For the past many months, and really, since I started my self-portrait journey, it felt like such a struggle to really communicate what this work was about. Why any of it mattered.
I felt how significant it was (and is) for myself, but I questioned if it was really that deep for anyone else.
And this questioning had me stuck in limbo – wanting to post and share more, but not really feeling like I knew what to say or how.
So I decided to write out my philosophy around it all.
I’m calling it a “founding essay.” And maybe it changes as I do, but for now, this feels like a big exhale and a second wind. A recommitment and confirmation of what it is I’m actually doing with self-portraits.
So, without too much ceremony, here it is:
Founding Essay
It’s not about the poses, and which ones to do to look sensual or sexy.
It’s not even necessarily about the photos.
It’s about who you become when you decide to step into your body and see yourself through your own eyes.
Sensuality, specifically, is an area where we’re taught to perform. How to be sensual for others. Desirable, attractive, likeable – for others.
We hear what others think of our bodies before we’ve had a chance to understand ourselves.
Our bodies become something to be looked upon, assessed, accessed — consensually and not.
We cannot control how others see us, but we can control how we see ourselves.
Looking, and truly seeing, is the first step to understanding our own relationship with ourselves.
Self-portraits can be simply about taking better nudes and sending thirst traps. That’s a valid expression of your own erotic force.
My approach goes further.
It goes beyond being and performing sexuality and desirability and brings you to a place of remembering what home feels like in your body.
It’s a permission slip you grant yourself.
Permission to be here, to feel, to desire, to be seen.
In this practice, you show yourself that it is safe to embody pleasure and sensual power.
When I first started sharing my self-portrait journey, I hardly mentioned sensuality at all.
I thought: Maybe this piece is important for me, but it won’t resonate with anyone else. Maybe the way this practice makes me feel in my body is a fluke, and others just want pretty photos.
Then came several years, thousands of photos, and hundreds of people I’ve taught this practice to, all over the world.
And I know now that it isn’t a fluke.
So I’ll say it plainly, the way I once couldn’t:
This is the work I’m here to do: To reopen the places we were taught to close.
The throat that learned to swallow its truth. The body that learned to make itself smaller. The channel between voice and sensation, between what we feel and what we let ourselves express.
This practice reconnects you with your body, and with your own agency, at a depth that’s hard to describe until you feel it.
Reclaiming your sensuality is reclaiming your voice.
Following your pleasure and desire is allowing your life force to move freely through you.
Your body is alive. It carries stories, wisdom, creativity, beauty, and power.
It is yours.
You deserve to feel safe in your body, safe in your pleasure, safe in your sensual expression.
You deserve to see yourself as art, to move freely in your body, to allow your own Eros and life force to flow unconstrained by others’ expectations.
We witness ourselves, embodied, to silence the external noise. To tune into our own voice.
We centre ourselves in our lives, in our creative expression.
We stop waiting to be seen, and become the one who sees.
This is what it means to come home.