Change Your Outlook on Life

By Lisa Firestone, Ph.D., she is a clinical psychologist and an author

In many ways, striving for perfection is a recipe for disaster. I’ve spoken with too many people who could never be smart, successful, slim, or striking enough to meet their own unrealistic demands. All the while, these individuals failed to experience themselves as people of value just for being themselves.

I’ve worked with countless couples that spend as much time obsessing over their relationship as they do experiencing their relationship. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if these thoughts were kind, compassionate, and introspective. Instead, they are harsh, cold, and critical. The demanding attitude we all have toward ourselves often divides our lives into two realities—what’s actually happening and what we tell ourselves about what’s happening. People who live in pursuit of perfection are missing out on the real pleasures of life.

We’ve heard the expression “live in the moment” so many times that the words can lose their meaning. We lose track of the fact that much of the time, we spiral off into thoughts that have little to do with the here and now. Buying coffee, we forget to meet the eyes of the stranger serving us. We obsess over how we look instead of noticing how we are being looked at—by a loved one, for example. When we fall in love , we worry about losing it, rather than enjoying the blissful feeling of being in love.

How can we shift from judging our lives to actually living and enjoying them? Here are three key elements:

1. Silence Your Inner Critic

Whether we are accomplishing a major goal or enjoying a simple pleasure, our “critical inner voice” is a thought process that can constantly question, critique, and undermine our experiences.

It subdues us and holds us back. It tells us we aren’t good enough or warns us that we will lose everything. It tells us that we have to be special to be worthwhile. It shouts, “If you’re not the best, you’re nothing.” When we receive an acknowledgment, it says, “You don’t deserve it.” When we fall in love, it whispers, “She will leave you.” When we listen to this voice we miss out on reality. We lose touch with the tactile, feeling, tumultuous roller coaster of real life. Instead, we stay in our own heads, failing to connect with the people, places, and experiences that make our moments worthwhile.

A friend of mine was invited on a getaway by her boyfriend of a few months. She was excited, but a few minutes into their long drive to the mountains, her critical inner voice started in on her. “What will you talk about? You don’t have anything interesting to say. He’s going to realise how dull you are.” The running dialogue in her mind made her unusually quiet, uncomfortable, even awkward. By the time they made their first gas stop, she wished she’d never agreed to come. Then, stepping out of the car, she felt a rush of cold, crisp air. She noticed they were surrounded by snow. It was beautiful.

She realized that her self-critical thoughts had left her missing out on everything from conversation with her boyfriend to taking in the stunning scenery. It was a wake-up call that gave her the insight necessary to silence her inner critic. She spent the remainder of the drive actively ignoring the “voices” that surfaced. When her “voice” told her she sounded stupid, she’d tell her boyfriend a story. When it said she seemed “desperate,” she’d put her head on his shoulder. When it commented on her appearance, she’d look admiringly out the window. Though it got stronger at first, like a child throwing a tantrum to get its way, eventually, the voice grew quiet, and she stopped noticing it altogether.

This is the approach we must all take, and it was recently, and perfectly, illustrated in an account by Amy Poehler in her book, Yes Please, in which she refers to her inner critic as her “demon”:

Hopefully as you get older, you start to learn how to live with your demon. It’s hard at first. Some people give their demon so much room that there is no space in their head for love. They feed their demon, and it gets really strong, and then it makes them stay in abusive relationships or starve their beautiful bodies. But sometimes, you get a little older and get a little bored of the demon. Through good therapy and friends and self-love you can practice treating the demon like a hacky, annoying cousin.

Actively ignoring and taking action against your demon will initially make its voice louder and you more anxious, but it is the only way ultimately to silence it. Dr. Daniel Siegel, a leader in interpersonal neurobiology, says that the only appropriate attitude to have toward yourself is to be curious, open, accepting and loving. This attitude is what makes change possible. It’s what helps you to not only reach your goals but also enjoy and appreciate the road that gets you there, imperfect as it may be.

