Rejecting ‘Body Image’
Reclaiming Intrinsic Beauty
A Verdant Collective 8-Week Online Class and Group
Enrollment for this course has closed.
Were it not for Western Industrial Culture’s relentless assault on our bodies, the term ‘body image’ would not exist. Many of us have grown up in cultures that debase our fertility and our capacity to conceive, gestate and nourish our infants in and from our own bodies. Cultures that use airbrushing and photoshop to create impossible standards for the appearance of our bodies, and then promise to remedy all our shortcomings with the right diet and exercise. If that doesn’t work, we’re invited to endure a simple nip here, an injection there, and even an implant or two to bring us up to the impossible and unhealthy standards many cultures have imposed on the process of being female. Our cultures would have us believe our body’s worth has nothing to do with its incredible capacity or how it feels from the inside out. Instead, we are taught to relate with our bodies from the outside in, based entirely on how they look to, and behave for, everyone else.
This messaging, and the resulting lifelong focus on, and worry about, the shape and appearance of our bodies hijack us from what is truly ours to be and do in the world. Without interference (and better yet, with encouragement) we are productive and powerful, irreverent of external control. Especially when it comes from men, from marketing, and from media.
The pure design and wisdom of our bodies tells us a very different story than the one we’re taught and told by the cultures we’ve grown up in. Our design tells a story of age-old wellness from the inside out. It tells a story of wisdom and pleasure, of abundance and generosity.
In this 8-week online class, we will remember and nourish our individual rewilded relationships with our own and each other’s bodies. We will share the journeys we’ve been on with our bodies, and the stories we are ready to let go of. We will listen to each other and reflect back to one another using words, imagery and movement. We will honor one another’s courage as we share our individual and unique physical and emotional terrain. We will hold each other as we unravel and reweave the threads of our wellness into resilient relationships with our bodies; ones that come from the inside out. Here we participate in mending the damage done to female culture and stand as role models for the girls and women, young and old, in our communities today.
Program Details:
Dates:
TBD
We request that you attend a minimum 6 of our 8 sessions
Location:
Zoom
Investment:
$249, or 2 payments of $125
A limited number of scholarships available for participants in need.
This online program is for you if:
You have felt mired in the stories of not enough, and too much: too fat, too skinny, too white, too brown, tall or short and you are ready to create a new relationship with YOU
You long to experience the freedom that comes only from ceremonially and communally liberating ourselves from the disempowering introjects of cultural shame and silencing that are handed to us simply by virtue of being born female in Western Industrial Culture
You are ready to experience intimacy with women that grows within you new roots of courage and ferocity – that you then seed in your home, community and culture
You are aware that your relationship with your body is getting in the way of your erotic wellness, of your fierce and vibrant, courageous voice in the world
In our 8 weeks together we will:
Deconstruct ‘body image’ to expose it for what it is – a cultural construct – replacing it with a culture and reference points that celebrate our bodies for their power and capacity, rather than their adherence to shape and appearance
Learn to connect with our bodies from the inside out, rather than viewing them only from the outside in
Engage in council-style circles, building intimacy and trust
Use ceremony to acknowledge and call in a transforming relationship to our bodies, and ritual to honor, celebrate, and nourish these physical forms
Learn the importance of adornment and appreciation, in place of accessorizing and compliments
Begin to forge new mythopoetic stories about our bodies that incorporate their totality, which is, of course, more than the sum of their parts – stories that place our belonging to the ecological world from which we come at the centre of our reference for the beauty and perfection of our physical form
Learn practices to ignite eros and cultivate pleasure so we have feedback loops anchored in the wellness and wholeness of our bodies beyond the response they elicit (or don’t) in others, or how they appear in the mirror
Experience the extremely healing capacity of well(enough) women’s community, to wizen us up, set us right and bring us home to our own brilliance and generativity
How much – or how little – you participate is completely up to you. Your boundaries are essential for the wellness of our communal container and will be welcomed and encouraged. We request that you attend a minimum 6 of our 8 sessions together – you are an essential member of this experience, the community that will hold this experience, and the wellness that we will all cultivate and nourish together.
This 8-week online class and group is presented by the Verdant Collective and is one of 3 stand-alone courses we are offering during the Spring, Summer, and fall of 2020. Our in-person four-month immersion begins in late August. Find out more at www.theverdantcollective.com
The Verdant Collective is a radical – and radically safe – place to remember what your free, embodied, deeply nourished, and sovereign female looks, sounds and feels like. It is a place to grieve and to celebrate, to replenish and to grow.
We are a group of women who refuse to accept the definitions and expectations our culture has placed on our sex, our wildness, and our authentic emotional expression. We believe our wild nature is a radical force for healing. Thus we prioritize its wellness in ourselves and our sisters.