No. 18 HER

As a young woman, I struggled with body image issues and an unhealthy relationship with food. I felt pressure to fit into society’s narrow standards of beauty. According to those standards, my hips were too wide, my belly was never flat enough, my thighs were too big, and so on. My chase for wellness was motivated by my covert desire to be thin.

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I began teaching yoga twenty years after I started practicing it. The only people I saw online were thin models and dancers in swimsuits. No one looked like me. This inspired me to start an Instagram account dedicated to body-free yoga posts where I posted compassionate quotes and line drawings instead of bikini pics or motivational jargon.

It resonated. Deeply.

It turns out, many wanted the same thing I did - the practice without the comparison.

I never forgot this.

Within a few years, after I transitioned out of teaching, I became a candle maker, using pure beeswax to offer an alternative to the fragrance-laden soy candles that dominated the market.

Trendy female torso candles started making their rounds. You know the ones. They’re the 6-pack, big-breasted candles that were moulded off of Kim Kardashian’s perfume bottle. They’re gorgeous, but I grew tired of the ever-perfect female forms and went in search of something more interesting.

Once again I wanted to create an alternative that represented more than the current aesthetic.

You see, when I was younger and thinner, I had low self worth. It wasn’t until I went through the experience of gaining weight that I also gained an empowering viewpoint on what it meant to exist in the world as a whole, adult woman.

I found a curvy candle mould and created a series of beeswax candles that I called HER. I launched each one with the following mantra:

I am a beautiful, unique spirit. There is no one else quite like me. As a sacred creature on this earth, I am worthy of being loved and cherished by others. My worth is untarnished by the way others see me. It is ok to want the best for myself and to pursue the things that bring me joy and happiness. I understand the power of my self-talk and choose to select thoughts that are uplifting and positive.

For me, it encompassed the worth, acceptance, compassion and excitement we deserve to feel about ourselves.

The conversations I started having with other women revealed that I was not alone in my revelations. Learning to love my body has been a challenging, empowering practice, and while my body will probably shift and change, the experience has taught me that my worth is way beyond my shape or the current popular aesthetic.

This isn’t just about yoga or candles. Looking back, this was a gateway for me out of youth and into womanhood. An unraveling of what was taught to me by popular culture about how a woman should be, and a slow integration of who I am.

Whole. And so much more than the aesthetic of the time.

At the time of this writing, I’m 42, and still peeling back the layers that have shaped me. More and more I am revealing the woman underneath, and she is not at all what society told me she’d be. For that, I am so grateful.