Acceptance and self-confidence is sexy, isn’t it?
We sat down with Caley Newberry, a boudoir photographer in the Nashville area, about her fascinating story of self acceptance and body positivity. There’s something admirable about the idea of being willing to be photographed as you are, imperfections and all. says a lot about your willingness to accept and love yourself for who you are. I hope this post sends a positive message to love who you are as you are, so that you can love others too.
You can listen to the full interview on our Get Your Marriage On! Podcast episode #39 here. We hope you love it as much as we did!
Dan:
Caley, can you tell me a little bit about yourself, your background, your upbringing and what got you here?
Caley:
Yeah, absolutely! So, I live in Nashville, Tennessee. We’ve been in like a little quiet neighborhood right in the middle of the city for about 10 years now. Before that I grew up in Alabama in a very conservative church household. I was a journalism major, and was a reporter for several years and eventually at one point just really started to fall in love with photography. So I photographed weddings for about 10 years, but throughout that movement I really kind of started to fall in love with my favorite part of a wedding day, watching a bride’s relationship with herself on the day where she just feels amazing and everything has been catered to her. In those moments where I was photographing a bride, just like in her dress, really feeling herself, and seeing that confidence exude from a person who started to really inspire me. Along with that, there were some other things that we’ll get into later, that really kind of led me down the path of boudoir photography. And I’ve been doing this for about six years now!
Dan:
Great. You told me this story about like this awful but wonderful summer where all of these things all converged into like one big thing. Now, you’re not just any wedding photographer, you’re like a darn good wedding photographer. People fly you out, book you months and months in advance, right? So you weren’t just some ordinary wedding photographer. Can you tell me more about that?
Caley:
Okay. So this one year I was kind of starting to realize that as I was becoming a little bit more prominent in the wedding photography world, and as I had more experience and all of that too, I was needing to raise my prices and I was booking higher end clients. And I realized that things became so much more about the day as you got into these higher budget weddings, I felt like it was less about the couple and it was more about the day. So, I was kind of starting to fall out of love with that, but I really had no idea what I wanted to do next. Then I kind of discovered throughout this whole process that I really loved the idea of trying to like fight some of the narratives that purity culture put out there and really help women reconnect with themselves.
I was kind of like really marinating on these thoughts and trying to decide what was going to be next for me. I knew weddings weren’t going to be my forever at this point. And I had this really terrible summer. So my husband works with like these really large non-profits. Pre COVID he traveled all over the world. And so he was spending at the time three months in New York city, which is just a really lame thing to do when you’re a married person. It’s like, why are we spending all this time apart? We’ve been together a lot lately! But that one summer, he needed to go for like three months for this job that he took. During that time, my cousin who was 40 unexpectedly passed away and I wasn’t exceptionally close to my cousin.
My uncle, a few months later, also unexpectedly passed away who I was much closer with. He was supposed to come to my house the day that he passed away. And so my family is grieving this terrible thing, and we’re all doing it together. He passed away on a Thursday, we were going to go to a concert on that Friday. And then I obviously dropped everything and I went home and spent the time with my family, but then I had to come back to Nashville and shoot a wedding. Then I was supposed to have a boudoir session on Friday, and I was able to reach out to those clients and be like, “Hey, this terrible thing happened. I need to go be with my family.” And my boudoir clients, of course, totally understood, and we rescheduled. But you can’t do that with a wedding.
So it was just, it was a lot. That summer kind of just like broke my relationship with weddings. I had amazing clients, wonderful couples, people that I’m still close with today, but it was not what I wanted my future to be. And I really wanted to have a bigger impact than I felt like I could have with wedding photography. So that was when I really started to figure out exactly what kind of turn I wanted my career to take. I really wanted to double down on doing boudoir work. I felt like I could have a bigger impact on women and that it would also kind of give me, I mean, maybe it’s selfish, but that it could give me the lifestyle that I wanted of being able to spend time with my family when terrible things happen. And my life wasn’t so dictated by this day that you cannot reschedule last minute. So this is kind of what started to lead me there.
Dan:
So boudoir has kind of this stigma attached to it. It’s kind of, I guess what you wouldn’t really consider conservative Christian upbringing, but yet you’ve kind of made that bridge. Can you tell me more about that? Like, what does it mean to you to be photographed? What is a boudoir photographer? What’s their job?
