Becoming a Nudist – Chapter 5 – The Joy of Nudity – Nudity is Joy, Joy is Nudity

Previous Part – A Joyful Life

I may sound like a broken record, but are you naked as you read those lines? If not, you may have good reasons (you may be in a plane or a train for instance), but it may be possible for you to get naked. No excuses, please, just undress, now! It’s not a suggestion, it’s a plea. A plea to bring daily joy into your life. A plea to put you on a freedom path. A plea to challenge the norms of society and culture. A plea to be a misfit.

Joy and happiness don’t happen. They’re carefully crafted daily. It is said that repetition makes perfection. Choosing joy and having joyful daily routine create joy.

“It is often the simple daily practices that influence our lives in dramatic ways.”

—Alaric Hutchinson, Living Peace: Essential Teachings for Enriching Life

Ingrid Fetell Lee, the author of Joyful and of the blog The Aesthetics of Joy, says that those simple words, I’ll be happy when …, are joy killers. She also wrote that “in pursuit of happiness, we postpone joy.” I believe this is so simple and powerful at the same time. We often prevent ourselves from being joyful. There are many reasons to feel sad or depressed. There are also many reasons to feel joyful. One step at a time, let’s put joy in our life.

Start Your Day on the Nude Foot

If being nude doesn’t immediately make you joyful, being joyful can add some levity to your life, leading to being nude. Every morning, as I wake up, I bring those three simple thoughts back to consciousness:

1. I’m grateful for being alive and healthy
2. I’m grateful for being naked under my sheets
3. I’m grateful for the wonderful day I’m about to spend

Psychology Today lists 7 scientifically proven benefits of gratitude. I had my doubts for years until I started to practice daily gratitude (more on this later) and see my mood, sleep and wellbeing improve dramatically. So why those three early gratitude matter?

Waking up every morning, feeling your fantastic complex machine that is your body working should amaze you. It amazes me and makes me smile. Being healthy is, like happiness, the result of a process: eat well, sleep well, exercise daily, and practice mindfulness, as we will see in the rest of this chapter, all intertwined with nudity.

I’m grateful for being naked and living in a country where nudity is legal. Sure, I can’t be naked everywhere and many people see nudity as a perversion. But overall, I can live nude, I can blog about nudism, I can share nudism with friends, without taking the risk of being jailed. So I’m grateful for being able to live my nudism the way I chose.

And every morning, I start my day on the nude foot by celebrating the day ahead whether nude or clothed. Every morning will start nude and some day will continue nude if I work from home or on weekends. Whatever I’ll have to do, I just picture that I will go to bed the next evening happy and joyful about my day.

Those three gratitude sets my day. If my wife is awake too, I kiss and cuddle her, and I’m ready for a great day. I’m ready for my morning routine, always done entirely nude:

• Breakfast
• Workout
• Meditation
• Pamper
• Planning

Those five actions sometimes got mixed up and I may work out before breakfast or plan my day just after breakfast. But hey, flexibility is necessary. However, even when I’m in a hurry, I never skip any of those actions. A normal morning routine takes around two hours, but can be done, if necessary, in thirty minutes.

If I’m traveling and am staying at a hotel, breakfast can be the first clothed morning action and will move after planning. It also happens that I workout clothed at the gym (I hate it, but it’s the only way I can run or lift weight). However, when I’m home, those five actions are always done in the nude and nude is the default choice if I can while I’m traveling. Start your day on the nude foot and start sweating.

Move Your Nude Body

If you’ve never worked out, ran or lifted weight entirely naked, try! If you have a home gym, you can try this today. However, the beauty of the naked workout is you don’t need much these days, just a yoga mat! You’ll find hundreds of free workout routines on the internet that will make you sweaty. Step on your mat and move your body. Just forget your clothes!

Here are a few (mostly clothed) I’m using for my daily routines. I’ve no affiliation with those sites. Follow or not, get inspired.

• Growingannanas. Mostly HIIT, vert sweaty and always challenging. Works for women and men.
• Tabata Songs. When you get only 10 minutes but don’t want to skip your workout!
• Athlean X. Serious workouts for men, including the sore in six minutes series.
• Popsugar fitness. With close to 6 million subscribers, you’ll find every kind of workout.
• GymnasticBodies. Subscription based workouts. If you want flexibility and strength of gymnasts.
• Naked Yoga School. You can rent videos for some workouts or subscribe to all. A great source of nudist workouts inspired by yoga practice.
• True Naked Yoga. Subscription based naked yoga sessions. Also available through Vimeo on demand.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends 150 minutes of weekly physical activity. My personal way of doing this is by working out or running daily, five to six days a week, sometimes seven. So, it’s at least thirty minutes of daily workout. By working out naked, you don’t need to change clothes, just step on your mat and go!

Working out has many positive effects on the mind and body, burning some fat and calories, and flooding the brain with good hormones that contribute to feeling joyful. Working out nude adds some extra benefits: no clothes to wash, you see your muscles and your body working, no constraints, increasing your comfort of being nude.

The less I wear, the happier I am, you should have understood now. It’s therefore obvious that working out nude is my preferred choice. Every physical activity not required protection is better done nude. This includes running, hiking, swimming and working out. If you want to pump some joy into your day, work out thirty minutes every day and do it in your birthday suit. Then work on making your day more mindful.

