On Wearing White
What you choose to wear should be based on your personal experience. Because it’s real to you. Not because someone else thinks you should do it, or you want to look a certain way to gain attention, or to put on an act.
It is a privilege to always look good, and to always look royal. Look good because you are good. Look royal because you are royal in your consciousness. Let your clothing project your pure self-identity.
How you dress can always be a personal choice. When you choose to dress with grace, dignity, modesty, and elegance, it can strengthen your projection and become a tool to help you expand your consciousness.
Projection and Impact
Elegant, white dress makes you visible to people. It gives you impact and projection. The only way you can connect to someone so that they can remember you is if you impact them with your projection. Dressing in white can expand your projection and your energy, much, much more than when you dress like everyone else. When your style of dress is a reflection of your own commitment to your inner reality, it creates a subtle communication with other people. The impact and projection says to someone, “This person is different. I’ve got to talk to this person. Maybe this person can help me.”
We want to serve others. We want to be able to protect others. How can you serve or protect if other people don’t even know you’re there? You have to be visible. That requires courage. It requires that you be secure in your self and that you enjoy who you are in relation to your higher self. Then you can serve and protect from the core of your own purity and consciousness.
Expand Your Aura
Each day, you can expand your aura and increase your openness and neutrality by wearing dignified clothes that are white or ivory, made from cotton, silk, or wool. Wearing white expands your aura and creates a powerful interface between you and your environments. The spectrum of light energy that makes up the color white contains the energies of all colors. By wearing white, all the colors are available to support and enhance the aura and the eight chakras. Natural fibers act as energy conduits. The fibers interact with your surroundings to conduct prana inward and filter out negative or chaotic energy.
Yogi Bhajan on Wearing White
"We wear white because it's a simple scientific fact that every piece of matter or material has a foot and a half aura. Every animal has a three and a half foot aura. Every human has a nine foot aura. And if we wear cotton and we wear white, this color therapy gives us one extra foot of aura."
"I trust my students will behave right. But in case they behave like animals, they will still have a margin, an edge. That is what it's all about. You have to wear a natural fiber and you have to wear white. It's a pure color therapy and it's called auric color therapy." [Beads of Truth, Spring 1981]
"We adopted this color because of our background and to support our development. We ask you to wear white so that you will reflect what is outside and go within yourself—that’s what white clothes can do for you."
"When you are totally dressed in white, the entire face reflects it, and then it is very difficult to become intimate. Wearing white demands that the other person deal with you on a higher level, because that person has to concentrate himself in order to advance."
"The most difficult thing on this planet is to wear white top to bottom; but it is also the greatest therapy. Some people think we are laying a trip. We are not laying a trip on anyone. We wear yellow. We wear blue. We know these colors, and we know their reaction. Sit in your own living room with a yellow house turban on—and then a white house turban. You will find the difference. Colors create an uncontrollable action in your subconscious mind of inspiration, productivity and expansion. Colors have an excessive effect on consciousness."
"We wanted to develop a very fast, progressive, spiritual and technical method of all the colors, so we have adopted the one color of the seven colors, which is white. To you, white is just one color, but to me it is the total balance of seven colors." [Summer 1975, published in I Am a Woman, p. 156.]
© The Teachings of Yogi Bhajan
References: The Aquarian Teacher: KRI International Kundalini Yoga Teacher Training Textbook Level One and an interview with Guruka Singh Khalsa.
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