also cool story: about a week ago I invited some friends over to bake scones at like midnight, and they got to my house and were upset cause they realized they weren’t ~*SPECIAL*~ weed scones (cause who even bakes normal scones at 1 am in the morning on a Tuesday apparently only me), so to make them feel better, I immediately pulled some canni-butter out of my fridge and made my friends a batch of weed rasberry lemon scones. Win win, right?

Two days later I was rushing to pack my lunch, and grabbed one of my tupperwares of scones for my evening lunch at work. I got to work, got famished, opened the tupperware and realized i BROUGHT THE WRONG SCONES.

I was too hungry not to eat all three of them and wow cleaning toilets never has been and never will be that awesome again.

In an effort to get out of the house and get nature-y, I took a post-dinner digestion walk through the trails after today’s thunderstorm. Lo and behold, I went baked as fuck and couldn’t stop finding beautiful pieces of nature to collect and take home and probably looked like some creeper bending over the sidewalks to watch worms imagine trees as wise elders and pick lilacs *dont talk to her shes probably got advanced syphilis*

So im at home with all of this naturey wonder and haagen daz cherry chocolate ice cream and Norah Jones and im baked as all hell so what do i do I create sOME ART BITCHES

Also I realized that now that pennies are discontinued where i live, lucky pennies are actually going to be rarer and therefore more important. Commence penny collecting hoarders obsession, no biggie. I pocketed three of those lucky little bastards, today.

I’ve been thinking about making this post for a while now, though I’ve been a tad reluctant to attempt to formulate feelings on the issue, because it is so close to me. I’ve done some self-reflection and prodding at internal feelings and theories as they pertain to my recovery and wellness. And let’s be honest, as it pertains to much of the yoga/recovery tumblr community, the intersections between the two are far too significant to ignore. And I don’t know that many of us have really critically reflected upon this, so I’m surprised: why have so few people asked about it?

Yeah, yoga is awesome. And wonderful, and fabulous, and great for the soul AND body. I’m sure it is scientifically proven somewhere, yoga’s impact on emotional calm, balance in one’s life, and ability to breathe through life. It teaches serenity, mindfulness and perspective. And it will give you abs and probably ~*skinny thighs*~ while doing it. I digress though: no one will negate it’s value in mental and emotional health: it improves depression, all varieties of ache and ailment, anxiety, and as it seems, eating disorders. 

And yeah, I believe strongly in the lessons yoga can teach us about the ways in which to move with ease through daily life. Yoga has the potential to be a beautiful relationship with the self and the body, to be a kinship and self-care act. I would absolutely recommend it to anyone with the patience and the open heart to give it a try.

So I will not discredit yoga for it’s worth. For me, it’s worth is too high to enumerate. However, I want to talk about intersections between yoga, recovery and media representation.

I think the critical questions need to be asked. The westernization, commodification, and filtration through media of yoga has transformed the practice entirely. And those of us reblogging beautiful ballerina snowflake instagrams of inversions and wheel pose do need to consider the role this culture is playing in our recovery.

For one, I am not particularly a fan of Tara Stiles. Not the person, but the brandname. Respect and props go to you, Tara, for the wonderful work you do in getting people to live more healthily and mindfully. I applaud her direct message, but I fear her indirect one is too franchised, too influenced by Weightloss, exercise, capital P Perfection-striving, athletic challenge/ competitive culture. All made pretty by some universe-print leggings, some digital enhancements and a lot of fancy tags.

Case in point: most of us still only reblog extremely aesthetically pleasing yoga pose photos made by fit, thin and otherwise media-conforming idealic images. Personal photos are a bit different, but you can’t argue that media has not capitalized off of the trend, romanticized it and added a bit more competitive athleticism and beauty ideals. ,And they are still unrealistic ones. I don’t know that anyone has directly noticed but I’m becoming increasingly conscious of the type of yoga photos I reblog (ideally either people i know or follow, my own tragic webcam disasters, and women of a variety of shapes and sizes), What are the messages this media’s rendition of yoga sends to those of us in the recovery community?

