I was raised by a bunch of beautiful women who loved being naked. They practiced yoga naked, they bathed naked together in the stream behind our palapa, they seemed to just always be naked, which, of course, they were not. Their nakedness, however, gave me enormous amounts of anxiety and stress as a child. You see, we lived in a very small, isolated, Catholic village nestled on the Pacific coast of Mèxico and we were already the foreigners, which was weird enough for the locals. So, if by chance you were to bring a friend home while your mama and her gorgeous gringa girlfriends & even one local woman were doing naked yoga, your friend would tell the village about the bizarre spectacle at your house and you would be known as the Devil Child Of The Naked Gringas, which of course, I was.

Luckily, most of us grow up and I myself have become one of those wild naked women! Only now I photograph my body, the bodies of my friends and strangers alike, and share the images with the world because a whole lotta people in our world are still terrified of the un-clothed human body!

I have a secret: There is absolutely nothing terrifying about the human body. Not a thing. Nothing at all.

"But why the naked body? Can't you celebrate Body Positive without being nude?" So many people ask me? Of course you can celebrate body positivity whichever way you darn well please. I personally like seeing pores, stretch marks, cellulite, scars, all those things we can easily hide which cause many of us to live in a state of self-loathing because we are 'hiding' our true selves and are terrified someone will find out our secret: that we are scarred and that we are scared.

What many people have completely forgotten, however, is that being scarred and scared is sacred.

Last Saturday night, my Friend Lyndi Rivers and I hosted a woman's gathering at my studio. Anyone was welcome & 25 women showed up. I had been inspired by a recent blog from my fellow Body Positive Warrioress Jes Baker AKA The Militant Baker and Liora K who are also my beloved friends. In a similar tone to what they did, I wanted to take some nude photographs without the body parts that make nude photographs so nude but still show the irreplaceable beauty and uniqueness of women: the varying types of gorgeous behinds, booties, bums, tooshes, nalgas, whatever you want to call that sacred and covered part of women.

Here is the thing: We need not put others down to feel beautiful. We need not put ourselves down to praise the beauty of others. I do not need to make you wrong so that I can be right. I do not need to be wrong to make you feel right.

Life is intelligent. Life is beautiful. A human comes to have a heartbeat inside the body of a woman as we go about our lives while a whole new person grows within us! We age and are given sacred body lines like badges of honor to remind us of the painful, glorious, joy-filled lives we have lived!

When we search photos for our flaws, we are being very very unkind to ourselves. When we search photos for others' flaws to feel better about our own fragile sense of self, we are basically searching for a way to place someone else as the 'flawed' or the 'wrong' one and that is very unkind too. Weekly magazines would disagree with me since they make millions by posing us as in competition with one another. We are not in competition. We NEED each other. We need to empower our girls and boys to feel beautiful and live the POWERFUL lives that they are here to LIVE!

Why is feeling beautiful important? It's like asking why is breathing important. Beauty is our birthright, not some industry and media created oppressive competition condition. We are beautiful, we are strong. I am not right, you are not wrong.

We Just Are.

Here are the beautiful tooshes of a group of women in Tucson who still struggle-yet-practice feeling beautiful and who hope to inspire you, dearest reader, to feel amazing just as you are:

(Yup, above that's us, Jes Baker and Jade Beall huggin' naked, preachin' body LOVE. What's UP!)

This Divine Woman is actually one of my first inspirations for A Beautiful Body Project. I love photographing this Body and Soul.

Love you all!

-Jade

ps- you can still have your name in the FIRST A Beautiful Body Project Book by preordering a copy! You know you want it ;)