Reclaiming Beauty

Reclaiming Beauty, Celebrating Every Body was an amazing conference. It was the first conference I attended in long time that really catered to the audience. We were on the 25th floor of a hotel right in the heart of Atlanta; needless to say the view was amazing.

The theme of the day was reclaiming beauty, celebrating every body. We started off the day with Fhena who is very talented spoken poet who wrote up a poem sitting on the floor in the back of the room while we were enjoying breakfast. She really started off the day uplifting our spirits. She is on myspace.com/fhena if you want to check out some of her work. I suggest listening to Love Overcomes, which was another piece she performed for us.

The morning was a panel discussion with three experts in the field of body image, eating disorders and psychology. I should stop and mention that the majority of people, well I should say women, because there were no men at this conference were mostly counselors and psychologist. The panel was presented with these five questions:
1.What is beauty? What does it mean to be beautiful?
2.Thoughts about body perceptions and issues across the life span, which was also the breakout session I attended later in the day.
3.What are the cultural differences of beauty?
4.What are the ways we collude as it relates to beauty?
5.How can we “reclaim beauty” and have a more holistic view of our bodies?
I took pages and pages of notes; too many to write out here, but will eventually come out when I start another weekly series on body image.

Lunch was awesome. The conference hosts told the chef that most of the people would be eating vegetarian and he needed make it exciting – wow was it ever! I also had the opportunity to learn more about a post doc in the counseling center. We chit-chatted the 2- hour lunch break about a variety of stuff!

The afternoon session we talked more about how we colluded to the different beauty assumptions and judgments during our lifespan. What things we’d do from infancy (that we remember) until our current age. This group of women span the life cycle, so it was very interesting to hear what a 70 year old woman had to saw in comparison to a 27 year old. Our discussion was lasting much longer than we had allotted time for, but tried to wrap it up on a positive note in addressing how we can be more empowered when it comes to beauty.

After that session we reconvened to watch a performance done by two women from the Duende Dance Theater. It is very powerful to see how someone can use their body to express beauty as an art form. We also her a few monologues from The Good Body, by Eve Ensler. Eve Ensler also wrote The Vagina Monologues. I’d see The Good Body by Eve a few years back in New York and I’d forgotten how good the show was.

So that was the conference at a glance. I’m going to start posting body image thoughts on a weekly basis, probably starting next week, looking forward to rekindling this interest area of mine and learning about some new stuff in the process!