Caley:
Yeah! So when I first started doing this, again, like I said, I grew up in conservative Christian culture, and we grew up in this time of purity culture and all of that, where you’re just taught so strongly. And I feel like it’s very much put towards men as well or boys at that age, but I felt like girls really took a lot of the brunt of purity culture. And because you have the modesty conversation and all of that wrapped up in it that like you are responsible to make sure that a boy doesn’t lust after you. So I feel like it really put a really terrible relationship with a lot of young women and their bodies from a very early age that like your body is a weapon and like all of these things that your body is responsible for.
So, I wanted to do something about that. I really started originally marketing this because I was not totally comfortable with what my purpose was at the time, my original push around boudoir photography was that it was a great gift for your spouse. And I thought that would be just like a good thing you could do for them. This is a fantastic gift. And it didn’t take me very long to really realize that I needed to shake that message because I realized that so many women that were coming in and doing sessions with me, that they were doing something that they were not ready for and something that they were not comfortable with necessarily at the time, under the illusion that they were doing something for their partner and that it was like this thought of “I’m doing something unselfish” basically. And that was not the message that I wanted to put out there.
It’s like, no, I want you to do this for you. And at the time, because I still had a lot of those like purity culture messages in my head, I didn’t feel like I could say that for a long time. It was like a lot of mental gymnastics I was doing and I landed in this place of realizing that you can’t give part of your body to another person fully until you know it yourself fully. So then it was like this little baby step transition into, if you’re getting married, this is a great time to just like get to know your body a little better, understand yourself a little more and kind of figure out where your hiccups are going to be. And then over the years, I just kind of like tiptoed and tiptoed more into if you’re doing this as a gift, fine, like if that’s what it takes, that’s fine, but we’re not going to approach it like this anymore.
So we do a lot of homework exercises and stuff like that, such as, tell me about your relationship with your body. Like do you have any trauma that you feel like you need to work through here? These are questions that I just gently come out and ask my clients to kind of help them get into this very vulnerable mindset where they realize that like, okay, if you want to share these gifts with your partner, that’s totally fine. This is something you can share. I would love for you to share them. I’m happy for you to do that. But for my approach here, when you are in my studio, this is all about you. And I want this to be a gift for you to understand yourself in your body.
Dan:
I love that. Tell me about your story with your relationship with your body and your very own boudoir photo shoot for yourself.
Caley:
It was the summer I got married in July of 2007. And that spring I started having some really intense health issues. So, it was affecting everything, like I could not keep food down or in. I just struggled with a lot of health issues around this. My husband and I had waited until we got married to have sex. And then I was so sick that I had no energy to even like give myself in this capacity. It was an auto immune disease, and it took so much energy just to live day-to-day life and try to pretend like I was okay to people that I was around all the time at work and all of that, that anytime that I had left over, I was too exhausted to have any quality time with my husband.
And, and I mean, both sexually speaking and just even having a conversation over dinner, I didn’t have it. So when I was probably like 24 my husband was gone for a little while and I am on about 70 milligrams of steroids a day, which is a pretty high steroid dosage. And I had like the moon face and I had gained weight and I was just not happy in general with my life. And so I’m like at home one night, I’m a, I would say budding photographer at the time. I was not very good at what I was doing at this point, but I just really wanted to understand myself a little bit better. And I thought one of the ways to do that would be through like, just these really raw, vulnerable self-portraits. So I started taking, like, they were, I would say they would probably be considered boudoir, maybe like very poorly done fine art nudes was the kind of thing I was trying to do here.
And I was looking through these photos and some of them was like, okay, well, that’s a terrible photo, taking self-portraits is hard. But there were other photos where I was like, they just had this very profound moment on me where it wasn’t necessarily that I looked at it and thought that I looked pretty, but there was this deeper meaning behind them where like I could tell that I was on the path to documenting a journey. I didn’t look like myself, I barely recognize that myself in these photos, but I could tell in that moment that it was like, this is going to be a thing that I’m going to photograph throughout the years and I’ve done that. And so in that moment, I started to develop a relationship with myself and started to look at this body that I appreciated that it was trying to help me out here, but we were really struggling. We weren’t on good terms at the time.
Then from that, I felt like I started to have this little stir of awakening in myself of just the importance of developing a personal relationship with my body. And I felt like my relationship and my marriage grew from there too, but it had to start with me understanding myself a little bit better and taking that moment to just appreciate where I was in life. And the fact that I was surviving somehow throughout how sick I was in that moment was just a really beautiful process for me. And just like the beginning, I would say the beginning of all of this.
