Erica

Erica – USA

/in /by

My Embody Project shoot came up quickly, and I didn’t have much time to prepare, mentally or physically. I felt a little nervous about it beforehand. I wondered how I was going to be captured in the photos, and I wondered how my thoughts would come across in the interview. The idea was to shoot me editing Embody Project images on my computer, working the way I do every day. Turns out I found it easy to be photographed naked while engaged with my work. I almost forgot about the camera a few times as I sang along with my favorite songs. I definitely forgot to think about my body, my nakedness, and that was a surprise. After the shoot, I found myself feeling grateful, grounded, energized, and open.

My lifelong struggle to accept my body as valuable and beautiful, with all its “flaws,” in our idealized culture, has taken me to the very depth of my shadow and to the razor’s edge of my capacity to grow. Through the years it’s carried a lot of weight inside me. But I’m thankful for all the mineshafts and mirrors along the way — which have shown me my “beauty,” my “ugly,” and everything in between — because each one has forced me, by baby steps and giant leaps, to question my assumption that the reflections were true. I’ve come to see that all reflections are relative truths: when someone finds me beautiful it is not about me but them; their thoughts, their opinions, their preferences. For every person who finds me attractive there is another who will find flaws. I’m still me, but the reflection constantly changes.

What’s left for me now is that how I experience myself in the vast dynamic scope of all that I am, both as human animal and divine spark, is all that’s important. It begins, and ends, with me owning and loving me as I am now, right here, and letting go of however it is that you might see me. Over time, it’s felt like that weight has slowly been lifting from my soul. And during this shoot, it fell away completely and revealed something wonderful and simple and already present: Freedom to be.

Working on the Embody Project, I’ve been moved to tears during shoots by watching something inside someone release into total self-acceptance. It’s joyful. It’s brilliant. It’s palpable. That’s what this whole Embody Project is about, and that is my life’s work, to continue to experience for myself and to keep sharing with others.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

2015 Update

 

I saw all of you last night, through a window of tumbling internet mosaic panes

I saw your glass shards, your green hills, your cold rivers, your beautiful infinite skins

Yesterday when I was just an I

forgetful and alone

you spoke your truth

and I witnessed your reclaiming

sang your celebration

felt the soft contours of your strength

and intimately knew your Yes

 

In your courageous acts of defiance

you revealed yourselves, revealing me

And I remembered

the why of it all

the we of it all

the us that we are

And I felt a welling up

from within

and a deep longing

to join you again

 

Every day I walk on jagged pieces of my weathered stories

at times forgetful and alone

scanning the green horizon

asking the everblue sky

for remembering

And every time I look out through the window

at you

at me

something else

long forgotten

buried and discarded

crumbling and dirty

so precious

so needed

is whispering

its Yes

 

And so

because of this

because of you

for you and with you

I am on this bench today

so you can see me now

Naked, truly

Brad-Leaf

Brad-Leaf – USA

/in /by

Healing Ritual Space is where I spend about half of my time. The so-called “altered state of consciousness” is a place where I go regularly, on my own accord. Daily, nightly, I pass back and forth between the world of dreams, and the world of form, and I watch how one becomes the other.

As we did this photo shoot, my grandmother was dying. She lay in a hospital bed 170 miles away, struggling to find her way through to the Spirit World. She needed my help, and so…I set out with her to find the way through to the other side. The lens of the camera became our portal.

BIRTH
the lens is the birth canal
Is it me, looking for the way through,
or is it my Mamaw?
The Voice says, “It is both. Go through. You’re up!”
Right now, I am her, and she is me.
We are dying
and we are being born
through this portal
into a new place…

And so here we go…through the portal, only…
I don’t know whether I’m going out…or in…
Is this the beginning, or is this the end?

Blessed be the return of the light.
Blessed be
the two-way street
where the ends called “birth” and “death”
loop back
to meet again.

I am ALIVE!
This life is FOREVER!
Blessed Be
the FIRE in ME
which always burns!
Blessed Be.
So motit Be.
Amen.

The sound of pen touching page is the only sound, as the latest rays of this day’s sun filter through the frosted windows of the funeral chapel where I sit, with the lifeless body of my grandmother. She is not here. She has gone to fly. How do I know? I went with her, and I came back here to tell it.

SHAMANISM: “To know the realms of life and death; to cross freely back and forth between the two, until you can no longer tell the difference.”

Connell

Connell – USA

/in /by

Soar over and past the mountains. Embrace the wind’s dance. Become the Dragon.
Fill the bag and give good pressure.
Tune into the hum of the drones. Become the pipe. Transform your world into a land of pastures and forests.
Feel yourself getting ripped back into a past that once was present.

