University celebrates Love Your Body Week
By: Nick Mason, Contributing Writer
From Oct. 12-15, Towson University’s Body Image Peer Educators celebrated Love Your Body Week, dedicated to building positive self-image.
“We’re trying to spread awareness of eating disorders and of positive body images on campus,” BIPE member and Digital Media Marketing Lead, Jodi Wolf, said.
Her marketing team keeps the university up to date on their activities through Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. The peer educators stay active by tabling, hosting trivia and working in the community, such as the nearby Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital.
They will also host events in the spring for National Eating Disorders Awareness Week.
Wolf said that her marketing team likes to be interactive with students and encourages them to tag themselves on the team’s Instagram event photos. Wednesday and Friday, the BIPEs held “Dare to Love Your Body” activities and trivia at Freedom Square and the University Union.
On Wednesday, Oct. 14, Charm City Yoga instructor Carrie Shaw hosted a body positive yoga class in the Counseling Center on campus.
To provide a unique body-appreciating experience, Shaw incorporated a special music mix that was geared toward body love and living in the moment. She also tailored the class to dedicate extra meditative moments where participants could appreciate their hands, spines, abs, leg muscles, feet, minds and spirits.
“We did a longer meditation at the end of class on zooming slowly out of your body and into the cosmos, then zooming slowly back into your own unique, miraculous body and feeling more interconnected with everything and joyful about your precious place in this vast universe,” Shaw said.
Shaw joked that if there were any more people, she would have had to move the class out onto the lawn.
Other Love Your Body Week events included a “Love Your Tree” workshop, which was a campaign to help students develop a positive body image. Wolf explained that the name comes from the idea of nourishing one’s body like a tree so that it can grow.
On Monday evening there was a screening of the film “Killing us Softly 4” which looked at American advertising and the relationship to sexism, eating disorders and more.
To close Love Your Body Week, different student groups celebrated body positivity and diversity through a dance showcase at Paws.
On Nov. 18, body image film, “The Illusionists” will be featured at 6 p.m. in the West Village Commons Ballrooms. Following the movie, students will have the opportunity for a Q&A with the director, Elena Rossini.
For more information on the Body Image Peer Educators, interested parties can follow the team on Facebook under “Towson University Eating Disorders Outreach Committee.”
“We’re always accepting applications,” Wolf said.