Dan:
So this is like your journalism self coming out. In a way this boudoir photography is kind of like a form of therapy for yourself. And how does that translate to work with the clients? Any stories you can tell of some of your clients and how this process has really kind of turned a corner for them?
Caley:
Yeah! I mentioned that early on, I had done these as like wanting them to be a gift. And I feel like it was really my clients that helped me see how much deeper this could go. So I have clients that have come in that have been struggling with infertility, or that have had multiple miscarriages and need to see that like their body is not their enemy, that there’s this thing that there’s like the sexual relationship that they have with their partners. And they’re trying to create a child, but then this same body that’s trying to create a child and having this beautiful relationship with their partners is also not carrying this child to term and causing all of this grief. And so it’s been a really confusing process for a lot of women. And I think that that has been part of a lot of their journey. I’m not going to say that it helped with their fertility or anything like that, but their mindset around it of just like realizing that their body is not their enemy.
There’s been several people like me who had had a lot of auto-immune issues or health issues, cancer survivors, all of that, that have something to celebrate that maybe it’s their health. I’ve had people that have come in after they have lost a spouse and they’re doing sessions to like help them grieve and understand themselves in this time and document that grief. And so, you know, we do a lot of like laughing and smiling photos and things like that, but also we just like take advantage of that. And I had a session that I did not get a model release for, and that’s totally fine, but you just start talking to a client and they start to like tear up when you’re having this conversation, I photograph that moment and there’s really beautiful raw images in this too. So we try to of course to get the photos where you’re just like beautiful and glamorous and all of that. But I also want to document the process of like just these raw vulnerable feelings.
A couple of years ago, I guess it was two years ago now I had like a two month span where the majority of my clients were women that were in their fifties and may have been in either verbally or emotionally, and on a couple occasions, physically abusive relationships marriages for 25 years, you know, they have grown children and they finally got the courage to walk away from those abusive relationships and have no idea what a healthy sexuality looks like because it’s always been in the concept of this abusive person. And so there’s a lot of trauma associated with that. I very firmly believe that our bodies carry our traumas with us.
I also ask them at the beginning of every session, how do you want to feel when you see these photos? I had a girl last week who said that she wanted to feel beautiful for the first time. And to me, that’s the baseline. Like, of course I want you to feel beautiful, but I want to take it deeper than that. But when you have the baseline of a client who has never felt beautiful before, then it’s like, okay, well, we’re going to start here. Like, we’re just going to get beautiful photos. And as the session went on, I felt like I could get some deeper things from her. But the thing that she needed in that moment was to feel beautiful. And, you know, you get other clients, I’ve had some that say, like, I just want to experience joy and I want that to be captured.
The things that people tell me that they want to feel throughout these sessions is just such a beautiful insight. I mean, I can’t even say how much I appreciate that they let me in on this, but that’s something that we take through their entire session for the day and the photos that I show them in their slideshow and that is all hinged on how you want to feel when you see these photos. And it very rarely involves another person. It’s so often just like their inner, you know, the things that are swimming through their heads all day, everyday, the things that they need to feel. It’s never something that involves another person. It’s always about what’s going on in their heads and things that I don’t feel like they often share with other people. So, so often our sessions start off with like tears in people’s eyes, because the very first question, when they actually like put their first outfit on and have their hair and makeup done is what do you want to feel when you see these photos? And that’s automatically like a very vulnerable and emotional question.
Dan:
That’s great. So this is inspiring! This isn’t, this isn’t about like being X-rated. This is kind of like akin to Renaissance art, right? It’s there to inspire, it’s about the beauty of the form and the person and what you’re trying to say through that.
Caley:
Yes, absolutely. And I think I told you when we talked previously that like going to the Vatican for the first time and seeing all of this Roman art was just like, oh, this is exactly what I want to capture. Like I want this timeless beauty photographed. And so that’s where I get a ton of my inspiration from on how I want to do this. And there are photographers that, and there’s one in my town that is far more, I would say, sexual than I am in her photos. If that’s what somebody needs then by all means, go for it. That’s fine. But that’s not exactly what my process is here. We definitely kind of take the emotion into it and really try to capture someone exactly where they are and meet them in that place.
Like I was telling you like the client that just said she wanted to feel beautiful. It’s like, okay, if I hadn’t known from that question that you’ve never really felt beautiful before. And she is a stunning, like stunning human being. So it was shocking to me that that was her answer. And so the fact that she had never felt that, it was like, okay, I need to meet you there. And if I just kind of came in and photographed everyone in this very like borderline erotic type of work, then I would not have met her where she needed to be. So I think everybody has their own story of their relationship with their bodies. And some people develop it at a very early age and get a healthy relationship and that’s fantastic. And then some people are in their fifties and sixties, and they’ve never reached that point before.
