Helping create a world equal where we view everyone as equal is Jessica Sander’s central theme in life right now. Through her work, this fantastic young social worker and author of “Love Your Body” hopes to encourage people to be their best selves and to create safe spaces where everyone can feel valued, heard, and included.
In this podcast, we will hear about her motivations and her uplifting stories and ideas leading to this book and her work.
It all started from a conversation with her best friend about unnecessarily dangerous and expensive plastic and vaginal surgeries that we hear so much about nowadays. While even as she was grappling about her identity at that time, hearing women waste time and energy focusing on how they look urged Jess to do something.
Jessica shares writing the book is in itself a journey of self-discovery. She realized the book she was imagining didn’t exist at all. So she decided it will be out of the box with an uncompromising message. It will be the first children’s book that discusses stretch marks and cellulite–all kinds of female forms! While admittedly a white female is falling within “the norm”, she didn’t quite see the way she has growing up, which still made her want to see more representations. Jessica felt like she was an untapped energy source for such a book to come to life.
She also shares how she struggled to find balance in writing the book. Recognizing that we do live in a world that seems to value beauty amongst all else, Jessica explains how she didn’t want to set false expectations. Instead, she strived to make the book as compassionate and positive for people in such places of self-doubt but in a realistic way.
Jessica and Alexandra navigate an essential conversation in this podcast. Especially now that we can be so consumed with what we see on social media, and just like Jessica’s works, this conversation aims to lead diverse voices without being anything less than compassionate, open, and authentic.
Links mention in the podcast
- Love Your Body – Book
- Download audio
- Watch video of the podcast
- Schedule free Ayurvedic consultation
- Check out our Free Meditation Challenge with Alexandra
Podcast Highlights
- My whole life, I was waiting for myself to be represented by a model or something like that. And when we do not see ourselves represented in the content that we consume, we think we’re not right, normal, desirable, important, and to be held on a pedestal. Then we are always striving to be something other than ourselves. I started sorting out the imagery and saw more and more women showing forms that I haven’t seen before in these content. I was inspired by their body positivity and I realized the true power of representation. – Jessica Sanders
- I’m lucky enough to be fairly confident enough in my childhood, not with my body but in my ability to have an opinion and my voice. I challenged the negative thoughts with self-compassion and taught my self a different way. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it has completely gone away; it’s social conditioning and we have to do a lot of unlearning. – Jessica Sanders
- Body Positivity, started by lesbian women, is a movement to acknowledge the body in its truth. It’s also combating fatphobia in our culture. People with bigger bodies are also discriminated, maybe not in a life-threatening way, but in all kinds of awful ways on a day-to-day basis. Shame could be potentially a very damaging thing for an individual. – Jessica Sanders
- We can easily judge when we’re on the side of normal. It takes tremendous effort to wake up to what other people go through and it was difficult to bear to see all these people in pain and suffering. If I cannot be compassionate with myself, if I don’t understand where my moods, opinion, and own energy comes from and my courage that I want to build in this world, then I cannot bring that forward and towards other people. – Alexandra Kreis
- I don’t want young girls to go through what I went through. It shouldn’t be like that it was their destiny. Because my experience is ‘the norm’. And it shouldn’t be ‘the normal.’ We have to start the conversation early. – Jessica Sanders
Guest Bio
Jessica Sanders is the young author behind Love Your Body. She is also a social worker from Melbourne who started with photography as her first passion. Ready to try anything new, she jumped right into researching and writing her first book and the upcoming ones from inspirations from her own childhood and her post-graduate studies which focused on Gender.