Journey to Mee-dom

This post is specifically to sum up all the reasons why I started this "Naked Face for Grace" project. Please share, this post or any part of it - not for me, but for all the women in the whole wide world. It's been almost two months since I stopped wearing makeup and I have to say a few things that I have noticed personally. I have never felt more beautiful. I have never felt more confident. I have never ever ever felt more happiness - true inner happiness. There are many reasons for my state of happiness - but the removal of my external mask has really tipped it over the edge for me. When I went in there and did some deep digging, I found that through all my mean nasty comments/thoughts to myself in the mirror, I was breaking myself down little bit by little significant bit. Every single day, however many times a day that I looked in the mirror - they all added up to an overall feeling of worthlessness. I was looking at myself not into myself and even though it ...

Today I decided to take the attitude of "Congratulations". Towards myself, to things happening around me, just basically an all around preempted celebration. This means that for things that had not happened yet, and even small things that usually I wouldn't even notice. For example, on the hour drive home on a highway that I have a lead foot on, passing two cops and not getting a ticket - congratulations! I decided to just keep a consistent feeling of "congratu" (I just made that word up). My intention at yoga was again, "Congratulations!".  In my head it was said in a pretty exuberant tone of voice - I'm pretty sure when I said the word mentally, my eyebrows raised simultaneously. Class was going fairly normally, hard and sweaty and twisty and bendy. Then Laura said "we are going on a field trip!" So we took our mats to the wall to work on headstand. I have been working on headstand for less than two months but I want to get into i...

This week has been an intense array of emotions for me. I have described this experience as shattering , earth quaking , ground moving and essentially breaking me open. My heart sings to a higher octave now. All of these pictures and stories have profoundly shifted me to a higher vibration and a whole lot closer to my authentic loving self. Each and every photo has meant something different to me. I would like to be able to feature every face sent to me in my blog - there is more to come but I would like to start there. I would like to show you now a little sample of what I want to do with these pictures, with your permission of course. This will take patience as sorting and keeping track has proven harder than I thought. I also want this to keep the theme of real and honest. Please feel free to send me messages about what this has shifted for you. I want to hear from you! There are so many purposes for this naked-face project but first is that I want to take the time to thank y...

I promised myself I would not blog tonight...because I need to go to bed early. Well screw it. I am sitting here in a mess of tears because I am absolutely beyond moved by all of your courageousness! Wow wow wow wow WOW. I have to admit that I am awe-struck on so many levels. Some people whom I haven't heard from in years have written and sent pictures, even people that I don't even know! It lifts me up to see your faces - sent to me personally! I was also affected deeply at how beautiful every single picture was - and to be honest I didn't expect my reaction to be so profound. I was shattered to pieces 76 times over and over again throughout the past couple of days and I cannot even begin to express my gratitude for the affect you have all had on me and surely so many others. I broke into tears with every new photo I got - even when I thought I was good to go - I would look into your eyes and I could see your big beautiful hearts blasting through the screen. I was al...

Oh my gosh I should really be sleeping. It's 11:48pm. I just decided to take a quick peek at a documentary that a dear friend recommended I watch when I was telling her about my "naked face" project. So I found it on vimeo and before I was 10 minutes in I was sobbing. This video struck a huge cord for me on so many levels. "The Perfect Vagina" is about women not liking their vaginas and going to extreme measures to change that. It's beautifully done and I have to strongly urge that you watch it - especially if you have daughters. It really is worse than I thought. Women hate themselves from head to toe. They think that it's their own individual independent idea to; cover this, paint that, cut this, snip that....the list goes on. We are misinformed by and large about the real truths. We are marketed to constantly to not like whatever it is that we have - and we believe it. We outright believe it! It becomes so internalized that we believe we aren...

Today I was in a really foul mood. It snuck up on me out of no where and spread like wild fire in dry bush. I could feel it growing totally out of control. My sister and I were doing some running around and we had the kids. First of all let me just say that Fabricland looks like an amusement park to children under 5. I felt better once I noticed a sign out front politely asking people to hold on to their friggen kids or else. Ok it didn't say that but it may as well have - but obviously all parents have the same issue when they go in there because it beckons to kids like the little old witch who eats children in a house made out of candy. At first, when my mood started to take a nose dive into an empty pool, I just thought I was tired but when I realized wasn't in fact tired and that it was just a *dun dun dun... bad mood (gasp). On my way home my stinky mood seemed to have evolved. The transition was so obvious that it reminded me of those seemingly harmless weird neon pil...

