Mirrors.

I have a favorite mirror in a funky hip part of town in a bathroom in a restaraunt. A place where I grew up over the last year, where I had my first 39th birthday toast (there were more than one) and where I can bring my friends and feel so comfortable (hsp's love returning to the safe places). And this mirror is round with old repurposed wood. The lighting is quite horrible, but you can get around that. I take a picture almost every time I visit. I sometimes leave little bathroom secret messages on it for someone to find later in the night. When I look back at each of the mirror pictures in this one place I see myself in time. I see where I have come from and I see where I am. Every so often I take a picture and I know that it is my guide to where I am going. I notice how I have started to loosen up in the picture, playing and posing, just for myself.

I spent some time, probably a couple of years, avoiding mirrors. I had no full length mirror. I had to learn to feel who I was inside of my body and stop making a good day about how more or less bloated my belly was. I started to just look at my face, my neck, my breasts and my hair in the mirrors until over time I could slowly look at all of me. We are not only what we see in a mirror and yet it is the only way we will ever truly look at our own physical self. Isn't there something incredibly powerful in that?

When I ran Sexy and Sanguine I knew that we would need to spend time looking into mirrors and the mirrors of our cameras. There is an intimacy with yourself that happens when you see yourself and photograph yourself that doesn't happen with another person. You learn to slow yourself down and look at the places that you have been afraid to see. My prompts were gentle but insisted that the pieces that we try to hide from were brought to the mirror for our own eyes to stop fighting and start seeing with truth. I witnessed these women fall in love with their own bodies and skin in a way they had been searching for in years of dieting, hiding, addictions and stories that weren't their own.

Some days I need to turn around. I am in so much pain that looking into my own eyes throws me to my knees. And so I let myself turn around and I find a new way of seeing myself. I'm still there. Not hiding just hurting. And hurting and sadness and pain are as much a truth as is joy. The day Kate Moss, also 39, had her Playboy spread come out I stood in the mirror, looked straight on and said, "This is my 39. I feel more confident and sexy than I ever have." Looking into the mirror, capturing that moment in time always brings me back to the memory of claiming my number, my age, my lived experiences that are adding up to stories that keep getting more rich and luscious and filled.

This time in the mirror, the photos that follow are my daily practice of seeing who I am today. I am never the same, always changed and flowing and my own Satnam. When I share them it is permission for you to see yourself as goddess as feminine source as truth as passion as joy as healing wounds as sexual as seen as growing sensuality as expression as pure physical beauty. As I heal I pass on the permission for you to heal. And to be seen. And to be beautiful and claim that knowing of beauty. And to be even more beautiful because of that time you spend seeing yourself as intimately as if your lover gave you his eyes.

You may play. Smile or not. Be naked or not. Each day look at you. Find your own eyes and shape and make silly faces. Take the pictures. Create a collection of your beauty and travels and favorite places. Write the story of you growing up into your feminine truth rather than holding onto a belief that you aren't worth your own beauty. We are life and love inside these bodies. Look at them. Adore them. Devour them with your own eyes and let the rawness of your sensual self start to be your new definition of who you are. Stand in the mirror and look.

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Join us for more sensual living for 10 days of The Making Space Cleanse {For the sensual woman} starting April 21st.