Hi, I’m Jill
See, it says so right on the labeled vanity stool, lol – what a goofball – I LOVED my Dymo label maker!
I grew up in Beverly Hills, California, the spawn of a Hollywood producer. We had a photographer come to our house once a year to capture not so candid shots of us as a family. I am seven years old in this photo and as you can see, I was not averse to posing!!!
When I hit my awkward teenage years, that all changed. The braces, the lack of breasts, oh the shame….I have many pictures with my shoulders hunched to hide my invisible chest. My face morphed into something strange and angular, my nose grew long and pointy and my best friend was a perfect blond haired California girl, complete with breasts! I pined for boys and dreamed of being a famous model and actress so that one day they would all be sorry for ignoring me. The song ‘At the Ballet’ from A Chorus Line (my favorite play of all time) summed it all up, “Different is nice but it sure isn’t pretty”.
It’s been a long journey from that gangly awkward teenager to the sultry woman below. Through New Wave and leopard spandex, Madonna and leather bullet bras, photography school, living in New York and Paris, quite a few boyfriends – the journey to Fabulous was paved with a lot of tears. How bittersweet it is to look back and realize how beautiful I was in my 20’s and 30’s and I truly had no idea. I felt like I could never measure up to the Ideal of Beauty I had grown up with in Hollywood, and now assaults all women everywhere as we have globalized our limited notions of Beauty, creating sickness and self-hatred in its glossy wake.
Kind Eyes was born from my own healing and my desire to show a more expansive, inclusive vision of beauty – and to help women heal their wounding and pain around self-image and feeling less than. As a photographer, I have seen this wounding come up time and again when I pick up my camera – a contraction, a protective reflex. I believe we all embody the Goddess and we honor her by loving and accepting ourselves. If you already know you’re amazing – YAY YOU – Let’s party with your Bad Ass self – but wherever you are on your journey, be it tentatively stepping into ‘I might not be half bad after all’ or outrageously self-expressed, we can CELEBRATE ourselves as women choosing to claim our Divine Beauty and see ourselves with Kind Eyes.
About Kind Eyes
Kind Eyes is about empowering our own relationship with Beauty and saying goodbye to our negative self-talk. My desire is to create a positive healing – and FUN – experience that will reflect your unique beauty back to you, the better for you to rock the runway of your life feeling like the Bad Ass Goddess you most definitely are!
“the Beauty of each person is found in their imperfections” ~ Sophia Loren
We have the gift of a body, our body, one lifetime to live in it. Can we learn to love ourselves, our bodies, see our ‘flaws’ as our uniqueness and celebrate it? Can we own our Beauty, claim it for ourselves as our divine birthright?
“People often say that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared to look, including inside ourselves”
~ Salma Hayek
I am passionate about BEAUTY, and about reflecting back to any woman in front of me the Divine Beauty I see in her. My deepest desire is to contribute to the healing of our collective wounding around Beauty and to put out a positive message to women that will build self-love and acceptance and hopefully celebration!
Choosing to see myself as beautiful is my personal practice as a woman – As a photographer, it is my joy to help women take ownership of the narrative of their Beauty through visual imagery.
Not that I never grab my stomach like it’s a sack of potatoes, or give myself a facelift with my hands on occasion…but I do it with love, and I laugh at myself and my humanness, and then I say something nice to myself and carry on.
Join me
XOXO Jill
PS – I am not a Navajo or any kind of Native American but I love this Navajo prayer because Divine Beauty is my guiding principal and how they saw Beauty in everything is really inspiring to me. May it inspire you too 🙂
Navajo Blessing Way Prayer
In beauty may I walk.
All day long may I walk.
Through the returning seasons may I walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk.
With dew about my feet may I walk.
With beauty may I walk.
With beauty before me, may I walk.
With beauty behind me, may I walk.
With beauty above me, may I walk.
With beauty below me, may I walk.
With beauty all around me, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.
Photo of me: ©Boudoir Rocks
All others: ©Kind Eyes