Erica – USA

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.

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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