Lizzo said it best when she captioned a nude selfie for a Dove campaign: "Let's Get Real Y'all." For her, nudity has never been about exhibitionism. It's about radical self-acceptance, the idea that physical nakedness can be a fast track to emotional nakedness and deeper, more honest connection. By shedding our clothes, we shed the social masks we wear. 

Other A-listers are catching on, and culturally the boom in scandi-style naked saunas across the country suggests the rest of us are too. The British Naturist Society has seen a surge in members. In the last twenty years the number of people identifying as naturists has risen six times. 

Which is how I ended up naked in a garden-shed-sized sauna on a Tuesday evening. 

Last month, a friend invited me to join her at a naturist club. Not my usual choice of activity, I have to say, but I wasn't horrified either. I'd describe myself as nudity neutral. I'm not one of these people who loves to get her kit off at any given opportunity, but I'm not prudish either. I am also very nosy, handy in my line of work, and curiosity outweighed embarrassment. More importantly, I'd been having one of those "I'm not good enough" days, particularly with regards to work. There was something about taking my clothes off that felt like release: from the ego, all the striving and pressure and performance that goes with it. Getting naked with a bunch of strangers, oddly, appealed. 

Now, you may be thinking, if it's release you're after, surely meditation or yoga would cover it? Or a normal sauna in your cozzie? What does nudity actually add? As I drew up to the big green gates of the club to be greeted by my friend in a towel, I was asking myself these very questions. What I discovered was revelatory. 

Perhaps I was channelling my inner Lizzo without knowing it, because it turned out it had nothing to do with body image. It was about the instant emotional intimacy in that sauna. What happens to connection and conversation when we remove the armour of clothes. Embodiment is a buzzword in wellness many of us will have come across, this idea, set out in Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score, that we hold trauma and truths in our bodies. Getting naked seemed like the most obvious shortcut to this. 

There were around ten people in the sauna, an equal split of men and women with an average age of sixty. Naturism draws an older crowd. They padded between the sauna and the cold plunge pool outside, perched across two tiers. With no clothes, there were no social signals of socio-economic status, which felt immediately refreshing. 

So far, so not that different from a normal sauna. Until the chatting started. In every clothed sauna I'd been in, nobody had so much as attempted conversation. Here, the unguarded questions flowed immediately: where did I live, what did I write, did I have kids, had I ever been to a naturist club before? The fact that people were clambering over you to get to the higher tier, their bits hoving into view, does have a way of cutting through the small talk. At first, I found this uncomfortable. Call me British, but it was alien to me.  

As the heat intensified and I felt myself relax however, my guard went down. I was struck by the sense of community and ease this group shared, how they knew about each other's lives and difficulties, were party to one another's emotional weathers. At one point, one woman broke into song, suggesting others joined in. One or two did, but I declined. A naked sauna was one thing, a naked singsong quite another.  

Nobody batted an eyelid, and it was just another example of how nakedness seemed to act like alcohol does at a party, disinhibiting everyone, a shortcut to deeper layers that would take weeks to reach in group therapy or a wellness retreat. I was struck by the eye contact too, as if being naked actively encouraged people to look at your face rather than risk the disrespect of eyes wandering. 

Perhaps Lizzo had it right when she talked about nudity as an act of authentic vulnerability. There's nothing more vulnerable than being naked in public. What I discovered was that vulnerability and trust have a symbiotic relationship. By going nude, it was like saying: here I am, trusting you with the most vulnerable version of me. All my wobbly bits and flaws. I accept me, so in turn, I accept you. You can trust me. I am not judging you. That trust leads to openness, an emotional disarmament. Sitting around chatting later, one woman told me about the death of her son, and a man about his wife leaving him and single fatherhood. 

"This is what nakedness does," he said, sitting by the pool. "I mean, look at me. Don't know you from Adam and yet I felt so able to be vulnerable with you, I just shared my innermost secrets." 

I can't say I am going to join a naturist club any time soon. But I think he's really onto something. 

If this has made you think about authentic connection differently, our community and events at theALLBRIGHT are built around exactly that. Join thousands of women who know that the most meaningful connections happen when you stop performing and start showing up.