Healed Through Boudoir
The term “boudoir” can evoke different things in different people.
For some, it means fun!
For others, it means a chance to play a role, do something a little daring, feel like a powerful badass, or to work through shyness.
But an often-overlooked aspect of boudoir can be an act of healing the relationship with the scars we carry with us.
Yes, I mean both the external, physical scars on our bodies… and the internal scars we carry on our hearts and minds that perhaps nobody sees.
We talk a lot about boudoir as a means to embrace features we may have a difficult relationship with because of unreasonable societal expectations (and what we discover is that despite feeling like the only ones that have them, we ALL have them). This is important work that is deeply meaningful to me as a photographer, and I know is life-changing for the clients I work with. Learning to embrace our sensuality in tandem with our stretch marks, cesarean or surgery scars, birthmarks or other features that are a part of the unique beauty that is us, is transformative.
There are also scars, however, that never show up on camera. Or even in person. Sometimes we even try to hide them from ourselves.
So many of us live with the scars of painful life experiences. Abuse. Heartbreak. Struggling with our mental health. Feeling like we lost a part of ourselves, or our connection to a piece of us. These scars deserve attention and healing too.
While boudoir photography is not a replacement for therapy and will not solve all of your problems, we often forget on our healing journeys that it isn’t just about “work;” healing is also about going within and loving the parts of ourselves – inside and out – that we may constantly be trying to hide or silence. That part of us deserves to be heard, acknowledged, and nurtured.
As we embrace the experience of boudoir that is obvious from the outside – getting our hair and makeup done, being in a photo studio in Columbus, Ohio or a beautiful outdoor environment in the woods, wearing something that feels intimate to us – we can take the opportunity to ask what is going on inside. What are we seeking from this experience? How can we make this something for us? What parts of us can we gently guide and say, “You are safe here?” How can we listen to the voice inside us that we were taught we had to silence in order to survive?s t
Boudoir photography IS about feeling sexy. It IS about fun. It’s about a lot of things. It’s about whatever you want it to be. And if you need to reconnect with a part of yourself that you haven’t visited in a while… boudoir can be about healing too.
