Mondays can be rough for many of us, and this doesn’t create the ideal environment for building a better body image. To help you turn that around, every Monday features a tip, activity, inspiring quote or some other tidbit to help boost your body image – and kick-start the week on a positive note.

Got a tip for improving body image? Email me at mtartakovsky at gmail dot com, and I’ll be happy to feature it. I’d love to hear from you!

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Beautiful lilies

A smiling musician plays

My heart with a hole

I wrote this haiku about a year ago.

It talks about the two most painful losses in my life: my grandmother, whose name was Lilya, and my dad, who was a musician in Russia. This sounds so sappy, but he almost always had a smile on his face.

I think haiku is a beautiful, challenging and fun way of expressing ourselves – and you can use this type of poetry for your body image journey, too.

Maybe you start writing haiku to express how you feel about your body every day.

Maybe you write haiku to practice gratitude. To let your emotions out or cheer a friend up.

To talk about your passion. To ponder your body image.

To celebrate your unique beauty. In fact, use beautiful words to do so!

Or to celebrate the joy of eating or moving.

To remind you (and me, too!), haiku is a Japanese form of poetry with three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables.

When researching haiku, I came across ones that talked about body image! They’re from Bodypositive.com, the website of Deb Burgard, a psychologist and eating disorder specialist. (She’s fantastic.)

Specifically, each haiku focuses on the joy of moving.

These are several of my faves:

How I long to dance!
I will blaze with pure movement
Stars bursting inside

-Joanna Y.

Up the hill my heart
Sings out hard, fast, furious
Feet finish the song

-Martha Garvey Jr.

pushing the pedals
sweat streaking down my forehead
a smile breaks out

Here are a few that I’ve created:

Look in the mirror
My family staring back
I smile, drops of tears

My body a tool
Beautiful and powerful
Sometimes I forget

Don’t know you at all
But your unique beauty fact
Tell yourself always

The Haiku Foundation is a nonprofit organization that preserves the art form of haiku in English. They keep a record of all the poems featured on their site that year. So you can find some inspiration there, too.

If you’d like to, share your haiku in the comments! Or if you have another favorite form of poetry, share that below, too.

P.S., Are you participating in our word of the month series? This month’s word is creativity. I hope you’ll write about it, too!

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    Last reviewed: 10 Jan 2011