Shedding inhibitions

Hello All and welcome to a Wednesday afternoon on the West Coast:

Happy news to report, I got my diploma in the mail-yeah!  Now I finally feel like I finished school. I saw the envelop sitting on top of my mailbox Monday and I new what it was.  All I need now is a job.  Really happy about this one.  If you want to see the picture, you can it find on my timeline at http://www.facebook.com/lenorelowen.  You can post your thoughts there as well.  One other announcement, "Form and Landscape: Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Basin, 1940-1990" is now live.  You can access it at http://www.huntington.org, go to current exhibitions, click on "Form and Landscape," then click on the link that says online exhibition.  I recently attended a presentation at USC on the exhibit, which you can read about on my "Preservation of Community Assets" blog post titles "Form and Landscape."  Highly recommend this one.

All right, lets chat.  So I've been sleeping in the nude for just about a month now and truthfully I'm really enjoying it.  One (un)intended consequence is that it's ridding me of any insecurities I have about my body image.  The result of that is was the ability to make love to the bf without any inhibitions.  You read all about the experience on Monday.  It was the first time in a long time and I had forgotten what it was like.  More accurately, what it could be like.  Before it was boring and mechanical.  This time it was amazing.  The whole experience of sleeping in the nude is part the freeing of myself of the shackles of the past.  I refuse to be tied to the chains that kept me from moving forward.  Of course, I'm berating myself for waiting so long but I suppose the timing had to be right.  After I finished my undergrad education and later, came home from my first tour of grad school I was in an existential morase.  I was trying to figure out who I was and what I was meant to do.  This final tour of grad was really a life altering experience.  For the first time, I got a very real sense of what I could truly aspire to.  USC's motto is "Fight On."  I always say that they should change it to "Go, do, you'll be great."  The faculty and administrators really bend over backwards to nurture and encourage the students at all levels to aspire to great heights.  If you fall, they'll be their to catch you.  After I finished and uploaded my thesis, I went into hibernation of sort or as I call it thesis rehab.  I was sifting through the same existential questions I had from previous turning points.  The only difference this time is that I didn't spend too much time trying to figure out what I want and who I was.  So where does sleeping in the nude figure into this?  Being in a constant state of anxiety can manifest itself into hyper-self criticism.  You  start nit picking at all sorts of things including your body image, "I'm too fat, to clumsy, et cetera ad infinitum.  When you stand naked in front of the mirror you force yourself to see yourself as is.  Sleeping in the nude allows to embace that further.  You start to let go of all the self criticism and learn to accept yourself as you are.  This translates into the ability to give yourself to the one you love freely.  This is what I did and it was the best experience ever.