Dan:
Great. So from your very first session with yourself, with putting your camera on the timer and like doing your own, like documenting your journey, have you taken other, you know, done your own photo shoots several times since then and cataloging your times with yourself over that time?
Caley:
Yes, I have. So in that first session that I did, you know, I mentioned I had all the steroid weight, the moon face, all of that, and I didn’t do another session for probably a few years later. I know we weren’t living in the small town we were in anymore. And so it was definitely a few years from when we moved. And the next session was when I was no longer on steroids. I had reached the point in my health that my doctor had said, like, your bones are going to start deteriorating if you stay on steroids. So I had to come off of them. And so coming down from a year and a half of being on these, you know, you take the auto-immune disease, first of all. And then just like the fight of trying to like stay awake all the time when your body is so used to having this hit every day. It was tough.
I also started to be tired all the time, even more than I already was, and I was dropping all of this weight. So the weight that the steroids had helped me retain over the years was all falling off. And I got down to about 85 pounds at my sickest. And I still didn’t realize how skinny I was. I think I still had like a lot of my personal body insecurities. Those things did not go away completely because, I mean, I don’t know many women that don’t have like some insecurity they’re fighting at some point. And I still had a lot of those insecurities on my body that my brain just was not comprehending where I was in that moment. And so I had had people tell me that I was withering away. And even though I was wearing a size 10 in kid’s jeans, I had no idea how sick and tiny I was.
And so I did another photo shoot. And in that moment realized, first of all, that there was some body dysmorphia going on in my brain because I can see how withering away I am. But my brain also immediately went to like a little tiny pooch that I was very insecure about. And that was the first thing that my brain saw instead of that my arms were this big around and that everything else was so small, like the way that my shoulder blades stuck out and all of that, I didn’t see how dangerously thin I was. And so that was a little bit of an awakening for me in realizing that I am not perceiving my body as it actually is. That I had worked to do that. I had to actually work a little harder to fight the insecurities and know that none of that defines who I am or anything like that when I was able to get past the insecurities and seeing how thin I was was a motivation to think, okay, you’ve got to figure out what’s going on here.
And then I did another shoot several years later. I had gained 15 pounds and was back to a decently healthy weight. And it’s continued to gain since then. Then I also realized along this journey that as I’m gaining weight I’m shaming myself for it. And I was trying to fight this in my own head. And so then ended up doing another set of self-portraits and realizing that like, oh, my favorite self-portraits are when I’m feeling my healthiest and that I am at a heavier weight. And that I feel the most energetic. It was the first time I had had energy in years, like 10 years, probably the first time I had had energy. So photographing those now, I will also say my skills got a lot better by this point, too, but that was my favorite set of photos that I had done because it felt like the real me and I could actually document happiness and health instead of sickness and wasting away.
Dan:
That’s so beautiful. Now, part of your process is you take the photos and then a few weeks later, your client comes back for a reveal of the photos. And that’s a very, very touching, very emotional moment and very telling.
Caley:
Yeah, that’s probably selfish of me that I make them come back. I could just send them an online gallery, but I really want to watch the reactions. So I have them come back and we make an event out of it and I specialize in print product. So being in person, it’s a lot easier to help them print it, pick out their printed products and stuff like that. So there is purpose behind it. And I start off with like a slide show and I feel like there’s over the years I used to do like these very like romantic songs and stuff like that. And now I play this girl is on fire. Just with the message that we’re trying to put out there, you know, we have a little like box of tissues out here too, in case we need it.
And I would say like one in every five people cries and maybe it’s like one in every 10 starts standing up and cheering for herself. So it’s really fun to watch these women just like have no idea how beautiful they really are, like even doing family portraits and stuff like that over the years, even when I did weddings and engagements and all of that, you’re trying to catch a moment and a relationship. And so the moment is more important than the pose. And that’s different here. Here it’s the posing and the intention and we go kind of slow and we have fun, but it’s a very long, intentional process, like my clients are sore the next day from posing and the process! They have no idea that they can actually look like this because nobody poses themselves like this in real life.
