Mention nude yoga to the average person and you’re likely to get a giggle or a squirm, or maybe a joke about downward dog.

Ask Amy Patterson and she might giggle too, or show an interesting pose she discovered on Instagram. But she also gets serious.

Naked yoga, she said, “has absolutely changed my life.”

“Prior to this practice I, like most women, really struggled with a lot of body-image issues and constantly not feeling like my body is good enough, not beautiful enough, not fit enough, not thin enough,” she said. “And I come to this practice and most of those thoughts have pretty much been eradicated from my daily life.”

The 20-year-old Worthington resident started practicing, and teaching, naked yoga this summer. At a recent women’s class that she guided at the Dharma House in Worthington, she encouraged the group to be “acting from a place of gratitude, taking this time to be thankful for your body for all the support that it provides you … thanking yourself for this ability to be real and true and authentic to yourself.”

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