2. Don’t Avoid Feelings

Psychologist Robert Firestone, my father and my co-author on Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice, recently pointed out that living in the moment isn’t always as joyful as the saying would suggest. Life is filled with a wide array of emotions including pain. However, living in the moment does ensure a more lively existence. We can’t experience the past or the future, yet we spend much of our time lost in regretting the past and worrying about the future. Still, the present moment is all we have. Think of what we are missing when we trail off and focus on things we aren’t actually experiencing. Think of how we tune out or numb ourselves in an effort to avoid whatever we would think or feel if we let ourselves be right where we are.

Most of us engage in behaviors that numb us in an effort to avoid sadness. But sadness has many benefits: It makes us feel rich, full, and alive to feel our sadness. It has a rejuvenating effect that grows our capacity for happiness. When you try to kill off a part of yourself, you lose more of yourself than you think. The fear that motivates us to avoid deeper feeling frequently leaves us dulled, anxious, and miserable instead.

3. Refocus Your Attention

When we listen to our inner critic, it is like looking at ourselves through someone else’s eyes instead of our own. We must learn to take the focus off ourselves and look for meaning in our experiences. This still means setting goals, but also enjoying the journey. Life is about striving, not just being there. Have you ever set a goal to exercise or lose weight, then felt slightly empty when you reached it? That’s because life happens in the journey itself. Your energy can only be felt in your actions.

As you live your life, remind yourself: Slow down and pay attention. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Focus less on evaluation and more on your actual experience. Look out the window of your car. Be in the moment, “Pay attention in the present like your life depends on it.” And if you do get lost, never beat yourself up; just bring your attention back to the present moment. You can actually strengthen your mind like a muscle by putting your attention where you want it.

Life is too precious to waste lost in our heads, evaluating ourselves, one step removed from our own experience. We can live more fully by paying attention to our senses and being willing to feel what we are actually experiencing at any given moment.

Original Article

Happy New Year

Just a short message to wish all those viewing my blog a “Happy New Year” and Best Wishes for 2018.

Hopefully during the year we can again push the case for non sexual “natural ” nudity and show people just how normal naturism is.

At the same time share knowledge on other topic as well as preview the kind of photography that you can take in place near to you.

Let’s hope 2018 is a good one !

An English Garden

Some things to do in the garden….all year round !

Theses videos are brought to you from the delightful people at English Garden Magazine English Garden

Three for Christmas

Christmas is a time for giving so I’ve given myself three recently released albums from bands/artists I’ve followed over the years but not so much recently.

First up U2 and their new album Songs of Experience how good is it ?

U2’s last album, 2014’s Songs of Innocence, was overshadowed by the PR stunt that accompanied the record’s release. Seems a lot of people weren’t so happy about finding a free U2 album in their iTunes accounts.

Lesson learned, but the controversy pretty much steamrolled over everything else about the album. Like, if you actually bothered to listen to it, Songs of Innocence wasn’t as lousy as all the negative press let on. A proposed companion LP, Songs of Experience, was to quickly follow, but plans were scuttled and the album was retooled in light of the iTunes debacle and singer Bono‘s subsequent health issues.

There’s no telling how the restructured Songs of Experience, U2’s 14th album, compares to the original vision, but as it stands, it’s pretty much a sequel. In other words, it sounds an awful lot like other U2 albums from this century.

“Shooting off my mouth, that’s another great thing about me,” Bono sings on the anthem-sized “You’re the Best Thing About Me.” Maybe so, but he keeps the politics and moralizing to a minimum on Songs of Experience, instead keeping the focus on issues of mortality and matters of the heart. It’s more All That You Can’t Leave Behind than The Unforgettable Fire, and U2 know it, opting for general uplift over deep purpose. That leads to some broad emotional checkpoints throughout.

The thing is, All That You Can’t Leave Behind found purpose following Sept. 11; the sentiments here are so blah that a personal connection almost seems unreachable. “The Showman (Little More Better)” isn’t too far removed from the deadwood Imagine Dragons produce, and the revisiting of old standbys – big choruses, shimmering guitars, musical flourishes designed to fill stadiums – does little to distinguish the album from the last one or the one before that. Songs of Experience, like the past few U2 records, is another U2 album that U2 think their fans want.

