychotherapist that is something that I have always done, and now I have a renewed sense of encouragement to my do the same for myself daily. 

This thought processed than brought me to other considerations for how I was looking at my life, I was believing that I needed to listen to the constraints that other people were putting on me. Like I said in the beginning my passion is to love, in order to do that I needed to stop listening to the nay sayers and start telling myself yes, you can grow, you can heal, you can make a difference.

Intentionally Seeking Balance

Recently I had an accident that resulted in a surgery, and weeks of pain. In the beginning of this journey I had thoughts of "why me", and "Oh my, my body is not functioning the way it always has". These among other thoughts inline with these influenced me to feel a higher level of anxiety than I typically face on a daily basis. I was scared of the pain, the surgery, of my body never being the same, I was frustrated that I had to ask for help to do simple things like getting dressed and doing my hair. 

Suddenly there was a shift in perception, and no I didn't just become grateful or happy overnight, nor did humility really find me in a way that changed my gut reaction to asking for help. What did shift was, that I started to see this incident as a message to slow down. As an over-achiever and a "worrier" I go 80 mph almost all the time, but this pain has slowed me to about 45 mph, its helped my realize that I have people that will bend over backwards to help, and slowing down is okay. In fact its more than okay its what needed in order to have a balanced life.

What is most upsetting is that, I've done this before, gone 80 mph and wiped out from it. Hopefully this time I will hopefully learn and make an intentional choice to continue to seek balance and slow down in all areas of my life