Believe me, I am guilty of exactly the same perpetuation of culture. Which has led me to really evaluate my reasons for feeling so close to the yoga/recovery community on tumblr. Am I the only one that searched the ‘recovery’ tag for the first time a year and a half ago and immediately felt the overwhelming urge to do the splits, start eating CLIF bars and wearing high buns and ending my posts with ~**☮ ✌*ॐ Namaste! ॐ*✌ ☮ **~?

I did all of those things. And looking back, it feels kind of presumptuous and entitled of me in some small ways. Have I appropriated the practice as encouraged by media representation of western yoga? (esp. as a presumed middle class, privileged white girl [actually I’m way less priviliged than i look/act thank you lifelong financial insecurity and gayness])? Is there a small part of me, despite being so connected to my practice and loving it with an unbreakable passion, that has reduced yoga to something I can get away with overexercising on, or inflated it to the path towards my never-ending wisdom and god-complex superiority? Now we all just want to call ourselves yogis, drink green tea and green smoothies and green everything. We want to be able to touch our toes to our heads and look like a feather gymnast pixie while doing it. with this sort of craze mentality, yoga photos become increasingly reminiscent of thinspo or fitspo photos. Eerie, isn’t it?

My concern is this: is it possible that this yoga-recovery fad (of which I am very much a part of) may be just another route by which we can manifest our sense of control and perfectionism? Don’t get me wrong, I love yoga, and it will always have a special place in my heart. But I do think it is time to critically assess whether or not we may be perpetuating society’s conditioning by virtue of minimizing yoga to a perfectionism of the body and the control of it, both internally and culturally.

*she types while sitting in half lotus on her seafoam-colored yoga mat eating peanut butter with a spoon*

I still, to this moment, have no clue how I feel about this, um, lurking feeling „„that the yoga-media axis and my involvement in that community might not be serving the entirely wholesome purpose we’ve intended.

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1. Sometimes I look at my life and wonder why the fuck I gave up fine arts to go into medicine. Actually tho what was i thinking

2. I seem to have entered that period in my house, pre- grocery run, where my snacks have gotten progressively weirder and more miscombined. Today, I ate a third of a jar of olives, some peanut butter with a spoon, a tupperware full of dates that I found in the bottom of my knapsack, and stolen white chocolate from the administrator’s office of the catholic school I am a custodian at.

3. (laugh at my job its okay i do too but i be rollin in bitches and money ((they pay me extraordinary hourly rates to watchentire seasons of Dr. Who every sunday)) so judge not)

3.5. Also all of my coworkers are bearded fat men who love to talk about attractive women and womens’ body parts and my being an attractive woman and how unnatural it is to be gay. ONE ASKED ME ON A DATE AND I TOLD HIM I WAS A RAGING LESBIAN WITH A HOT GIRLFRIEND YES SCORE ONE FOR ME.

4. I tried to bike to work today, except that I ran over a clip of roofing nails and ended up actually having to jog with my backpack and my one-wheeled bicycle for the last 4 km of my commute to work in order to be on time. So i did in fact get my workout in in the most unexpected and karmatic of ways.

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I am about to unleash a royal fury of disappointment on my old high school mentor wow 

I have cracked the code to irresistability

it is confidence

and milkshakes

I’m looking for clients who are interested in having art done by commission, and am networking for an expanded clientele base. I’d love the chance to make beautiful art out of your children, nieces and nephews, pets, or crazy artistic whims! I am skilled in portraiture, landscape, and am particularly focused on realism and pencil renderings as my specialty.

Check out my old portfolio for a taste of what I’ve been up to, as well as these more recent examples of other (mostly pencil) commissions I’ve done:

Totem. Graphite on mayfair. 16’ x 20’.

Bear and Rat, Just Married. Graphite on mayfair. 16’ x 20’. Wedding commission.

Graphite on mayfair. 16’ x 20’. Portrait commission.

Maggie & Steve. Graphite on paper. 8 1/2’ x 11’. Printed onto wedding guest book cover.

Untitled. Graphite on mayfair. 24’ x 30’. Gallery piece (Ottawa Art Gallery).

For more information or to ask any questions or concerns, do not hesitate to contact me via email at shannon.martin.watson@gmail.com. I can do shipping, too!