So, it’s little surprise that the best songs are the most familiar sounding: “Lights of Home,” “You’re the Best Thing About Me,” “The Blackout, “Love Is Bigger Than Anything in Its Way” and even “Get Out of Your Own Way,” which features rapper Kendrick Lamar repaying a favor to U2, who appeared on his album from earlier this year – the way better Damn.

Still, the opening (“Love Is All We Have Left”) and closing (“13 [There Is a Light”]) tracks attempt to elevate Songs of Experience into something grander than it is, and offer a hint at what the album might have been if it didn’t take the expected route so often. Both songs go deeper, lyrically and musically, than almost everything they bookend.

That doesn’t mean Songs of Experience is a terrible or even a bad record. It just isn’t very memorable. Besides a couple songs, chances are none of these will go on your playlist alongside band classics like “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “One.”

The emotional reach and payoff, key elements to U2’s success, aren’t there for the most part – even though everyone, including the album’s long list of producers, works overtime to polish the 13 songs to modern-day specifications while still nodding to the band’s past. After all these years, there’s simply too much baggage for U2 and any new music they make, and lightening the load seems moot at this point.

Read more:

Next Up :

Stop everything guys, because it’s finally here. Liam Gallagher’s album might be the most eagerly awaited solo debut of the year, but is it any good? The answer, thankfully, is a big, fat ‘hell yes’.

This is in no small part down to the fact that the brother-bothering Britpop hero and wise-cracking lad about town has done the sensible thing and roped in a hit list of Los Angeles music industry heavyweights to avoid a Beady Eye situation. Steering clear of weak Oasis imitations, producers Greg Kurstin (Adele, Lily Allen and the most recent Foo Fighters album) and Florence + The Machine collaborator Andrew Wyatt have bought pop gloss and slickness to Liam’s serious swagger, diluting his rough and ready rasp but never diminishing what makes him so great – his beautifully ballsy attitude.

‘As You Were’ is an album that has more in common with Primal Scream at their most flamboyantly fun and Spiritualized at their most dreamily epic rather than a dodgy rehash of ‘Definitely Maybe’; it’s plugging into the 1990s, for sure, but not the bits you’d expect. “I didn’t want to be reinventing anything or going off on a space-jazz odyssey,” says the man himself of the album’s influences. “It’s the Lennon “Cold Turkey” vibe, The Stones, the classics. But done my way, now.”

Certainly there’s a lot of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones here too, but the glammy, foot-stomping country bounce of tracks like ‘Greedy Soul’ make sure this isn’t a hoary dad-rock indulgence, but a totally 2017 rock record with its sights set high.

Big, beefy tunes like gospel groover ‘Wall Of Glass’ and sassy Primrose Hill hoedown ‘You Better Run’ are more than capable of blowing the roof off your local arena and slaying next summer’s festival season. The record shines a light on Liam’s softer side too, with lilting love songs ‘When I’m In Need’ and ‘I’ve All I Need’ as fragile and open as they are bold. Welcome back Liam – never leave us again.

Read more at http://www.nme.com/reviews/album/liam-gallagher-as-you-were-review#pURUibYrpS1cJiSO.99

Finally it’s the turn of the other Gallagher brother Noel

Noel Gallagher’s latest is the most ambitious of his solo releases, internalizing the heyday of late ’90s Britpop while sounding both urgent and absurd to mostly great effect.

They were hard-pressed to top last year’s Potato Wars showdown, but on this season of every Britpop enthusiast’s favorite reality show, The Gallaghers, we’ve been treated to the most dramatic story arc yet. For the first time in their post-Oasis careers, Liam and Noel have each released albums within weeks of each other, setting up the proverbial WrestleMania of rock’s greatest sibling rivalry. Alas, it remains to be seen whether Noel’s latest record with current backing band the High Flying Birds, Who Built the Moon?, will match the chart performance of Liam’s recent solo effort, As You Were, which debuted at No. 1 in the UK. But in the real arena where winners are made and losers are shamed in 2017—i.e., Twitter—Liam has been putting on a clinic, delivering some his best material ever in the wake of what will go down in Gallaghers lore as Scissorsgate.