Watching those feelings come out in their photos and how they react to them is probably my favorite part of my job. Just like sitting there and watching them have either like, I mean, it’s usually joy, that’s kind of what I’m going for, but sometimes it is highly emotional for women that have never seen themselves as beautiful. And, they’re able to find, you know, 40, 50, 60 just absolutely stunning photos of themselves that they can’t let go of. And so they put them all in their album because they’ve never had that many photos of themselves in their lives over the years that they’ve loved. And to have them all in one moment, it’s just a really powerful thing to watch.
Dan:
Can you share maybe one or two of your most memorable photo reveal sessions you’ve had with a client?
Caley:
Yeah! I mentioned that I had one client that she had been married for 25 years to an emotionally and verbally abusive person. She said in those 25 years, he had never told her that she was beautiful. She was very thin. She said that he used to come up and pinch her love handles and tell her that she was chubby and all of this stuff. And she internalized those messages over the years. And so she was sitting on our couch and we start playing these. She’s very nervous throughout our whole session. Like the first several poses, she was like noticeably shaking because she was so anxious and those were like the first few photos. I know we’re going to have some throw away photos there just to get you comfortable, but every now and then somebody nails them.
But for the most part, those first few photos I know are going to be toss away photos while we’re just getting to know each other. And I’m watching like, which side of your face is your good side and all of those things, your “good side”, the side that they would prefer to see. So I know that these are going to be throw away photos for the most part. And that’s what hers were because she was so nervous and you could see it in her expression. And I had to show her that she could trust me and she had to get comfortable with me. That’s all part of the process! But she’s the reason that I keep Kleenex in my studio now, because she’s watching these photos and at the time I just had toilet paper. She’s just staring at these photos and we would go through them one by one and we rate each photo for which one that she liked the best and think that she wants to keep.
And it would take her 20-30 seconds to answer for each photo because she was just staring at them. I just didn’t talk. I just didn’t want to break that moment where she’s processing how she actually looks. This is not Photoshop, this is just what she looks like when she’s posed well and lit well, and all of that. And she had no idea that she could look that way. And so every photo she would just sit there and take it in. And of course at first I’m thinking, does she hate them all? But then she would talk and she would just be like, “that’s beautiful”. But it would take her like 10 or 20 seconds to say that every single time and watching her confidence as we kept going through all of them, as she saw each photo, she just got so excited. So it started off in these tears and then every now and then a photo would come up that would make her cry again. But it started off with her kind of grieving a little bit that she had never seen this in herself before. And by the end of it, she’s just like crying happy tears. And it was one of the most powerful experiences that I’ve had when watching a woman see those photos for the first time.
Dan:
I love it. Is there another memorable one?
Caley:
My other favorite is the other extreme. She was a young woman and she was getting married and I don’t do a lot of brides. I mean, I’m always happy to, but I just don’t end up getting a lot of brides. I don’t think that that’s the message I’ve put out there, but she was getting married and I think was, you know, knew that she was a cute girl. A cute woman. But when we started playing her slideshow, she actually got up and started cheering at herself and was just like whooping around the studio. Whenever a photo came up, she would just be like, “oh my”, bare hands on her face. She was freaking out. So there’s both like you get both ends of the spectrum. Those are probably my two biggest extremes. But watching her, like I just laughed the whole time watching her just like rejoice in what she saw in herself.
Dan:
What’s your advice for anyone listening to this that feels like they can improve their relationship with their body, which is probably everyone out there?
Caley:
Yeah, no, I don’t think you ever arrive at a moment like that. Right? Like you get wiser with age, but you never arrive at ultimate wisdom. I feel like this is all part of that too, because our bodies are also constantly changing. And so, you know, you may be happy with yourself at 28 and you’ve done some work this day there. And then by 45, you don’t have the same body anymore. So I would think my advice to people is that it takes a lot of mental work. It’s always a process. It’s not something you arrive at the ability to look at a photo and appreciate the things that you may not love about yourself, but like take it in, do the mental exercise of thanking your body for all of the things that it has. I tell a lot of people this, it’s part of my overall message.
I talk to my Instagram stories a lot. This is one of the things that I felt like resonated with a lot of people when I was as sick as I was, I had this big struggle with that. Like I wanted to say, “I am not my body”. And so that allowed me to separate from my body in a way that I would say was unhealthy that I just stopped caring about my body because it was me thinking “I am not my body”. This doesn’t matter. And then it became no, I am my body. My body is this thing that does all of this work for me and my body tried so hard to save me over all of these years when I was so sick. And so I’ve kind of arrived at this place that I think I’m actually happy with what this message says is that we’re in partnership with our bodies, that your body does not define you, but you’re not separate from it either.
