Did you ever try naked yoga? Did you every try yoga at all? It’s not about being flexible enough to put your leg in your neck while standing on the finger tips of your left hand. It’s about becoming and being healthy. Have a look at Naked Yoga School, with over 200 episodes of exercises. There has to be something in it for you!
Note: be careful, try the exercises at your own risk. They are labelled in difficulty; don’t start with anything advanced when you’re not advanced!
Sosna sarna from Jucho, on Vimeo. Escaping the madness.
The interesting bit is that for meditation it is always emphasised that it’s important to wear clothing that doesn’t feel tight or restrictive.
Now, what can be less restrictive than no clothes at all? (Except for when it comes to your own mind that tells you to wear something because being naked is wrong? In which case you should retrain your mind, but that’s my opinion.) That is the awareness I had when I started into nudism and naturism. After trying it, I decided that meditating in the nude was the ultimate way to do it for me. There is literally nothing that is ‘around’ you. No itching from fabric, no restraints from elastics.
I only discovered one drawback to this. When meditating together with others who are not into meditating in the nude, I don’t want to make those people feel uncomfortable so I wear something as light as possible. Those meditations are never as good as the nude ones, though.
If you want to read more about nude meditation, here are a few links to other blogs:
Press release NFN 22 january 2014:
Tuesday January 28th will see a unique fact in Dutch history. Then the court in The Hague will look at the 43 fines that have been handed to nudists in the Summer of 2013. 20 nude recreating people did not pay their fines because they think they’ve been fined unjustly in the area where they were at that time. The NFN (Dutch Federation for Nude Recreation) agrees with these people and will support the right for nude recreation in the Delftse Hout (name of area where fines were written).
In 2013 the city of Delft decided to ban nude recreation in the Delftse Hout and fine people who were there anyway. The ruling was an attempt to reduce harassment in the area (especially in the evening). The daily checks at the nude beach led to large unrest and irritation among the visitors, so many of them stayed away. Some felt so intimidated that they decided to put on some clothes. A large group of nudists refused to to accept the ruling of the city council and let themselves be fined. All those fines are now seen by the judge in one large trial.
(Source: NFN website – original text in Dutch)
And to the far right we proudly show you the latest fashion for nudists:
🙂
Question: What is the legal penalty and fine for a woman walking topless on the streets of New York City?
Answer: It’s a trick question, because, according to statute 245.01 per the Appeals Court of The State/City of New York, it is completely legal for a woman or a man to opt not to wear a shirt (or bra) in public. Of course, a man wearing a bra will get more stares than a woman wearing a bra (thank you, Madonna) and a woman going bare-breasted will draw more stares than a man doing the same, but why? Why is a woman’s nipple so controversial? I decided to tackle this subject with my new film — Free the Nipple.
http://vimeo.com/80495306
More, if you want, at Why I Made a Film Called Free the Nipple and Why I’m Being Censored in America.
The nook? What’s the nook? No, this is not an advertisement for a specific e-reader. If you’re looking for that, Google again.
This post is about a very nice place on the interwebz called The NOOK. A place that nudists and naturists can join, where they can be themselves and don’t have to be afraid to be stared or laughed at. The NOOK (which stands for Naked Online is OK) has members of all ways of life, and it’s safe to discuss all facets of the naked life. This does not mean you can throw anything into a discussion, there are some rules and guidelines. (Have a look at the NOOK’s Mission statement.) Here is the first part of it:
The Nook is provided as a safe place for people to post Naked and Active content, images and text, to discuss these issues, and how they work, or not, in our modern society. In part, the site is a counter-reaction to the highly succesful, but reactionary, social networking monolith known as Facebook which, with it’s judgemental, hypocritical and puritanical, censorship rules, imposes a stringent sexual code of conduct on it’s membership. The Nook aims to be a decent alternative, by definition non-PC (not politically correct), social networking site.
There is more, hit this link for the page with the whole mission statement, but this section described The Nook very well.
Note that you can’t always be 100% safe 100% of the time – there are always people who come in and start making trouble of kinds. Luckily the NOOK management (owner and moderators) are on patrol frequently to keep these occurrences to a minimum.
Seen enough? Curious? Ready to take the plunge?
(The image will take you there when you click it.)