A time and place where the largest city would be considered a quaint hamlet by today’s standards.
When the world was still merely untouched, unmolested…unspoiled.
When language was primitive, and customs brutish and organic.
We are no more incredible than the people of that time.

We hide from ourselves.

Anything from eyeliner to cosmetic surgery will do the trick.
Designer clothes or a piece of plastic will be enough.
Anything that we can wrap around our bodies to become, in our culture, modest.

Consider the Dragon.

Her hide of seemingly roiling bronze and gold reflects the rays from an ancient sun
As she speeds along, carried by the wind. She is the queen of her domain.
She is flawless and powerful.
She is immortal.

Consider the Piper

A man standing atop a grassy knoll, playing an ancient instrument
Reflecting on the ancient music that is now soaring with the wind.
He is in control yet he is flawed and fragile.
He is mortal.

Do you see them? Do you feel the presence of an ancient, unadorned spirit?
It lies in the music and it blows overhead. Invisible but not unsensed.
We must all reach out for that ancient, unadorned spirit. It resides inside us all,
Somewhere in the recesses of our archaic beings.
We must all walk in this beauty of unadorned joy and jubilation.
Celebrate the gift that is your life and enjoy and bask in the ancient sun.
Let the sunlight glint off of your roiling body as you let your mind get swept away with even the slightest breeze.
Let the ancient music dance and live inside of you.
The time of this music is not over yet. It hasn’t even begun for most.
All you have to do is become the Dragon Piper.
Let your scales flash, let your roar be heard.
Tune yourself and let the wind and the sun carry your ancient song.

Julia

Julia – USA

/in /by

I am remembering the moment that a dear friend and I were bellydancing with a group of women, many of whom were experiencing the first time ever moving their hips in a clockwise circle. We were there to help guide them. She and I laughed afterwards at how incredibly sexual and alive we felt, almost a bit ‘too much’ especially surrounded by women most all of whom were at least 15 years older than us. I said to her ‘I feel a bit bad, like…maybe I shouldn’t be doing it so well…especially in front of these elder women.’

Then I thought, hold on.

When did my mind get to have a say in how natural I felt in my body? Where and when was I taught to doubt? By what force of creation was I influenced to try and subdue the power? Who told me I need to suppress my sexuality, for others or for myself?

Was it my great aunt who refused to talk about anything below the waist? Who taught my mother, directly and indirectly about sex? Where did she learn this? Who encouraged her and how do I hold a place for the voice that says NO to this message without feeling like I might be disrespecting my elders?

And still I know and I hold the truth of the power that lives within my body and the gifts that lie therein.

So what to do now? I believe the answer is in the heart, it is unconditional love.

I am completely in love with this, my body.

And I honor this, perhaps temporary, perhaps permanent place, humbly. Not only is she strong and powerful, can lift and move and bend with the wind, but she holds soul, wisdom, inherited and learned, gathered and gleaned. She has been places, fairytale places… has felt the soft breeze off the ocean, the sweat and sand and dirt hiking in the desert. And she has breathed it in through her powerful lungs, she has laughed in every cell for the joy of being alive.

She is beautiful because of her form, her magic, all she knows, without needing to be told. She knows, even better than I do, how she is like the trees, like the water, the rocks, the leaves~ she was made of the same magic, form and substance as these Things. This is unchangeable.

Joyous love for my body: that is what I have found. Almost 28 years of living in this body, I have loved her, used her, adored her, been adored because of her gifts. I feel almost no regret for the things I’ve put her through, as she has always come back stronger and more resilient than I thought she could. I am so proud of her, proud of me, knowing we are one in the same.

We begin again, each month anew, as we cross the threshold from Maiden to Mother to Crone. We’ve done it before, dear body…and I’m so looking forward to going there, this time around, with You!

My beautiful body: I choose to respect her, to honor her cycles, to stay in tune with her, no matter what.

Body of mine, I am so very grateful for you.

Kirra Donna

Kirra Donna – USA

/in /by

My stark white body against the uninhabited pavement gave me the feeling of what one might call an apparition, as if I was watching myself, completely removed from the situation, like an objective onlooker. The stabbing pain in my feet from the cold cement was the only thing grounding me to reality. Each drop of rain that fell fatefully over my body caressed me, and I began to feel reinvigorated.

I had fallen out of touch with what I like to call the “magic,” for lack of a better word. I had come to a point where I saw “beauty” and felt nothing; I took on the characteristics of a machine, operating on automatic (which unfortunately is not so uncommon these days). A monotonous cyclical pattern had taken hold, and I fled.

I think when I met with Erica I had come unconsciously seeking a state of mind long gone; a mindset that appreciated the profoundness of small wonders; like a perfectly round stone or the only purple flower in a field of green. Magic.

