DRESSING FOR YOUR SOUL

Volume 19

What You Wear Affects You

Do you take the time to choose what you wear every morning? Or perhaps, evenings, as you dress for dinner? Obviously, some of us take more care in our appearance than others. Is it because some of us love fashion or perhaps have the need to create or maintain a certain image?

Yet others dress according to their moods. Professor Karen Pine, author of Mind What You Wear, found that specific clothing can make people feel more confident in different situations. Common sense and experience would show you that what we wear affects the way others think of us. Many people are affected by how others see them.

Sometimes putting on different clothing makes you feel differently too. For example, something silky may make you feel relaxed or classy or sexy. Something with somber colors enhances the seriousness of a task or situation that you find yourself in.

Over the years many cultures have rules regarding dressing, in general or for specific occasions. One might think that this is done for image or honor but it is actually done to instill certain values or a particular mindset in the wearer. For example, military uniforms may evoke feelings of patriotism or reinforce a hierarchy of superiority and subordination.

Pine also found that the effect of dressing in certain clothing is so strong that when the women in one of her research groups were asked to do a math test in a swimsuit or wearing a sweater, the latter group performed better.

More often than not, people choose to dress a certain way to express how they feel, what they think, and what they choose to honor. So if the way we dress has a lot of influence on our psychology and spirit, doesn’t it make sense or feel better to be more selective of what we wear?

Clothing To Change Your Life

According to International Makeover Coach Selena Rodriguez in The Archaeology Of Style, clothing emits energy through its cut, colors, design, fabric and fit when a garment or accessory matches to one or more of a person’s essential inner qualities. Clothing cannot otherwise give to a person an attribute the wearer does not already carry. Perhaps this is why just simply wearing a particular color or shape may not help the wearer manifest or change the situation she or he wants to change.

By wearing a certain style but not feeling comfortable in it does not help manifest or improve a certain situation because, well, the style may not suit you at all in terms of personality or lifestyle. You are just not being authentic, not respecting your body or living according to what makes your soul happy.

A Colorful Learning Experience

I have a good friend who has a colorful sense of style that always makes her look perfect in what she wears. Although she mixes different textures and price tags but one constant is that she is always colorfully dressed. She is also one of the kindest and most positive people I know. She explained it best when she told me that she had had an abusive and controlling husband all her married life, and divorced, she feels free to express herself and be herself.

This friend is a teacher and counsellor by profession, but if you were to meet her, you would definitely notice that she does not dress at all like what you would expect of her profession. Yet she is successful, holds a good position at work and is leading a most blessed life despite widowed by her second husband.

Dressing Your Purpose

Since my life purpose involved becoming more of my authentic self, I decided that I would experiment with this to see which clothing I wore would make me feel more like myself.

If I were being true to myself, and my body, mind and soul were aligned that particular day to my purpose, intention and tasks, I should be able to create positive and aligned outcomes. And yes, more often than not, I’ve found that those days were indeed among my most positive ones.

Dressing Your True Essence

You can use your clothing to radiate qualities you need more of and minimize the ones you don’t need, or divert attention away from the qualities you don’t need. This article is not about teaching you how to dress or what colors you should wear but to remind you to be mindful of how what you wear affects you and others, and can actually change the outcomes of situations in your life!

For a start, it’s important to know who you are. Just because red denotes passion and you want to emphasize that, it does not mean that you have to focus heavily on red when you do not like the color. Think about other things that make you feel passionate.

When you are wearing what makes you shine, you will feel good and confident about yourself. People will respond favorably to you and compliment your style or act more positively when you are around.

Many of us live according to the expectations of others. So much so, we often forget our true essence and lose sense of who we are. About 8 years ago, someone I had just met told me, “You are nothing like you dress, you are actually a little crazy and fun to talk to”.

That really surprised me as I really did not give much thought to what I wore then. My opinion then of people who did care about what they wore was that they were either socialites or artistic people. And I thought of myself as neither – I was a lecturer and just felt that I had to dress conservatively.

Perhaps dressing up isn’t so much about impressing anybody, but about fulfilling your life purpose and influencing others for the better, leaving a unique impression on the world.

Have you met anyone whose sense of style makes you break out in a smile? What if your dressing could bring out the best in you or other people in every way? What if you dressed a certain way and could transform the way you feel about certain situations and people and thus create different outcomes for your life?

If clothes do maketh the woman and the man, let us clothe ourselves in ways that make us shine out the true essence of our soul, not mask it. And make our world a better and happier one if even for a day.