For his part, Noel seems to be heeding the lesson learned from Oasis’ rivalry with Blur throughout the ’90s. Only, in this case, he’s decided it’s better to be Blur—to brush off the nasty insults, disengage from the war of words, and just focus on making far more interesting records. Where Liam’s As You Were is essentially the perfunctory Fauxasis album that his old band would’ve churned out this year had they slogged it out this far, Who Built the Moon? feels like an attempt to rewrite their post-Morning Glory history.

The album imagines an alternate late-’90s where, instead of trying to make a cocaine-clouded update ofMagical Mystery Tour, Noel deeply internalized the adventurous music being made by his peers in Primal Scream, Spiritualized, Death in Vegas, the Beta Band, and David Holmes (whom he wisely taps to be his producer this time out). The new album’s opening track, “Fort Knox” presents an immediate study in contrasts. Like the kick-off to 2000’sStanding on the Shoulder of Giants, it’s more of a crowd-rousing entrance theme than a proper song—but instead of bluesy guitar riffage, we hear screeching cello drones, clanging percussion, gospel chants, a hip-hop-scuffed backbeat, the relentless drill of a jackhammer, and a female backing singer’s ecstatic wordless wails. Call it “Kama Sutra in the Bushes.”

Sure, there are few prizes for being on the cutting edge of circa-1997 British rock in 2017, but Who Built the Moon? abounds with urgency and absurdity—qualities that were sorely lacking on the Birds’ previous albums. For the first time in a long while, Noel sounds like he’s genuinely having a blast, adopting a motor-mouthed monotone on the glam-slammed rumble “Holy Mountain” as if he were Plastic Bertrand doing “Diamond Dogs,” and blissfully skating atop the glacial motorik surface of “She Taught Me How to Fly.” And just as the skittering psych-pop of “It’s a Beautiful World” seems like it’s about to dissolve into the ether, he summons guest vocalist Charlotte Marionneau of indie-pop enigmas Le Volume Courbe to deliver a surprise megaphoned address that revives the song as a Francophone answer to “6 A.M. Jullandar Shere” by former Oasis tourmates Cornershop.

Who Built the Moon? feels like the sort of album where Noel spent way more time mapping out the sounds than writing the lyrics. But “Keep on Reaching” whips up enough manic, soul-stomping gusto to forgive its obvious Stevie Wonder swipes (”Keep on reaching out for that higher ground”), while “Be Careful What You Wish For” oozes enough creeping menace to elevate its title from clichéd phrase to prophetic threat. Alas, in the album’s closing stretch, Noel attempts to inject the proceedings with some conceptual gravitas, deploying a pair of moody instrumentals (dubbed “Interlude” and “End Credits”) to bookend the winsome, swashbuckling pop of “If Love Is the Law” and the climactic foreboding ballad “The Man Who Built the Moon.” With no discernible logic holding it all together, the result is a more of an awkwardly fitting framework than a proper song suite, though at the very least, the latter track’s ominous, In the Court of the Crimson King-style grandeur does raise the not-unwelcome notion of Noel going full prog.

But more than any particular musical experiment, the best gauge of Gallagher’s growth on Who Built the Moon? is the song that didn’t make the cut. Included as a bonus track, “Dead in the Water” is a quintessential Noel solo strummer, an unplugged transmission from the same dark night of the soul that yielded acoustic Oasis outliers like “Talk Tonight.” It’s a great song, right up there with Oasis’ best B-sides. But it’s one whose raw emotion and bare-bones simplicity represent low hanging fruit on the High Flying Birds’ current skyward path.

After extended listening time what do I think ? Well I like the U2 Album the most as it sounds well rounded as a good band effort. The Gallagher brothers efforts are good too but lack the punch Oasis albums used to have. In order 1 – U2 2 – Liam Gallagher 3 – Noel Gallagher

Planning a Garden

“I love beautiful gardens and want to have one, but I am not a gardener” is a quote I often hear. Maybe it is just lack of confidence, but there are people out there who have neither the inclination nor the aptitude to garden.