I was visiting from Montana (and had come seeking Atlantis), so Erica and I had a short window of time in which to make everything happen, and her warmth and attention was well received.

At the point we met I was already quite at peace with my body and had no qualms about stripping down bare, which is more or less surprising after having gone almost the entirety of my life with what most people perceived to be an eating disorder. But that was never the truth.  The truth is I was and have always been a very skinny person and it has almost always been perceived as a weakness.

There are two sides to every spectrum. Some are born big boned, I on the other hand am naturally small. I think more than anything my decision to participate in the Embody Project was somewhat of a declaration to the all-that-is. Not that I was out to prove anything, but as I spun in circle after circle  it was as though I was screaming at the top of my lungs without making a sound.

I felt ALIVE and I was THANKFUL.

It’s funny to me how sometimes you have to leave in order to remember what you already knew.

Sierra

Sierra – USA

/in /by

I am free
and alive.
I am vulnerable
fully realized.

Some people have told me that I am pretty, and others that I am ugly. I rarely believed either  was important. I was embodied. Regardless of what others saw, my body was my own. It was always there for me, and if I cared for it…it would care for me. The things that could not be seen are what made my body beautiful. I avoided seeing myself as ugly, but I also avoided seeing myself as beautiful.

I am surrounded
by energy.
I am a million pieces
coming together into one.

Then there was a boy. Landon. And when he looked at me the way I saw myself fell to pieces. He took those pieces from me, and built something new. Landon gave me back beauty. My body was no longer just mine…it was mine and it was beautiful. But old habits die hard, and sometimes I still see my body as just being useful. Then I’ll see Landon, and he looks at me like I am the most beautiful being he has ever seen. He helps me see myself.

I am bright eyed
and poised
I am sanguine
peaceful
accepting
flowing

Though the wind sometimes nipped at my bare flesh, the sun warmed me. It surrounded and illuminated me. The lake reflected me. The hay-bales lifted me. The crumbling stone building grounded me. The ancient tree wisened me.

I am free
and alive.
I am as I was meant to be
fully realized.

Sarajane

Sarajane – USA

/in /by

There’s a temptation to reach for comparisons.
To draw parallels between my body and theirs.
To seek approval from myself and from others.
While approval can be sought, my true desire is for freedom.
Freedom is found when seeing my body not as good or bad.
But as my own.
The arms that hold the ones I love. .
The hands that write.
The legs that stretch and toes that curl. when everything in the world seems right.
My body is to be reveled in.
Arms wrapped around my waist.
Neck stretched and head tossed back.
Every curve inviting and every movement full.
It isn’t to be seen in contrast to another’s.
Not even as beautiful or ugly in an aesthetic sense.
It is to be breathed.
Absorbed.
Delighted in.
It is everything I am and only a small part of me at the very same time.

To be embodied,
I believe, is to be present.
To breathe in.
To believe that what I am is what I’m meant to be.
To be embodied,
Is to finally see.
To see each line and curve for what it is.
A small piece of the overall story,
of the entire picture,
the whole person.
A small piece of who I am and everything, all at once.

I am milky white.
and bourbon on the rocks.
I am soft and warm.
and notebooks upon notebooks filled with thoughts.
I am freckled
and a quiet spot by the window.
I am wide hips.
and black coffee.
I am full breasts
and conversation that gets to the heart.
I am red hair
and dance, dance, dancing all night long.
I am a myriad of flaws
entangled with a rapturing, fiery hunger for life.

Zack

Zack – USA

/in /by

I Bow To My Body

 

i bowed to my body, yesterday; when i was four-five

taking baths in the tin tub, before we had indoor

my bow was in-sensed by my recognizing body parts familiar;

hands, feet, eyes, toes, elbows

mouth, my hanging angle towards left.

i bowed to my body and my body bowed back to me

 

then i was teased names;  four eyed, knock-kneed, tall-skinny lanky-back on back

can U understand what i’m saying?

through all this, i been keeping on bowing to my body

loving the shades of black, brown char-coal blue.

and Body bowed back to me

 

as far as i can remember,

me and Body been coming into ourselves together

one on one, two by two

combined in a spiritual mix of violet hue.

and i bowed to my body

 

i first discovered sexual rising, guess Who?

Me and Body, mind, Spirit True

consciousness born in a mental hive of appreciation on Self

tapping back into energies re-known past caps of grace

caps for my head and private place

open to sacred body-ties’.

mind U:  It’s been me and body all the way

bowing both in perfect time.

 

Oh Body Me, I have no qualms with Thee!

Bow Love

 

Zack 2013