Swellness Vibes

Color Therapy 101: Green

Ahhh, we have now reached the ever-present green, especially in areas inundated with grass, trees, plants… It is pretty pervasive and if it’s kudzu, it’s pretty invasive. (Sorry for the botanical humor there.)

Green is usually the color of the heart chakra, and I’ve been told it’s the color for receiving love (whereas pink, it’s counterpart, is the color for giving love). Green is typically associated with general healing and health as well. It’s also the color of luck (think of a four-leaf clover.)

On the flip side, you can be green with envy, so perhaps this phrase comes from when there is am imbalance in your heart chakra, when it is perhaps closed even, and you can no longer receive any love — or forgiveness — so you become angry, and quickly become envious because you feel like you can never have what others have.

(If only you’d open yourself to the love that is around!)

A friend of mine was doing an online meditation retreat, and shared a pamphlet about chakras that had been presented via the class. It is by Kheops International, and it is a pretty neat little roundup of information regarding chakras.

According to the pamphlet, an under-stimulated heart chakra can show up as being “afraid of letting go”, having a “tendency to withdraw, feeling unworthy of love”. An over-stimulated chakra can be expressed as one who is “feeling attacked” or has “excessive secretiveness and jealousy”. A balanced heart chakra “can express kindness and love freely”.

I just came across this wonderful, amazing website: https://www.sensationalcolor.com. This woman is an internationally recognized color expert, consultant, and designer. She even offers courses you can take learning about colors and design.

According to her, green is a color for rebirth and revitalization. She says that when we are surrounded by green, our pituitary gland is activated and our muscles begin to relax, histamine levels increase, and allergy symptoms start to dissipate. (It makes you wonder, though, as trees are green — how can you be in the presence of something that relaxes you, yet also creates an allergic reaction???) It apparently increases creativity as well.

According to Charles Klotsche and his Color Medicine book, green is considered a neutral color and therefore the “master” color, the middle of the visible spectrum. He says it relieves tension and balances your brain. He says a lot of disorders could be cleared up by green light therapy by itself, as it is a disinfectant and antiseptic. It can apparently treat colds and relieve food poisoning. He says green vibrates at 584 trillion times per second!

So how can you go about getting more green in your life, especially if it’s NOT lush where you live, and green isn’t as ubiquitous as it might be in other locales?

Start with my favorites — crystals! Malachite and aventurine, jade and calcite. Keep them around you! Wear green clothes. Eat gree, leafy foods and sprinkle your dishes with green herbs, like parsley, and lemon balm. Bring plants into your house.

Green light therapy that already exists treats migraines (LED “migraine lamps”), so perhaps you’ve already experienced it? You could always purchase a green light bulb and place it into a desk lamp and target an area you feel could specifically benefit from the green light.

During this season of giving and receiving, gratitude and love — if you find yourself having extra dark days, surround yourself with green to help bounce back. And as Dumbledore said, you can always just turn on the light. And in this case, green light!

Color Therapy 101: Yellow

Imagine: this person is staring at you as you sit in a chair. You’re trying to remain neutral – after all, you asked for this – but you start to feel a little on edge and completely uncomfortable — you’ve given in to the feelings of discomfort. The person assessing your aura tells you how she is done looking at you, because all of a sudden you turned YELLOW.

According to David Hamilton in his new book, Why Woo-Woo Works, people who say they see auras have often said that the color is associated with how the subject feels at the time of assessment. (An aside: I’ve only just started to peruse his book, but he’s got real-science, real-studies behind all things ‘woo-woo’ and I recommend the book if your brain is hardwired the way mine is.)

So let’s think of things that we already know about the color yellow. When you refer to someone as being a yellow belly, you’re calling them a coward. This is the exact inverse of, say, ‘follow the yellow brick road’, which of course, the yellow bricks lead to Dorothy’s way out of Oz. She’s following her own power to find the way home.

So the standard goes, yellow is the color of the solar plexus chakra, which is the chakra that is associated with self-power.

During the yoga training I took, I taught a portion on color and light therapy to my fellow yogis. I asked them what their favorite colors were, and which ones they didn’t like (if any). The sunniest, brightest, most joyful of my classmates loved the color yellow. So it’s power, and joy.

If your solar plexus chakra is out of balance by being under-stimulated, surround yourself with pretty yellow flowers, or crystals like citrine. Infuse your water with the sun and lemon juice. (You could even go as far as using citrine essence — maybe we’ll do a little crystal essence experiment here in the near future. A quick google search is telling me that you can purchase already made essences, rather than make your own! There are many different sites hawking products like this one. Who knew?!)

Yellow light therapy that already exists, like with some other colors, is LED light therapy for facials. Various colors do different things — according to this site that offers the LED facials, yellow will remove inflammation. If you live in Illinois and have tried the service, let us know!

According to this site, yellow sunglasses will help alleviate anxiety. It makes sense, right; yellow being the color of the sun, of joy. This site lists a bunch of various colored glasses — even some for kids.

And oh, how much fun was it to discover that Hauswitch was offering color-specific items at their store. I wasn’t able to visit it last year when I was in Salem, but I would love to go inside the store itself one day. If you order these yellow pillows to bring some joy or manifestation into your room, please post pictures to share!