It is your container for how you live this life and you’re doing this together. So I feel like it’s a lot like a marriage, right? Like you are your own person, but you’re also in a partnership. And I feel like your own relationship with your body is that way too. You have something bigger than your body inside you, but you’re still in this relationship with it. So how do you nurture it? How do you take care of it? You wouldn’t talk to your partner with the kind of self-loathing that you talk to you. I at least hope you wouldn’t talk to your partner with the kind of self-loathing that I feel like women, especially, but probably men too can talk to their bodies about. So why would you treat something that you live your life with that way? I’m nicer to anybody and everybody than I can be to my own self. And it takes a lot of mental work to get to that place. So that’s the first thing I would say. I feel like until you reach that point, you’re never going to be able to fully embrace yourself or your relationships or anything until you confidently know who you are and how to take care of your own body.
Dan:
When you can like yourself and your embodied self, what does that do for individuals? What do their relationships look like? How do they interact?
Caley:
Which is everything like going into life, waking up every morning, putting on clothes that you don’t feel like you look good in. I had this conversation with a person, not that long ago, that would say that she noticed every time she looked in the mirror, she would pinch her love handles. It became a compulsion. She couldn’t stop herself from doing it. That every time she looked at herself, that was where her eye went and she would pinch her love handles. And so I stopped her and I was like, what was the thought that went through your head when you did that? And she was like, sometimes there wasn’t even a thought, but when there was one, it was self-loathing, otherwise it just became a compulsion. I was like, do you think it’s possible that even when you weren’t having those active thoughts, those love handle pinches were still sending that subliminal physical message of self-loathing?
And she was like, “oh, absolutely. I never felt better about myself when I did it.” And I think that that’s kind of the extreme example. All of the things that we say and do to our bodies affect our lives. So getting into that place of appreciating yourself helps you wake up. I mean, how powerful is it when you wake up and you’re just like, I really like myself today! And I mean, it feels like you can do anything and it’s not all about what you do, but you’re more available to others as well when you’re not wasting energy hating on yourself. Does that make sense? I love that question.
Dan:
Caley, is there anything else you want to share?
Caley:
I don’t know. I feel like there’s still a lot of messages around women and their own sexuality that I don’t like. I’ve always struggled with this message of purity culture. I’m very much in the fight against purity culture. I was harmed by it. I know a lot of people that were harmed by it and my parents didn’t really even talk about sex to me very much at all ever. And I was not a sexually interested teenager or whatnot. So I feel like a person that escaped pretty damaged by purity culture in my childhood. But I carried so many messages throughout high school and college and young adulthood that sex is bad.
Sex is bad, sex is bad, don’t have sex. Then all of a sudden you’re supposed to, you know, put on a white dress or a suit or whatever. And then all of a sudden anything is in bounds. And that’s the message that I’m trying to fight a little bit. I also don’t want to like throw out there go be sexually active, explore, have fun if that’s not the thing that your morals align with. But I think that there is a balance that has been missed all along the way. And until you’re able to take those baby steps, it doesn’t mean you need to go do a boudoir session. Like there are plenty of people that I would say that, you know, a boudoir session may not be for you. And that’s fine. Like I’m here if it’s something that feels helpful to your life road, to recovery and embracing yourself and loving yourself fully. But that’s not everybody’s way of doing this.
I think the ability to just even put lotion on your skin and rubbing over the jiggly bits and all of that to moisturize your skin and not hate yourself while you do it. There’s just so many ways to spend time with yourself, with your body that I think are hugely beneficial in getting to truly know yourself. And when you can fully awake into the idea of how much you love yourself and how strong your body is and everything that it’s capable of and how resilient you are with this partner that you are the most intimately attached with, then taking that into your relationships and you do it.
If you can do it in that order, I think that is ideal. But even in my life, over the past several years, I have made room specifically to have a relationship with myself before I’m able to share things with my partner. Um, and I mean, we’ve been married for almost 14 years and he is like the other half of my brain. I feel like sometimes we are the same person and I want to share everything with him, but there is still this precious gift of being able to spend time by yourself that I think we miss out on a lot.
Dan:
That’s beautiful. That’s great. If people want to find more about you, reach out to you, what’s the best way for them to find you?
Caley:
I would say I’m the most active on Instagram. My Instagram handle is @caleynewberrystudios. That’s where I talk the most to people and try to put the most positive messages out there. And then from there you can also find my website and stuff like that, but Instagram is definitely my go-to place.
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