There are lots of discussions in the spirituals world about the relation among Kundalini awakening, opening chakras, and soul growth leading towards enlightenment. From ancient times this subject was a hot point among spirituals, gurus, and meditators in general.
Let me tell you shortly about the practical relation among these main three concepts from my own long experience, and after also observing the spiritual evolution process at other very high souls.
There are from my experience two main approaches to open chakras 100%.
Chakras opening by working with oneself
First approach is the typical spiritual one, that is by working with yourself, by 1) daily meditation done correctly, 2) releasing low level subconscious beliefs, 3) going vegetarian or even vegan, 4) improving your actions in daily life, i.e. living every moment by what you received in meditation (a thing very few spirituals really do), 5) reconnect with Mother Earth and Father Sun who keep our body alive every second, and 6) choosing wisely where we live, work, spend most of our time, what kind of people we mingle with.
If one really applies daily the previous things with dedication and from the bottom of his heart, than he/she has the chance to actually reach soul enlightenment in a single life, and even further reach body wisdom. Remember that meditation by itself, no matter which meditation procedure, CANNOT BY DEFINITION MAKE YOU REACH ENLIGHTENMENT as unfortunately many spirituals think.
It’s like in school when learning mathematics and you attend the theory lectures, that’s all good and well, but one has to use mathematics to solve real concrete problems to really test if he truly assimilated mathematics or not.
The same is in spirituality, one has to apply in life what he learned theoretically and that means living as a 7D soul through your actions in daily life not just in theory, and this is much more difficult to do in a 3D world where large majority of people around are just young 3D vibration souls.
Actions matter 99% and theory maybe 1%. Therefore all conditions before mentioned have to be reached with at least 80% efficiency so to take a soul from 3D vibration to 7D vibration (soul enlightenment level), and body from 3D vibration to 5D vibration (physical ascension level). Opening the root chakra is a tricky thing and also risky, that unfortunately many spirituals being ignorant of the risks approach it easy-going and quite careless.
By doing this Yogananda, Vivekananda, Ramakrishna etc for instance and others like them successfully reached soul enlightenment, but didn’t reach physical ascension since they didn’t follow certain conditions from above. Well, maybe they didn’t know what to do, or ultimately maybe they were not interested in this, it’s less important for this post subject …
Chakras opening by higher initiation
Second approach for chakras opening is that a true higher soul in the 7D+ vibration (at least fully enlightened) and with a body vibration close to 5D (physical ascension level) to open your chakras at initiation by his sheer force of access to higher energy. It’s actually an immensely powerful flash of energy that sends from master’s C6 (chakra 6 or third eye, ajna) into your C2-C7 chakras (less C1, root chakra) that opens your chakras forcefully from their normal state of openness of 5-20% to 100%! Currently there are about 2-3 masters that can do this on the planet.
By receiving such a forced chakra opening, the Kundalini energy has finally the way open to start rising into the main prana / energy channel (shushumna), and by rising up it increases its vibration along the way and hence supports both soul vibration/awareness growth, and body vibration increase.
The problem is that after opening the students’ chakras these start instantly to shrink to their older much closed state, so the students have to work diligently and constantly following the conditions mentioned at this post beginning to keep them open.
By this approach in practice a student won’t be able to keep his chakras 100% immediately even if working diligently, but after an initial phase of chakras closing say to 50% the student can open them back close to 100% by working hard on the conditions above. In this approach the student uses his masters’ powerful help and starts from a much higher baseline than in the first approach.
Nevertheless, whether you approach one way or the other the chakras opening, this is still just an enabler and not the solution to become enlightened, and one still has to acknowledge and unload his subconscious of his limiting beliefs.