LightenUp: Every mind, every body.

We are so looking forward to our Forum this Sunday - we have such an amazing group of vibrant, enthusiastic, switched on women that we feel honoured!  Our new model based around self acceptance, self respect and self care will be form the framework of the day, and we intend that everyone will leave with a renewed sense of hope and appreciation for their body and themselves.  Bring it on!!

Thank you to all the wonderful, inspiring, intelligent and fun women who attended our first Foundation Workshop this Saturday!  It was a pleasure to have the opportunity to work together on boosting self acceptance, self respect and self care as an alternative and real approach to achieving our body related goals.  We were excited to introduce the HEARTfull Approach to illustrate how to access our heart space to create powerful change in our lives.  Watch this space as we will soon announce upcoming dates for future Foundation Workshops.  

It was disappointing to recently see slathered across the weekly magazines headlines like ‘hotter than ever celebs share their slim down secrets’ and ‘diets that work – Hollywood’s hottest new weight loss secrets revealed’.  Admittedly, I ended up buying the two magazines to see what they were going to say and the articles both left me feeling hollow.  They were so superficial, focused on dropping kilos fast, implying that this would be the answer to everything, and of course the source of true happiness.  It is hard for anyone, even intelligent women who KNOW that diets don’t work, to resist the temptation to be seduced by these kind of claims…especially if on some level we feel bad about ourselves.  So how to we break the vicious cycle of dieting?  We find that the first step to lose weight without dieting, and to feel better about our body is to build self-respect.  The more we truly hold a high regard for ourselves, the more likely we are to make better, healthy, more nurturing choices for ourselves.  LightenUp has developed an online program called ’30 Days to Self Respect’ that is available for free.  If you are interested send an email to us requesting to program from the ‘contact us’ page of our website.  Why not take the first step to finding real peace with your body? 

24th June 2010 will go down in history as the day Australia had its first female Prime Minister!  Regardless of your political leanings, what an accomplishment for women, and men, and humankind for that matter! Secretly, I would like to think that this monumental moment will also mark a shift in our belief in ourselves as women, as people who can dare to dream big and dare to achieve magnificent things!  I can already 'hear' the breaking down of the shackles that can hold us back, like a fixation with our outward appearances, and a toxic relationship with perpetual diets being replaced by an emerging and real belief in ourselves.  We really can feel free to be who we really are, and know that not only is this enough, but to nurture who we are is the most powerful way to honour ourselves, not to mention inspiring others to do the same.  And as a bonus, when we do give ourselves permission to be ourselves, our eating falls into a natural flow and basically just takes care of itself.  What one thing can you do today to honour who you really are?  Now go and do it, I dare you :)

Recently at the hairdressers I grabbed a magazine to read called ‘Shop til you Drop’ June 2010 which was packed with fashion for ALL shapes and sizes.  It also had great write ups on larger sized models which I found so refreshing.  Maybe this is a sign of things to come?  Wouldn’t it be great for us all if the stick thin models no longer were mainstream and instead were replaced with real women who make up over 90% of the population?  Fingers crossed.

We have had our first minor hiccup with our website.  For a seemingly random reason, we lost over a year's worth of blogs which we were initially devastated about.  Now, we are looking at it as an opportunity to start our blogging afresh in 2010 - we're sorry if you don't see a blog post there that you've come to revisit.  We are going to get busy writing and build up our blog again. 

Keep visiting and watch this space - it will be filled up again soon!!  Thanks for your support!