Weddings

Reading this may change your whole Wedding Day Experience to one of JOY and DELIGHT!! Read on – It will be worth your time.

This month, I talked with one of my favorite women in the business of Giving Brides the Best Possible Wedding Day Experience, Sarah Jenks of The Breathtaking Bride. Sarah Jenks is a name synonymous with having not only the best possible wedding day but the most pleasurable engagement possible and pleasure is a topic I hold close to my heart.

A little background about Sarah – after years of struggling with overeating and weight loss/weight gain, Sarah decided to get off the roller coaster and understand not only the how to eat well but the why am I eating this way to begin with. Her question led her down a path of self-discovery, spiritual awareness and a new love for her body. It was the morning after she became engaged that she discovered her real purpose. After the initial shock and awe of being engaged to the man of her dreams began to soften her first thought was  “Am I thin enough to get married?” What a surprise after all these years of feeling so right with herself to suddenly be pulled back into the conversation of not being enough. She realized in that moment the extraordinary cultural paradigm engaged woman are dealing with and decided to do something about it – thus was born The Breathtaking Bride.

Sarah is embarking on an experience with a select group of brides in the coming weeks – It’s called the Breathtaking Bride Booty Camp and I will be joining Sarah and a select group of lucky ladies as an expert on having authentically beautiful wedding photos. Sign up for this program now!

Sarah and I sat down and talked for a couple hours about everything from her recent wedding this past summer, her big move to San Francisco and her belief that the only way to lose weight and have a successful engagement is to create a life full of romance, play and joie de vivre. Who wouldn’t want to sign up for that diet plan? I know I want to.

Without further ado, tips from the radiant Sarah Jenks of Breathtaking Bride –

— USE YOUR ENGAGEMENT AS A OPPORTUNITY TO DRAW YOUR SHARED ROAD MAP

Brides often come to me with a desire to change something about the way they look because they are feeling unhappy and think that losing weight is the answer. Once we start to open up their feelings and ideas, we will discover that behind their discomfort with their body image is something else – some aspect of their relationship that they are unhappy with.

We think that once we are engaged we have it figured out, something like “I’ve been working my whole life to find the man of my dreams, now I found him and he’s locked in, we’re locked in” But actually the engagement is the beginning not the end.

It’s important to put attention on your passion, on your intimacy, on your intellectual conversations, have  conversations about spirituality and your dreams in life – where you want to travelto  and when you want to retire and what do you want your marriage to look like. How do you want to feel when you come home at the end of the day from work, where you want to be when you’re 45 or 55 or 65? Talk about how your marriage is going to be similar to and different from your parents, from your friends. Talk about all of it, the whole thing. So I think that is the biggest tip.

Recently a client came to me distressed. She was gaining weight after her engagement and wanted to be losing weight. We spent weeks trying to understand what was going on. We started to dig into what thoughts, concerns, fears she was having and what she discovered was a fear that after she was married, she would start to become a mother to her man instead of a wife, like she saw with her own parents. She discovered a false belief that after her wedding she would be responsible for all the cooking and cleaning and nurturing her husband and she would gain weight. She was really very in-love, but had never shared her fear with her fiancé. Together, we talked about the kind of marriage she wanted to create and how she could start creating that now with sexy and fun date nights. After weeks of seeing no results, she lost 10 pounds in two weeks! She had been so distracted by her future version of herself looking fat, she hadn’t thought much about what she really wanted.

When we were done with our work, when she got married the thought how am I going to look didn’t even cross her mind. She went from feeling shy and self-conscious to walking the aisle feeling fabulous and her attention on the amazing man was waiting for her at the end. It was a hugely successful transformation.

TAKE TIME OFF FROM PLANNING YOUR WEDDING AND PUT TIME INTO SHARING PLEASURE WITH YOUR MAN

Often times when women become engaged, their lives suddenly become work and wedding, period. I just got married in June, so, I’m fresh off the boat with this and got into a cycle of working and not planning my wedding or planning my wedding and not working.  Taking time for myself was not a priority and because I didn’t make it one, it didn’t happen. When I did take time off I felt guilty, thinking “oh, my mom is working so hard or I really should be doing this and shouldn’t I be enjoying this, like isn’t this my wedding, like isn’t this suppose to be fun?”

I realized that my mom was choosing to because she was deriving pleasure from it. I accepted that this is a gift from her and I could find pleasure in receiving it.

Once I got that I was able to turn my attention to having fun with my man. We planned date nights and weekend get-aways where planning our wedding was off limits.

Now, I suggest all my brides go on a weekend trip with your fiancée and don’t talk about the wedding; get back massages, go for walks and take baths, hang out with your girlfriends. Make pleasure a priority in your life, in your planning and trust that taking time off will contribute to the pleasure of planning your wedding and having the wedding experience of your dreams come true!

Want to learn more about Breathtaking Bride, click here.

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Is there someone YOU want to hear from?

In September, I had the honor and delight of working with Clare Robinson and Matt Heaphy to have captured their classically, originally elegant Headlands Center for the Arts Wedding. Recently, I asked Clare if she would write a bit about what had inspired her and Matt in planning their wedding , her answer is too inspiring not to share with anyone planning a wedding, here it is –

We were inspired by each other. Prior to his proposal, Matt and I had never talked about what we each envisioned for our wedding, so after he proposed (and after we’d spent a few months just floating in our state of engagement), we wrote letters to each other, putting on paper our dreams, inclinations and hopes for the day. These letters served a saving grace throughout the planning process. Whenever we were overwhelmed or uncertain about a decision, we’d find inspiration and answers by going back to what we’d put in writing oh so many months prior.

Wherever you are in the planning process, I invite you to invest some time and attention, following Clare and Matt’s lead in putting on paper your dreams, inclinations and hopes for the day. Use it as a valuable touchstone throughout your wedding planning. This can be one of the most cherished experiences of your wedding planning!

Over the past decade while mastering the skill of being an award winning wedding photographer, I embarked on a life long path of transformation and one of the key distinctions I have cultivated may be the key to you having the wedding of your dreams. It is the fine art of receptivity and it has transformed my experience of joy in the world and my ability to look and feel great in photos. It started in 2001, the launch of wendy k yalom photography along with a daily yoga practice. Through my yoga practice and the guidance of a series of extraordinary teachers, I came to discover myself to be a far greater person than I had imagined myself to be. As the Patanjali Yoga Sutra promises –

When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.

My great purpose was to fully experience and appreciate the richness of life and love and somewhere in the midst of inspiration and possibility, I decided to master the fine art of receptivity. What I didn’t expect in becoming highly receptive to the beauty and brilliance of my life was a positively wonderful experience of myself in photographs.

Want to know how it worked? Watch this short video and be inspired to give it a whirl.