These non-gardeners adore a fabulous outdoor space, but they don’t want to obsess about the black spot and buddleias.I find these people hard to fathom – I would be loath to “finish” my garden and would far rather be titivating and transforming it for ever and a day. But they want it done and dusted.

The Non-Gardeners’ Garden

I enjoy working with non-gardening gardeners; paring down the design so that there are no frills, just straightforward, gutsy elements.Simple, clear, unfettered, but glamorous spaces have a strong appeal and often rely on a highly individual feel.

They need character to hold the interest as opposed to successions of blooms, perfumes and other ephemeral things. This individual feel may take the lead from a point of interest in the architecture or surrounding landscape.For instance, you might be blessed with dramatic slopes, as with one garden I am working on that sits, teetering, by the edge of a small disused stone quarry.

Alternatively you may, as many people do, have a house and surroundings that look mediocre and nothing out of the ordinary. In this case you need to import or create the drama.

Definition and Proportion

If you are lucky enough to look on to countryside, making the most of the view may well be the making of the garden.Our rear garden, when we arrived, was a wire-fenced paddock, with no access from the house. It was an amorphous, rather bumpy space that you didn’t look twice at.

I lifted the level by burying unwanted spoil from building work and defined it on both of the two short sides with a series of panels of yew hedges.Then I put in an invisible, stock-proof barrier, a ha-ha (a retaining wall made of horizontally stacked telegraph poles one-metre high that can only be seen from the meadow side) across its long boundary and it became a well-proportioned space.

The ha-ha now provides slightly elevated panoramic views over grazing livestock in the adjacent meadow. A large tree with a seat in the foreground sharpens the focus and contrasts with the lazier, more distant view. In short, it’s got wow factor.

If this sounds too complicated, consider removing a section of boundary hedge on to a neighbouring field and put a sitting area in the gap. A friend of mine tried this and it works brilliantly.

Hedges and Trees

Many people inherit overgrown, mammoth coniferous hedges. Removing them can create new opportunities. A city garden I worked on had a boundary blocked in by a thick, greedy Leyland hedge.

We felled the screen and exposed the native belt of trees. False gates made the mini woodland come into the garden and has transformed this small property.If you’re worried about privacy or concealing eyesores, screening can usually be achieved in a charismatic way with pleached trees, allées and leaner hedges.

Shaping spaces can be done with a range of elements that don’t require extensive or difficult maintenance. Fences and walls can be wonderful but expensive. Alternatively try hedges, allées of trees, specimen trees arranged in strong configurations or changes of levels. They are not difficult to maintain.

Box hedging has soared in popularity, because it creates real definition and holds together blowsy planting that would look a mess without it in its off season. It is often a key player in these type of gardens.

Good gardens are all about interesting, well-defined spaces. Spaces that have good proportions are easier to live with. Ill-defined shapes with no strong character can make you feel in limbo, and are not pleasant spaces to linger.

Defining a space that relates well to a part of the house you use most, such as a kitchen or living room, is a great starting point. Small town gardens with strongly shaped paved areas (directly off the kitchen) broken up with oversized, but kempt greenery in oversized pots can give great usable space.

A Dramatic Feature

Other key players might be a fabulous, oversized urn taking centre stage, a clutch of mammoth topiary, an intriguing door or gates, some amazing water or furniture. A friend of mine has made some giant-sized table and chairs which sit at the end of a vista! Unforgettable.

Top tips for non-gardeners

1 – The late David Hicks banished views of flowers from the house because of their ”off” period. This might be too extreme for many, but structural planting is far easier for non-gardeners.

2 – Paving is almost maintenance free. Be bold with it, design the proportions carefully and incorporate structural planting within the paving.

3 – It is relatively easy to find people to help mow and clip hedges; proper gardeners are more difficult to hunt out.

4 – Any specimen plants in bottomless pots (rooting into soil below) from bay to quince trees, look architectural, grow bigger and better and won’t need watering after the first year or so.

