Canyonlands Self Portraits

The place where I spent the most time during my cross country road trip (click here for the huge post I made about the whole trip) was southern Utah. I visited for the first time ever in 2016 and absolutely fell in love, so when I was planning my trip I knew I wanted to spend a lot of time there. Most of June 2019 was spent traveling around southern Utah’s National and State Parks. I have never felt the way about any other place than I feel when I’m in Utah. Everything is so vast, colorful, and alive, even if it doesn’t seem like it from the surface. It’s an incredibly spiritual place for me.

After all the hardships of late 2018 and early 2019, I was in an emotionally rough place (though I didn’t fully see it when I was living it), and I spent a whole day in Dead Horse Point State Park and Canyonlands National Park on a day that had a lot of complicated significance to me. I wanted to take back my favorite place as MINE, instead of only having memories of it shared with another.

The day before, I had created 10 self portrait sets in Colorado National Monument and the desert outside of Moab Utah (those sets are coming soon!). I took them in a different way than I usually did, and it opened up a whole new world of possibility. Those self portrait sets that I created shook something up inside of me. It’s as if taking self portraits allows me to come back to myself over and over after self-abandonment, whether abandoning myself is intentional or a subconscious survival mechanism. It is becoming crystal clear to me that being in my body and feeling my emotions, which is exactly what self portraits help me do, is so incredibly healing for my body, mind, and soul.

I’ve been reading an incredible book called The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk (trigger warning for anyone wanting to read it, it’s difficult to read) which has been opening my eyes to the way our brains work differently after trauma, our bodies literally hold onto trauma, and the ways that we can rewire our brains to heal and come back into alignment with ourselves. He describes several different healing modalities and how they assist in healing for trauma survivors such as EMDR (Eye Motion Desensitization and Reprocessing), yoga, psychomotor therapy, IFS (Internal Family Systems therapy), and neurofeedback. A major component in a lot of trauma healing is the ability to be present in your body and acknowledge what you’re feeling without judgment. This is much easier said than done.

At the time, I was still so confused about myself and what I was feeling, but I knew I could let go of my thoughts and just MOVE and FEEL when I took self portraits. I didn’t question what came up, I just allowed my body to move in whatever way felt right. I moved energy in, around, and through myself, and what better way to begin healing than nude in the desert with my feet on the earth.

This is the only self portrait set I took on that emotionally significant day, and it was especially healing for me.

Have you ever done something differently than your normal that shifted something in you?
I’d love to hear about it, feel free to comment below or send me an email at bunnyluna@pm.me <3

Photo members: click here to view the self portrait photoset that I took in Canyonlands during my solo cross country road trip this summer
Video members: click here to view the BTS video
First Look members: click here to view the photoset of Pure Rebel next to a river in a Washington rainforest, click here to view the photoset of me taken by Pure Rebel in the same place & click here to view the BTS video