What my wardrobe taught me about healing

my spiritual textile practice as a holistic stylist

Thanks being here! As always: If you like what you’re about to read I would love to get a heart/restack or a recommendation to a friend. It goes a long way <3

I am a millennial in fashion I’ve already seen a lot: from kate moss “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” quotes, women who wear a 38 being categorised as plus size models and body type styling to look as slim as possible. Safe to say, I had my fair share with all kinds of pressure to look a certain way. Hands down the most toxic part of the industry is also its cure and your wardrobe speaks volumes about it. So the work that I am doing now is basically a result of saving myself from my own textile and emotional hell. I had to unlearn my experience with fashion, my body, my relationship with myself and my emotions. Spiritual practices and yogic philosophy were my tools to get the keys not only to cure the symptoms but to heal the root cause of the relationship with myself.

These three beliefs I helped healing with the help of my wardrobe:

Body Dismorphia

As mentioned above, I’ve always struggled with my body image. There are still days where I feel too big to be an influencer or too small breasted for a woman or too tall.

Spoiler: I don’t own a full length mirror right now and it helps wonders.

The first layer of healing my body image came with shopping pieces vintage. Vintage pieces are mostly one-of-a-kind pieces so they don’t come in smaller or bigger sizes. What helped me when I started to buy vintage as well was the realization that the sizing of brands is a mess and every retailer does it differently and there is literally zero common sense in measurements. During this process, I’ve also came to the conclusion that sizing only matters in terms of how I want the piece to sit on my body and not how my body has to look in order to fit in.

As I don’t have a full length mirror due to my move I had to focus on yet another thing: How I feel wearing my clothes and that resulted in two main epiphanies: I finally own a wardrobe that fits my emotional blueprint and I get to experience a range of emotions in the first place. If you’ve ever experienced a depression you know what I mean when I say it’s a blessing to have the ability to feel them instead of feeling nothing. Secondly, I trust my instincts and intuition more than my reflection because the image in the mirror is literally a projection and is coloured by so many different factors like hormones and emotions.

Spiritual Hygiene

I still have days where I get lazy with my spiritual hygiene as I don’t believe in myself. Aka: I think I am a freak who got sold on some neo-spiritual bullshit that claims everyone is special but feeds the ego in just another way.

Well knowing, that my work works and I have proof with every single client and interaction I have. I see energy work as similar to actual physical hygiene. Like brushing teeth and showering I developed a spiritual hygiene that helps me to keep my energy clean and my mind clear. In last week’s column I talked about the three standing points of yoga which is asana - the practice itself, pranayama meaning the breath and drishti -the focus. The underlining premise of yoga is to create unity. This unity can’t be created by thinking about it or feeling it but my experiencing it. I often feel like a sponge who’s soaking in everyone’s emotions and in order to receive what actually wants to be received by me and work through me I have to “empty” myself which is not the same as feeling numb.

In order to create this clean empty receptive feeling I don’t have emotional bandwidth to constantly think about my outfit. I’m developing a deeper practice with it so that clothes or getting dressed in the morning feels like a walking meditation to me. It’s a level of unity and wholeness I get to experience through the way I am using textiles on my body. Through a beautiful and aesthetically pleasing process I become more myself every single morning and release everybody else’s energy.

All source is asking from me is to pay attention and enjoy the practice what it may bring to the surface. Choosing an outfit is more about the process of getting dressed with full consciousness than having a slaying look every single day.

Shopping

I shop when I am sad. I shop when I want to spoil myself. And everything in between. I understand that money can’t buy happiness on all levels but it also kind of can, you feel me?

You can call it the natural instinct to gather or describe consumerism is slavery: My shopping behaviour is purely based on my emotional state. I got to know money as a form of an excuse. An excuse for emotional absence and lack of personal interest. Money instead of love if you’re a deep sensing and feeling scorpio moon like me.

In full transparency, this third textile behaviour is my personal kryptonite and hard to get over with as I feel enslaved by this behaviour and freed at the same time. I am a financially independent woman with a distinct style and eye for aesthetics that deeply wants to be seen by her peers and create true connection to people instead of only textiles. I feel so human because of my human needs yet so above it because I know better most of the times but not always. To hold space for both is challenging and powerful at the same time as I get to experience the inner capacity to have space for both, for the contradiction, for the paradox.

Textile Alchemy

I just bought these worker pants from Carhartt double knee cargos and I bought them as a spiritual totem. I use them for something I’ve just realised and overcome. I use them to experience, what I was doing emotionally for years. I energetically released it with buying those pants. This is my way of letting it go inside of me and having it as something I get to hold outside of myself so it doesn’t consume me anymore. In spiritual practices this is called alchemy.

My wardrobe serves as a mirror for me like my intuition is talking to me through garments not trying to correct me. It used to be a negotiation between who I was and who I thought I needed to be: slimmer, softer, more feminine, cooler, less visible, more impressive, more desirable and more acceptable.

Through the work, getting dressed has become a ritual of attention and affection. I listened and became participating in my own life through my personal style instead of performing it by following trends.

I don’t believe healing looks like perfection. I think it looks like awareness. It looks like proactively choosing again. It looks like trusting how something feels on my skin instead of how it looks in a mirror. Clothing used to help me disappear into expectations and now it helps me to not only self-express but self-relate. I have a relationship with myself again!

Mirror, mirror on the wall.. I trust how I feel more than how I look at all.

x

Lea