"I began to make a shift when I participated in a gathering called 'The Body Sacred.' One of our goals was to reexamine attitudes toward ourselves and our imperfections. It was a much-needed antidote to my focus on negatives. The group's intent was to consciously transmute conditioned responses to our bodies, reframing our perceptions to see our unique characteristics as assets rather than liabilities.

"Wide hips and heavy thighs, for example, might be attributes reminiscent of the classic figure of a fertility goddess, rather than signs of a failure to live up to the standards of rail-thin advertising models. A caved-in chest is pulling away from intimacy, but it can also be a celebration of the sensitivity that leads to that withdrawal. I began to see the possibility of looking at human 'defects' from a totally different angle — to see them as perfect ways to deal with an imperfect world, as evidence of our participation in a larger healing agenda. What we call our imperfections might be considered ways we have embodied bits and pieces of the group mind and the conflicts of the collective unconscious. By taking on some part of the negativity of the planet, we can transmute it with joy and love, making of it something positive. Each of us, with a certain quota of that darkness, can collectively heal the whole, of which we are each a part."