5 – Water is wonderful for the wow factor. But the design is difficult to get right to ensure that it is low maintenance. If in doubt, call in the professionals.

6 – If you want flower beds, don’t have hundreds of different plants, but keep to bigger blocks of performers with a long season, Rosa ‘Mutabilis’, Hebe topiaria, Geranium ‘Jolly Bee’, Sedum telephium ‘Matrona’, Erigeron karvinskianus.

This is a repost the original article can be found here: Original Article

Nature Connects

I’ve just read an interesting article in the guardian about a couple who for seven years now,have lived a nomadic lifestyle firstly in New Zealand now in Europe. In the article she is promoting her book “Woman in the Wilderness” and it tells their story and shows how you can live a different lifestyle and adapt to it.

Having been forced to readjust my lifestyle somewhat I can understand how you can realign your life and live nomadically living and doing without . Having said that I’d probably stop at washing my hair in urine.

She thinks that perhaps women have lost their connection with nature, “even more than men. Also,” she adds, passionately, “why do women behave so weakly, physically? As in, ‘I can’t lift that,’ ‘I can’t shit outside,’ ‘I can’t have my period in the bush.’” She thinks it’s a shame women are missing out. In today’s world if you want to be more content, sometimes you have to change your life completely.

“This is tricky because you can never get far enough away from people,” grumbles Peter. Fortunately, “We’re absolute masters of disappearing into forests.”

Naturism for some represents a real life return to nature and also an alternative to stereotype lifestyle.This consisting of living naked in a community, within a dedicated area.

Naturism aims at the well-being of the body in contact with the natural elements that surround us, like air, sun, light and water. Ignoring any erotic connotation, naturism helps restore the body’s proper place. Natural nudity should be seen as the original state in which each of us were born. It is natural and healthy.

With more than half of the world’s population living in cities, humans have lost touch with nature. The concrete jungle and the rat race suck up our time and energy and we feel stressed, anxious or like we have lost meaning. We have middle life crises, travel to ‘find ourselves’, fight depression with pills, change jobs and cars but, somehow, we cannot fill that void. We don’t know what’s wrong.

What we are truly lacking is a connection with the wild world and its rhythms. Today we don’t need to hunt or gather food for sustenance, work hard to build a shelter or collect wood for fire every other day in the winter. We don’t need to protect ourselves or our food from predators. Our lives revolve around paying bills, buying things we don’t actually need, drinking to feel something and staring at a computer screen.

Nature is good for our sense of wellbeing. The way nature works as a whole system, bringing meaning to great complexity, often gives people a sense of purpose and understanding. This purpose has to do with feeling connected to a larger environment and order. While nature connects you to a larger system, it also helps people come to terms with what they cannot control. In nature, people learn to cope and acts as a stress controller.

Living in the modern world, it’s easy to forget our connection to nature and the environment.  There was a time when all of humanity lived as animals in harmony with our ecosystem. Our actions have an effect on the environment, and a healthy environment is what allows us to live.  By reconnecting with nature, we move toward a more sustainable future for our planet and a more holistic existence for ourselves.

2017 Finale

Monty Don says goodbye for this year !

The final programme of the 50th season of Gardeners World

Gardening Tips

Gardening Tips from Gardeners and Horticulturists I follow on YouTube

So why is…..

This is re-posted…click on the pic to read the original post

So why is nudity necessary?
Well!…

Nudity is not an alien concept for me (and I feel genuinely in debt to my parents for that!), we are all born naked but not many of us are lucky enough to be brought up with naturism as an ordinary occurrence. That’s right, I’m a naturist. And before you all gasp with judgement at a young lady wanting to be naked in public a few stereotypes need to be addressed and corrected:

First and most importantly, nudity is NOT sexual. Not unless you flounce around in a suggestive manner; which even then you will likely achieve a more immediate effect simply by shrugging into some inexplicably small and uncomfortable lingerie. (For men it’s true also, you may not have frills and bows but many women would agree that when seen objectively the gentlemen’s parts, although not without their function, are not the most tidy and inviting, so a nice pair of boxers won’t go too far amiss.) Hence naturism is not about being attractive and it certainly isn’t about sex – it’s about nature. Being comfortable with the reality of yourself and others, releasing public stereotypes usually supported by clothing and finally relaxing into a natural way of living without expectation or judgement.
We are not all naked all the time !

