Chakra alignment: Your journey to find inner peace
It's time to let go of the ‘Clean Girl Aesthetic’ and start focusing on you. Enhance your spiritual energies on the inside to reflect the best version of yourself on the outside.
The ‘Clean Girl Aesthetic’ has been one of TikTok’s most familiar trends with over 817,400 posts using #CleanGirl. Instead of being influenced by spending money on beauty products, Stanley cups and hair gel, why not invest your time into the emerging #MeVsMe practice, where creators are improving themselves from within to become the best version of themselves? Discover your inner peace and focus on what you can enhance on the inside, to inevitably reflect it on the outside.
Experts in This Article:
Dr John Thurlow - Author of Unstraight, doctoral degree in education, spiritualist follower.
Thulile Seleka - Experienced spiritualist coach, social change practitioner, and activist.
Spirituality comes in a variety of different practices, with a broad ‘concept of universal energies’ at the centre of its origin, as stated by Dr John Thurlow. Spirituality can include mindfulness, personal development, religious convictions, and the pursuit of life’s purpose. Forms of spirituality can vary across cultures, beliefs, and personal experience, but the universal understanding of transcendence and discovering one’s inner peace remain consistent. Ultimately posing the question, ‘do we believe in spirituality or are we spirituality?’ – Thulile Seleka.
Deeply connecting to yourself upgrades you from your ego and places you in a ‘energy of love’. When speaking to Dr John Thurlow he enlightened the meaning of spirituality by explaining the practices of gratitude, hope and inner peace with later explaining how they link to chakra alignment. These three categories were broken down into practices you can enforce to engage with each one:
Gratitude
Find your negative thoughts and recognise the significance and weight you are allowing them to have. ‘When you pay attention to these negative thoughts, over and over in your head, you are allowing your body to believe they are happening to you right now’. Your mind, body and soul, although all work together, are three separate entities. By enabling room for negative thoughts in your mind, you are allowing your body to release cortisol as a result, as the body cannot distinguish reality from your thoughts. Instead, replace these affirmations with positive ones and your dopamine will rise, enabling happiness and appreciation.
As Thulile advises, ‘the more you are growing in spirituality, the more you are able to handle emerging issues coming at you from your physical, material life.’
Hope
To exercise the practice of hope, it's important to take your mind into the future and allow yourself to feel the excitement of upcoming plans and opportunities. John explained that when writing his book Unstraight, he faced some ‘difficulties’ and challenges when fearing his family and friends would view him differently due to the rawness and truth of the book.
Coming from a deeply Catholic upbringing, John felt that his homosexuality drove him away from his religious backgrounds, but he retained the practices of spirituality by understanding ‘we all have the same source of life’ and we come ‘from the same origin’. Instead, he visualised his family being ‘proud of him’ at his book launch rather than the negative thoughts he was feeding himself. Holding onto that visual, John persevered with his book and continued his writing process.
Inner Peace
Inner peace is allowing yourself to feel presence. Presence is a concept in which we are all aware of, but often don’t practice enough. Feeling presence requires full concentration on how you are feeling inside and focusing on the energies in your body. Chakras are an important part of discovering your inner peace as they are the seven central flows of energy in your body.
‘When your chakras are blocked, you get physical illness, emotional illness, and you get a spiritual imbalance…when energy can’t flow through you, it’s some kind of diss-ease of the flow of energy. And some argue that’s what causes diseases’
– Dr John Thurlow, author.
What are chakras?
The seven chakras are known as the body’s energy centres and obtain their roots in ancient practices. Each of the seven primary practices are associated with particular physical, emotional and spiritual facets. Chakras run from the root of your spine (tailbone) to the crown of your head and influence well-being across the body. Harmony is encouraged by balanced chakras and alignment, whereas imbalances can be caused from blockages and lack of practice.
Dr Thurlow also offered knowledge regarding chakra alignment and explained that, ‘chakras need to be open for that energy to flow through you’ in order ‘to raise your vibrations’. By doing so ‘you bring good things to you and good people to you’. Which is what we all want to achieve, right?
However chakras can become blocked, not always from a fault of your own but through ‘ancestral mapping’ – Thulile Seleka. When your chakras are blocked, complications can take place which can present themselves in the form of spiritual, physical or emotional imbalances.
Offering valuable, expert opinions on the importance of chakras and the effect they can have on overall wellbeing, Thulile states that chakra alignment ultimately ‘centres you’.
‘It centres you, which is what you want. It clears your aura, which is what you want. It gives you a sense of clarity about who you are, and it heightens the level to which you're aware of yourself and how you're showing up to others and the world you are in.’
– Thulile Seleka
How To Practice Chakra Alignment
Incorporating physical exercise such as yoga and meditation, will not only improve your physical health, but your spiritual health too. Aligning your chakras and keeping them balanced is ‘an available system to use because it really shows the multidimensional nature of human beings and how that relates to our day to day lives’ – Thulile Seleka.
By following the seven different yoga poses offered in the video below, an initial step in discovering your inner peace and achieving a more fulfilling quality of life is available:
Putting you first, and understanding your needs and wants out of life, is the first step to self-acceptance and peace, which I understand, in our digital age is difficult when you are being constantly bombarded by how you should look, dress and present yourself to the world, all the key concepts of the ‘Clean Girl Aesthetic’.
By allowing yourself to not only improve your spiritual mind, but stepping away from social media posts and unrealistic trends set by creators, will enrich your personal quality of life.
Create your own trend by finding what makes you, you.
‘It’s about surrendering yourself and going with the flow and allowing universal light to flow through you.’
– Dr John Thurlow