A warm thank you to the 11 wonderful people who joined me at New Hope Camp for last Sunday’s day retreat! We soaked up the fall sunlight practicing yoga on the pond, and meditated to the sound of the breeze in the trees. The food was delicious, and the people made the day wonderful. I can’t wait to see you at the next one. Last Thursday was our Chapel Hill screening of Embrace, and more than 100 people gathered to watch the inspiring documentary! I loved hearing you laugh and

Quick: describe your body in one word! Don’t think too hard, just spit it out. Now that it’s out in the open, how do you feel about how you described your body? Does it feel like a celebration of what it can do? A criticism of how it looks? Neutral? I’ve asked this question on Facebook more than once, and the public comments are mostly positive words. But later, in private, I hear words of struggle and resignation. If that’s the case for you, know that you aren’t

Exercise used to be my unhealthy obsession. It usually felt joyless, but I gave it hours every day. I’d jog alone at night and lift weights so aggressively that I was nearly always sore. If someone delayed my "workout" (a term I rarely use now!), I would get so anxious that I wanted to cry. My friends called me a health nut, but when I was honest with myself, I wasn’t exercising for my health. I was willingly sacrificing my safety and mental health to shrink my body into OK-n

Every day, the news is full of yet another layer of heartbreak. So many kind, loving hearts are grieving around the world. Because of this, I’ve been second-guessing whether to write what I’d planned. I worried it might be petty to talk about making peace with our bodies at a time when violence seems to be everywhere we turn, and our action feels urgent. Then I attended a webinar led by the powerful Sonya Renee Taylor, the founder of The Body Is Not An Apology, and I was

Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing with you a few of my favorite body image action steps! They’re a taste of what we’ll work on in the Body Peace series at Carrboro Yoga in August, and the tip of the iceberg of what my body image journeying clients celebrate in coaching. There’s so much body judgment we consume every day, that we’d probably need to hole up in an power-free cabin in the woods to escape all of it! Since that’s not realistic, and you’d never finish Orange I

Pssst: If you're signed up for my newsletter, please note that I have a new email address! Please add emily@emilyburrows.com to your contacts. We miss out a lot when we're preoccupied with hating our bodies. I'm not only talking about the pictures we duck out of, the pools we don't swim, and the adventures we don't take. I also mean the day-to-day energy drain of tearing down our bodies, our physical homes, that makes it really hard to care for ourselves (and others). You

I'm not too worried about how yoga poses look. I'm interested in how they feel. During a yoga class some years ago, I was practicing a warrior pose and experimenting with how different it felt to shift my weight from the inside of my foot to the outside. Suddenly I noticed the teacher by my side. She looked me up and down for a moment and then asked me to, “Suck in your stomach.” Um. Even though she couldn’t see it, my core was active. But in an attempt to be a “good” y

The first time I watched a video of myself teaching yoga, I had to take a time out. Even though I knew the lighting wasn’t quite right and I was wearing a boxy shirt that didn’t move properly and had sweat marks from the humidity and sunshine, the way I saw my body shook me. I’d taught yoga hundreds of times in this body, but I hardly recognized it on screen. After uttering a loong “oooooooof,” I excused myself from the video my friend and I were reviewing together, and sa

I want to share a loving reminder with you that's been on my mind: You haven’t failed at self care, body positivity, or anything else, if your relationship with your body is on the rocks at the moment. There are just some days when loving your body is too tall an order. Sometimes you’re in deep physical pain or you’re thoroughly exhausted. Or your inner critic may be on a bender, shaking her fists and shouting judgments that are so high-pitched you can’t hear over them. Or

Recently, I came across a box of some of my many old journals. The last time I stumbled upon them, I found some embarrassing relics of my past, including a love letter to New Kids on the Block and a photo of my face pasted onto a model posing with Chris O’Donnell. This time, I found a notebook of mostly tables and numbers. I flipped through a couple of pages before I recognized it as one of my old “health tracking” notebooks. From high school through public health grad