 

Nudity is not a compulsory or regular part of life just because you see yourself as a naturist – it is a lifestyle choice that says that in certain situations you are open to the concept of social nudity as a freeing and comfortable past-time. It doesn’t mean I walk around my house naked everyday – I have two Dutch housemates that might get a shock if that were the case. It doesn’t mean we force our naturist habits on others. It doesn’t mean we freeze ourselves in the name of naturism, when it gets cold we put clothes on – we are naturist not stupid. And it doesn’t mean we would be comfortable being naked amidst a group of textiles (that’s what we call you strange clothing obsessed beings). Naturism is common in the format of a campsite, a beach or a spa. Naturist campsites are very safe communities that are usually quite difficult to join whilst spa’s and beaches are public which brings both the benefit and downfall of accessibility, bringing me to number 3…

Because we are happy in a naturist environment does not mean we want any Bob or Jack seeing us naked. Naturist groups are respectful, non-sexual situations where one doesn’t look at another’s body because there is no need to. We simply all have naked bodies and it isn’t appropriate or worthwhile to stare. This means, and I’m talking now to all the meerkats and peeping-Toms I’ve come across in my time, that by being naked we are not an invitation. You have no right to enter a naturist area if you have no respect for this lifestyle and you certainly have no right to stare or photograph us. This would be weird in general public so why would you intimidate someone simply because they happened to be aiming for a no-white-bits tan?

Naturists cannot be stereotyped. Unfortunately I am aware that I am exactly the kind of person people would assume to be open to nudity. But dreadlocks and paint-brushes aside I can state from experience that naturists come from all walks of life and the free-loving hippie vibe is just not a genuine presence in naturist locations. You can be sat with a lawyer or banker, a full-time parent, a student or bar staff and you wouldn’t know until you really got to know the person. Another beautiful thing about ridding ourselves of those telling lifestyle costumes.
It has been scientifically suggested that nudity is good for our health! Of course this is only logical that natural living would be but many don’t think about the reduced stress and increased vitamin D achieved by the powerful mix of nudity and that long-awaited sunshine.

So being a naturist all my life has become a large part of my being. Some naturists feel it makes them no different apart from some seriously relaxing holidays, but for me it’s a proud lifestyle choice and a strong belief that it has made a massive positive influence on  my life and personality. I feel it frees me from the stresses of society and makes me strong and unique.

As a teenager I struggled with body confidence issues that reached the stage of attending Slimming World and breaking down at the glimmer of a camera lens. Both unfortunate and increasingly evident issues in today’s young generation. But these problems stem from the pressure given by fashion, advertisement, television, music, and so on. Often a figment of social imagination and expectation rather than genuine problems, our idea of ‘healthy’ or even ‘attractive’ weight is disastrously mistaken. On the other hand, in naturist environments I could finally release my sucked in stomach and save twenty minutes of painful self-judgement each morning trying to choose which outfit shows the most airbrushed version of myself. This is why society needs nudity.

 

We need to know what average people look like. We need to know it’s ok to be ourselves and aim simply for happy and healthy. And we need to realise that there is more to learn about a person than what first meets the eye. It’s amazing that we are surprised by the shallow, make-up slicked, ‘selfie’ producing generation when we suggest no natural alternative. And on top of that, if we are born naked what is so wrong with it? It’s a real shame humanity has developed to the extent of being offended by its own natural appearance.And lastly, why it is relevant to my practice. Aside from the fact that my best work is often made naked amidst a pile of paint and blankets (you don’t get your clothes stained that way!) my work is centred around society and I feel nudity is a perfect symbol for being unashamedly honest about our presence on Earth and my hopes to bring it to a purer and healthier form in any small way possible.So let’s strip off the stereotypes, the politics and the expectations of society. Jump out of whatever box you’ve been put in and join me in thinking clearly and independently..

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