from the outside in
reflections from a boudoir shoot, one year later
A year ago, I walked into a studio apartment with four strangers to take pictures of myself in lingerie.
I still look back and think it’s one of the best moments of my life.
Not because of how I looked.
Because of how I finally felt.
The four women welcomed me warmly, making the studio seem less like a photo shoot and more like time with people genuinely glad I was there. They got to work making me feel supported. Still, I was scared.
My pulse started to race. My stomach started to turn, and the caffeine I’d had that morning wasn’t helping. And underneath the blow dryer and the brightness of the room, old stories started to drift in. The quiet, familiar ones. Not good enough. Not quite right. Who do you think you are?
This is what the body does. Before the thinking mind can catch up, the nervous system is scanning, trying to decide whether this is safe, drawing on every stored memory to give context to the experience. Scientists call this interoception — the body’s internal sense. The signal system that registers pulse and breath and the tightening in your chest before you have a single word for what you’re feeling. It is a real, trainable skill. Most of us just were never taught that it was one. We were taught to push through the signal instead of learn to read it.
So I almost did.
And then I remembered: I chose this.
I had scheduled the shoot months earlier, picked outfits, and put in quiet, inner work. I wanted to see if I could stay present in discomfort rather than watching myself from a distance.
I started to control my breath. Slow it down. And then I did something that used to be almost impossible for me.
I let the compliments land.
Instead of deflecting or dismissing the compliments as untrue, I decided to let them in, allowing my body to receive them as genuine, trustworthy information.
That is what somatic authority is—treating your body’s signals as information worth hearing. Most of us learned the opposite, but that day, I made a different choice.
I won’t lie to you. The first few minutes in front of the camera were painful.
My mind kept pulling me out of the room and into the future, into the photos that didn’t exist yet, into the judgment I was already rehearsing. Trying to look okay instead of actually being there.
As I remained present, I could feel the shift in my body.
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment, but at some point I thought: you will never be here, in this moment, in this body, again. That realization brought release. I felt joy, and laughter followed. I was having fun. Because I stopped trying to look a certain way and started just being there.
I was experiencing this moment from the inside out instead of the outside in.
When I saw the photos, what surprised me most was that I wasn’t scanning for flaws. In fact, I felt overjoyed. I could recognize the results of years of inner work displayed in picture form. For those hours, I stopped managing my appearance and simply inhabited my life.
I thought about the twenty-year-old version of me who could never have done this.
Not because her body was less worthy. But because she hadn’t yet learned to speak to it. Hadn’t been taught to read its cues, to trust its information, to meet it with anything other than disapproval and correction. She was doing the best she could with the language she had.
So if I could say anything to her, it would be this:
Your body has always been speaking to you. But somewhere along the way you were taught to override it. Train it to fit what others told you it was experiencing. Yet every time your pulse quickened, your stomach turned, or your chest tightened, it was saying what you felt and trying to help you get what you needed.
It was never broken. It was never the problem.
It just needed you to learn to listen with curiosity, kindness.
And that someone was always going to have to be you.
Give yourself a little grace for how long that took. But don’t ever stop listening.
I think about that question a lot now.
What would it feel like to let one compliment fully land today - not deflect it, not qualify it, just receive it?
Start there. That’s the practice.