A very dear friend of mine and I met today with similar long faces. Each of these two faces were those of a long gruesome night of no sleep. We each had our reasons, similar yet different. As we listened and shared we realized that we had both been the victims of expectations. Throughout our lives we have expectations both detectable and undetectable. Sometimes we are well aware of our expectations - we state them proudly with assertiveness for all to hear and adhere to. Other times, they float around us invisibly with a coy sense of cockiness, slowly binding us. There are many things in our lives we say we will surely do and surely won't do. I remember before I had the twins I use to see moms in the grocery store losing their patience uttering the words "Because I said so." I vowed to myself to never say this to my children but to always give them full answers to their whys! HA! What the hell did I know?! Obviously nothing about children and certainly not that ...

I got really mad at my son today. It felt shitty. He had unbuckled his seatbelt before we stopped driving. We had in fact arrived at Oranj and he knew that, but I changed my mind at the last second and continued driving to take the kids to my sisters'. So really, I should have stopped and helped him re-buckled. Instead, of recognizing that I needed to help him and that it was truly my fault for confusing him,  I let my fear of him not wearing a seatbelt turn immediately into anger and I slammed on the breaks spilling a kombucha drink all over my car. My love for him got overshadowed by my fear for him. I was yelling and completely lost control. It was ugly. I know and have much evidence in my own life and observing the lives of others, that often fear is mistaken for anger and as I have quoted before "love cannot exist in the presence of fear". When I walked into boga I had a heavy heart. Laura asked me how I was, and I briefly told her what had happened...

Meditation and Medication. Interesting that these two words are only but one letter off from one another. I have been on 6 anti-depressants on and off since I was 15. I have been determined since I was 22 to take actions into my own hands. I am now 29 and I know that I can be my own worst enemy or greatest heroine. There are so many elements involved in wellness for me to be able to stay above what has always been described to me as "the safety line". I have known for years now that when I eat properly and exercise it gives me the building blocks to avoid succumbing to the dark side . For some reason though, year after year even if I was eating properly and exercising, I would still stick a toe, or a leg of half my body into the pool of my own self loathing. Obviously, something was still missing and two years ago I found myself drowning in the messiness that is my depression. Reluctantly, back to the doctor I went saying the same shit once again. Answering that damn ques...

I wasn't going to write about yoga today, but something happened that I couldn't not share. Also, I realized that as much as I love sharing this blog with everyone, I really write it for my own personal growth. So here it goes. It's Saturday. Saturdays I always go to Laura's power yoga at 1030am. Rain or shine or snow. It's kind of my one regular class that I will do everything not to miss. I realized that I have been using Saturday class as a check point, or reference point for where I am at in terms of growth, both in my yoga practice and personal growth (which of course is the same thing) from week to week. OK so where was I - right, it's Saturday and I go to power yoga. I'm not just happy to be there I am elated. I am really loving this new flexibility I have found and I just get to pumped to see what body and mind bending poses Laura's going to push us through today. I brought some tea and went early. I sipped my yerba mate mint mocha tea and sta...

While in a deep stretch this morning at "Easy yoga" (which means still hard in it's own way) I was thinking about how differently I have been feeling over the past two months. The before and after has started to become clear. It's like a great big ice block after the sun shines on it and melts it all away, leaving a beautiful shiny gold nugget. Before I had the twins, before life got overwhelming, convoluted, complex and just plain old too much, I use to take a break, check out for a while - nap. Ahhhhh naps. Glorious little babies those are. But ever since the "Lollies" graced me with their presence, I had to push through whatever I was going through because no matter what, you are needed. You are always needed. Morning, night, everything in between and even at hours you only thought existed when you use to party. You can't eat when you want, you can't poop when you want - hell, you are lucky to even get a good wipe in. I have been searching and...

I have come to realize that I have unreasonable expectations of progress. If you are anything at all like me in this regard, you might also have a long list of things you just aren't good at. I have this story that replays in my head, and I even say it out loud to other people. It goes something like "I'm just not good at ______ . I never have been and I doubt I ever will be." It gives me permission to suck. I use to think that accepting that I sucked at something was the best path to self-acceptance. The sooner I recognized that some people are good at some things and some people just aren't, the better. I have told myself for a long time that I am not good at many things. Here is a list of a few things but this list is not limited to: keeping a clean house Cooking/Baking Yoga Staying committed to things Following a goal all the way through. Losing weight (and keeping it off) Staying calm Let me just be clear that self-acceptance is not congruent wi...