Once Upon A Time are words of initiation we learn at a very young age. The four words, which initiate us into the world of story, are among our first invitations to open our imaginations and let words and images carry us to faraway lands, imaginary spaces, to new landscapes of promise and potential. Through these early stories, we begin to form who and what we become in the world...

The families we are born into tell us stories also about what is expected of us and how we are perceived by those who know us first. Our families instruct us with words, glances, silence and overt instruction on who they see us to be. Familial stories fill us with expectations and demands that can both nurture and smother the urgent whisperings of our own souls.

And finally our culture tells us stories about who we should be and how we should look. Through an abundant mix of media images, musical lyrics and words, collective ideals of beauty and gender are formed and imposed upon us. Our movies, news, novels, advertising and all forms of media spin a compelling mythology that seeps into our brains, blood and bone. None of us is immune to the full force of this powerful weave of expectation and direction that engulfs us with airbrushed images, saturates us with lowered expectations and preaches conformity with the collective over any unique expression of voice, act or thought.

As human females caught up in this onslaught, we often do not know what hit us until we are already locked in behaviors that are no less than an uncivil war that pits us against our own bodies. The airbrush is weapon of choice. The abundance of Images we see each day are brushed into caricatured “ideals,” bereft of human story, wrung dry of human experience, stripped of the sweat, blood, pain and blunt force of what it means to be human in bodies that morph with each minute we are alive.

Through all this, we learn to ignore the innate wisdom and truth our bodies strive daily to communicate to us through hunger, pain, sexual desire and fatigue. Unblemished bodies, airbrushed and unreal, tell unblemished stories like the made-up narratives we read in popular magazines of Hollywood stars that have no relation to the truth of their lives. When our scars, wrinkles, sags and lumps, the real nouns and verbs our bodies, are rendered invisible, our own unique stories shrivel and are silenced.

Rachel Naomi Remen has studied extensively the link between story and our bodies. She is an M.D., Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, Founder and Director of the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness at Commonweal and a pioneer of Integrative Medicine.

Remen researched story-telling in hospitals for transplant patients and found the ones who listened to stories and told theirs healed much faster and did not reject their new organ at much higher rates than patients in control groups not bathed in story.

Writing about the power of story to change lives, Remen noted, “Like most of us I am a passionate change agent. After all, who would spend a third of their life accumulating all that knowledge and skill if not for the hope of making a difference? So it is surprising how long it has taken me to recognize the power of a simple story to make change.”

Remen also noted that initiation into the power of story “need not be a moment of radical transformation, but rather a movement of return, a turning toward the soul.”

A Beautiful Body Project is both an initiation and celebration of the power of story to make change. Jade’s photographs spark this initiation for the women baring their bodies and for the millions of people who derive inspiration and hope from witnessing, finally, what is real.

A Beautiful Body Project derives from the powerful link between images and stories infused with the passion and potential of lives lived in human form. It is about claiming, fully and completely, our imperfect bodies, fully embracing the truth, pain and joy that are written upon these bodies, and, together, transforming the collective tale of what it means to walk this earth in female form.

-Jacquelyn Jackson, M.S.W. is a communications expert, writer, and editor for A Beautiful Body Project

What influences have you felt from your family or culture? Please share any thoughts on Jacquelyn’s article in the reply section below:

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