Practice Nude Mindfulness

Mindfulness has turned into a multibillion-dollar industry. Although it exists for centuries and, like working out, don’t require much. You’ll find meditation and mindfulness guides all over the internet. Here are a few I’m using for guided meditations. I’ve no affiliation with those sites and apps. It’s just those I’m using when I need guided meditations.

• Calm. I’m using the app on my iPhone, but you can access 10-minute guided meditation right from YouTube.
• Gaia. Hundreds of guided meditations, from five to ninety minutes. Subscription based.
• Tara Brach. Dozens of guided meditations from Tara Brach, Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology.
• InsightTimer. Thousands of free guided meditations. Requires some efforts to find what you need, but hey, it’s free!

After my daily run or workout, I meditate ten to thirty minutes. I started meditating over thirty years ago and add nudity to my daily practice more than twenty years ago. Meditating nude helped me deepen my practice by enhancing my physical sensations and awareness.

I never skip my meditation and I never skip it nude. It may be three minutes if I’m in a hurry or thirty minutes if I need to address an issue that concerns me. In all cases, I stay or get entirely naked, glasses and watch included, and lie down. Yes, I lie down and don’t meditate while sitting. By lying down, your energy channels aren’t bent at the hip, knees or elbows. Your body is straight and your energy flows freely.

On warm days, I meditate outside, in the sun on in the shade, depending on the season and the time of the day. The sun light helps me get even deeper in me during the meditative practice and increases the flow of energy. Ten minutes of sun meditation energizes me like a full 90-minute sleep cycle.

Every day, my day starts with meditation. What do I do while lying down meditating? If I’m following a guided meditation, I’m focused on the voice and its guidance. If it’s not a guided meditation, I do breathing and energy exercises, and prepared visualizations. It goes beyond this book to describe the details of my meditations. Furthermore, I’m not a meditation specialist, just an amateur practitioner who finds so many benefits, I can’t but share them with my communities, textile and nudist.

However, the one thing, as you now have understood, that I can advocate loud and clear is to always, always, always, meditate nude. Like the topics and activities described in this book, on my blog and in nudist circles, once you started to practice an activity nude, you can’t go back to clothing. It makes so much sense, it feels absurd to wear anything. When possible, always choose nude!

Chose Nude

The site Lifehack provides 20 small things you can do every day to lead a joyful life. Those are simple and small things that make a real difference when you think about them. For instance, breathe! We breathe around 20,000 times daily. If we stop breathing for a moment, we can just die. Being conscious about our breathing is one of the objectives of mindfulness and meditation. By breathing well, we can bring more oxygen to our blood, which leads to more fuel to our body and brain, that leads to a myriad of other benefits.

However, the one small thing that matters to me a lot is number 10: take action! Actions speak louder than words. Taking action is making a conscious choice. Hence, to the 20 small things, I will add one: Get Naked! Choosing nude is choosing life. Choosing nude is choosing freedom. Choosing nude is choosing joy! It’s a small thing to do every day to lead a joyful life.

We’re coming to the end of the chapter about the joy that nudity creates. Because nudity always creates joy, nudity is my default choice whenever and wherever I can. As you have understood along this chapter, nudity and joy are twins. What comes first is irrelevant. Does nudity provide joy or does joy require nudity? Both. Joy is nudity and nudity is joy.

This is why I chose nude and I offer that you also choose nude when you can. Let’s look at any given day. You can adapt this to your reality. You can also wonder why nude is so present in any given day. I already told you, for me, nudism isn’t an obsession, it’s a “joysession”. It can become so for you. Nudity makes me joyful, with no side effects. Why would I choose something else? Yes, I could choose to be clothed. This is what society wants me to do. But I choose to be nude. This is what I want me to do.

On any given day:

• I sleep nude
• Morning routine is carried entirely naked: breakfast, workout, meditation, pamper, planning.
• If I stay home, I stay nude. If it’s too cold, I put a t-shirt or a robe on. If I have to leave home for work or running errands, I get dressed elegantly.
• When I come back home, I hang my clothes and get nude. If it’s early enough, I may go for a run or a hike. Yes, you guessed it … nude.
• Lounging, dinner and any evening activities are spent naked or with a light robe.
• Rince and repeat for next days.

If I need to go to a diner, I will elegantly dress (formally or not, depending on whom I have dinner with), as both my wife and I love to get dressed and wear nice clothes and shoes. But when I can be nude, I will choose nude! At a dinner with nudist friends? I choose nude. A hike with family and friends? I choose nude. A fun weekend? I choose nude. Holidays? I choose nude.

There’s an additional benefit to choosing nude that I haven’t yet covered in this chapter and we’re about to focus on in the next chapter. Have you noticed that joy is viral? Be the only joyful person in a room, your mood will surely pollinate from one person to the other. We’ve seen in chapter 3 that nudity is social. Mix social nudity with joy virality, you get social joy and viral nudity. If nudity brings you joy, share joy with others. Share the joy of nudity! 

Next part – Chapter 6 – Sharing the Joy – Sharing is Caring

Strip Nude, Stay Nude, Live Nude and Share the Nude Love!

Tino & Tina – fr, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons