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Practice: Embodying Your Curvy + Beloved Body
May 19, 2014
Have you been wanting to connect with your body and self in a deep way?
So have we. And in our experience, that’s not a once and done process. Nor is it something that can be done in only one way.
Coming into loving relationship with yourself takes seeing yourself in new ways and feeling your body from the inside out.
That’s why we created Practice.
Who We Are
Vivienne McMaster is a photographer and leader of the Be Your Own Beloved workshops. Be Your Own Beloved explores self-portraiture as a transformative tool for creating a loving and ever-evolving relationship with our self-image and our bodies.
Anna Guest-Jelley is the founder of Curvy Yoga, a training and inspiration portal for body-lovin’ yogis and their teachers. As a writer, teacher and lifelong champion for women’s empowerment and body acceptance, Anna encourages people of every size, age and ability to grab life by the curves. And never let go.
How This Came to Be
We dreamt up this course after several soulful conversations about wanting to share body acceptance in truly concrete ways. Ways that would resonate for people and help facilitate the process that has unfolded in our own lives over many years.
As we talked, we realized that the combination of self-portraiture and embodiment through yoga was a potent one. When Anna took Viv’s Be Your Own Beloved course, she filled in a piece of her own self-love journey that she hadn’t even realized had been missing: truly seeing herself in a kind light. And when Viv got inspired to return to yoga after exploring Curvy Yoga, she was reminded of how essential connecting breath and joyful movement are, no matter your shape or size.
So here we are — delighted and oh SO excited to be combining our personal experience, passion and expertise in this course. You can watch up chat a bit about it below!
Why Practice?
This course is called Practice because that’s what loving your self requires — kind practice. As much as we may wish some days that we had a magic pill to finally love ourselves forever, with no exceptions, we don’t. What we have instead is our own ever-evolving practice, and the desire to share that in a community of people who are interested in developing and exploring their own practice.
And that is what we’ll be doing together over the course of one body lovin’ month.
Here’s what you’ll receive:
- 4 weeks of prompts (M-F), each week’s theme built around an accessible yoga pose
- Your prompts will include suggestions & reflections on the week’s pose, a related meditation, 2 self-portraiture opportunities & a video to bring you into your weekend
- Support from Anna and Vivienne
- A private Flickr group to share your photos — this isn’t required, but it is an incredibly powerful part of the experience
About Our Yoga
The yoga shared in this course is designed to connect you with your body in a way that feels really good. No one needs to be able to put their leg behind their head (because goodness knows we won’t be, at least not without a trip to the hospital!).
All you need is a willingness to give yoga a whirl. Anna’s teaching is focused on meeting people of every experience level, ability and body shape/size exactly where they are, so even if you don’t feel flexible, have an injury or illness, or secretly think yoga probably isn’t for you, you will be able to do this yoga.
Because this yoga is about body positivity and getting to know yourself through joyful, gentle movement.
About Our Self-Portraiture
While self-portraiture or even being in photos is often really outside of the comfort zone for most folks, in this class we’ll be exploring using self-portraiture as a tool to see ourselves and our bodies with kindness and compassion.
Vivienne’s approach to self-portraiture is playful, accessible and welcoming. You absolutely don’t need to have any photography experience to explore the self-portraiture aspects of this class, and we highly suspect you’ll have more fun exploring these self-portrait activities than you ever believed possible!
Registration
This course runs May 19-June 13. You will receive prompts from us by email M-F of each week, leaving you the weekends to process, play and revisit anything you’d like from the week before.
The cost of the course is $49, which you can pay in full or in 2 payments of $26.50 (there’s a tiny administrative fee for the 2-pay option). Pretty sweet for support from both of us, right? This process has been so transformative for us that we wanted to make it as accessible financially as we could.
With the 2-pay option, your second payment will be automatically withdrawn 3 weeks after your first payment.
Registration closes on Sunday, May 18, at 12:00pm PT.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What will I need to do yoga for this course?
While having a yoga mat will be nice, particularly if you have slippery floors, it is not a necessity. Everything we’ll be doing can be done without a mat, and it can also be done without “official” yoga props like blocks and straps. Anna will show options with props, but she will also tell you how you can easily use things around your house as substitutes.
2. I don’t have a fancy camera. Can I still do self-portraiture?
Oh yes! You can absolutely explore self-portraiture with any type of camera. One thing you will need is a timer, which almost all basic point and shoot or DSLR cameras do have. You are absolutely welcome to use an iPhone for the photography aspects of this class, and one free app that you might want to get in preparation for the class is called Gorillacam. It will be oh so helpful during the class!
While we aren’t exploring technical aspects of photography in the class, there will be opportunities to ask Vivienne questions if any technical questions arise as you explore the activities!
3. What will I need to have going on tech wise to participate?
We’ve kept the delivery of this course simple so as many people can participate as possible. Each day’s prompt will come to you via email, so all you need is access to your email account to participate. On Fridays we’ll be sharing a video, so if you’d like to watch that, you’ll need reasonably quick internet to stream it. However, even if you don’t have that, we’ll be providing a transcript for the videos so you can still participate.
There is a private course Flickr Group which will be our collective community space to share our photos. Flickr is a free photo-sharing site and is easy to use. While the Flickr Group isn’t mandatory, the energy, support and opportunity to cheer one another on in the group will be something you might want to gift yourself with! There will also be discussion forums in the Flickr Group where you will be welcome to ask questions and start discussions with your peers. Flickr is a website but it is also available for iPhone or Android phones and you can access the group through either the website or one of the apps.
4. I’d love to get to know more about the program and about the facilitators, where can I do that?
Join us for our live Spreecast on May 9th! Details here:
https://www.curvyyoga.com/event/practice-ecourse-free-spreecast-qa-session/