And fitting for the season:
On January 4th I had my first encounter with Naturist park Flevo Natuur. (Link to Dutch site). Cooperating with Unox (a food manufacturer in the Netherlands) they had organised a new year’s dive. As this was in a naturist park it would be a naturist dive of course. I’d read about the event on Google+
Such a beautiful location for a naturist park! Hidden behind more trees than I had expected in a ‘polder’ (reclaimed land from the sea) there’s a large, open park with many options to relax and be active, like a heated pool, a large swimming lake, playgrounds for the kids, and everywhere there are funny houses, chalets and trailers (for sale or rent). There are also camping spots, but I didn’t see any tents. Not many people camping with +9c/48F I guess. Everywhere you’ll find garbage bins and toilets too.
After the skinny dip in the lake there was pea soup (made and provided by Unox) and hot chocolate with whipped cream, a good way to warm up again. Trust me, you need that then.
The even was arranged very well, all the people – large and small – were kind and friendly, and this was definitely not the last time I was at Flevo Natuur. Just bring on the sun!
Good on the Naked Rambler reposted verbatim from ‘The Guardian’.
Good on the Naked Rambler – more public nudity would be a good thing
You’d think that a fortnight of gale force winds would have us all hunkering down in jumpers, tucking our thermal vests into our jeans and flagrantly disregarding our partners’ hostility to bedsocks. Most people might be layering up in order to maintain bodily warmth – but not the Naked Rambler.
On Monday, Stephen Gough was jailed for 16 months after he breached an asbo intended to make him cover up in public. Gough is a prominent public nudity activist and has walked the length of Britain unclothed on two occasions; his most recent trip was the subject of a BBC documentary. He has also been sentenced and imprisoned numerous times on public nudity charges.
Gough maintains that being nude in public allows him a sense of personal freedom. The British legal system maintains that Gough’s nudity is not for mass consumption. But why, in 2014, is so much money being spent on keeping his body out of sight? His court records state there is nothing disorderly about his behaviour – it’s just about, as his lawyer pointed out in the autumn, “people’s reaction” to that behaviour.
We’re continually being exposed to sexualised nudity, but it’s rare to see a middle-aged man naked in public. During the day, before the watershed, we see hundreds of advertisements for gorgeous, semi-nude women moaning in ecstasy because they are enjoying their yoghurt or shampoo. Go and stand in any gym, cafe or shop with a TV on, and count the seconds until you see cleavage. For more than 40 years, the Sun newspaper has been publishing pictures of nipples that readers can gaze at over breakfast. Why is it OK to hint at highly sexualised nudity all day long and then persecute a normal man for getting naked as he goes about his business?
Gough’s critics are concerned that his presence could make vulnerable people feel disturbed and threatened. There’s nothing disturbing about nudity itself, just the meaning that people ascribe to it. Yet when nudity isn’t being used as sexual semaphore, it’s presented as something grotesque, to frighten the observer and make the subject a symbol of ridicule. Shows such as Embarrassing Bodies and The Man With the 10 Stone Testicles have fetishised freakishness in a way that stops us recognising real bodies. I suspect that the many men and women of all ages who experience body dysmorphic disorders are not helped by this. We may be regularly exposed to representations of naked flesh but we only ever see gods and monsters.
Initially, I thought that the laws “protecting” us from Gough’s body had a wider purpose. After all, if he’s allowed to get naked, we might all start doing it, and no one wants that. But the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the widespread adoption of naturism might solve our problem with nudity. If we stopped seeing our bodies as either a source of shame, or something to show off, we might become healthier, happier human beings. Public nudity could prove revolutionary.
Young women would grow so accustomed to seeing real bellies and bottoms that they would feel less inclined to lose weight in order to match up to imaginary images, or get industrial filler injected into their buttocks. Violent sexual crimes might become more clear cut and easier to prosecute: you couldn’t make a big deal of a victim wearing a short skirt if no one was wearing any clothes at all. And there would be no need for Embarrassing Bodies, because we’d tackle our health issues frankly and fast, knowing there’s nothing to be ashamed about.
Gough has not chosen to go nude in order to invite us to comment on his body. He is reminding us that we are all naked under our clothes, and that no individual’s body should warrant particularly close inspection – but our collective attitude to nudity certainly does.