So are you a yellow person? Why, or why not?

Color Therapy 101: Orange

At this point, no doubt you’ve pressed the “night shift” mode on your phone to help dim the effects of a bright phone when it’s nighttime. It’s an orange-y color, right? And I’m sure you know that orange is better than blue light, because the regular blue light disrupts melatonin production and we certainly need that produced by our bodies so we can sleep better at night.

So, aha! Orange light therapy is already a part of your every day life!

Alas, that doesn’t really explain any aversions or attractions to orange, especially in lieu of the chakra system. (Personal anecdote: the child was looking at the endocrine system in a book, and I told him the glands correlate with an energy system he already knows a lot about — and he figured it out — chakras!)

Orange is another stimulating color on the visible spectrum — but perhaps not as stimulating as red. It vibrates at a faster frequency than its predecessor, and generally elicits feelings of happiness and joy.

Let’s dig little deeper.

I personally could not STAND orange until my early to mid 30s. Around the time I was spending a lot of time holding my abdomen (and my child was swirling around in my aura, but that’s another story) — around the chakra area that is orange, the sacral area — it was by no mistake.

While the root chakra represents stability and security, the sacral chakra represents creation, emotions, this flowing essence of such. It’s where empathy is created, where ideas bloom, where everything — included sexuality, and therefore babies! — are created.

The combination of the two chakras fully working together creates freedom in the essence of stability. Who doesn’t strive for that, right?

However, if you are like me when I was younger and orange was a huge deterrent, there’s probably some sort of esoteric reason why. If your sacral chakra is out of balance by being too stimulated, you may find that you are overly sensual and sexual, to the point of dysfunction in your life because of it.

If your sacral chakra is under-stimulated, you may have relationship issues, or the fear of realizing your full potential (blocked creativity) in any form of your life.

So what can you do if you want to stimulate your aversion to orange?

If you want to un or de-stimulate your love of orange because you find that you are engaging in those overstimulated behaviors, you can try to mellow your attraction by engaging with the other colors, specifically the ones you may find aversion towards, or rather, more whites (purity) or upper spectrum colors. Greens would be good to focus on, to try and bridge yourself toward the upper colors as well.

This goes towards any color on the spectrum — you could also seek energy therapy to help balance the chakras — not just physical color therapy, but emotional, mental, spiritual. (Think: in-person or remote reiki, or chakra balancing yoga, or pendulum work.)

If you are understimulated, feel free to surround yourself with orange stones like carnelian or coral — you can wear one as a choker at your throat; listen to music that makes you feel sexy; grab a lovely, sensual orange and silk scarf to wear out on the town, or simply run it through your fingers, awakening the senses.

Lie on the floor and do a reclined-goddess pose; do pelvic rocks while in bridge, or scissors kicks (abdominal strengthening, too, woohoo!).

Even Philips has something to say about orange light therapy itself — it apparently revitalizes skin.

Remember — these color therapy/chakra posts are just the beginning.

Some of the information above is from the sources below:

Charles Klotsche – Color Medicine: The Secrets of Color Vibrational Healing; Anodea Judith – Wheels of Life: A User’s Guide to the Chakra System; and also my Reiki I and Reiki II compilations of sources.

“We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two because two is one and one. we forget that we still have to make a study of “and”.” -A. Eddington

Color Therapy 101: Introduction + Red

When you think of red, what sort of emotional response does it elicit within you? One of passion, rage, anger? One of lust? One of discomfort, awkwardness? Love, perhaps? Power?

Upon thinking of these responses, it’s really hard to disassociate the chakras and what their typical color and meaning assignments are. Thus, we will begin to see how color therapy can be used to help remove energetic blockages.

Starting with red, chakra colors follow a typical rainbow pattern up to the top of your head. The red is the root; orange is sacral; yellow is solar plexus; green is the heart bridge; blue is throat; indigo is the third eye; violet is the crown.

When I was a young girl, I couldn’t stand the lower chakra colors — red, orange, and yellow. Actually, I couldn’t stand green, either. I was all about the other end of the spectrum — blues, indigo, dark violets, blacks, and to a lesser extent, deep whites.

I remember when I was about in the 7th grade and a friend declared she loved my style. She thought it was amusing that one day I could get away with wearing all white, and the next day I could wear all black — and it wasn’t weird.

As with all of us, I would choose to wear colors depending on how I felt.

As my psyche and persona developed into high school age, the black became more of an enveloping color to to cloak me in safety — hello, Goths, or Emos, or whatever you’re called now — there’s a reason why you gravitate towards black.

Black absorbs all colors, and it helps you work through your highly emotional, and empathetic, states. It keeps you safe.

As I got older and began to study chakras, I realized why I preferred the colors I had always gravitated towards — these darker, deeper colors. To this day, lighter colors, pastels, still sit a little ill with me — and I am desperately trying to make yellow work within my lifestyle (but that one is a little harder, too; it sits not just on an emotional plane for me, but also physical — I am yellow-toned, and yellow eerily washes me out into a state of nonexistence!).

Red itself, though, was evasive for probably over 30 years of my life.

Red represents the color most frequently associated with the lowest chakra — the root. Literally think of the sciatic nerve rooting down from your spinal column, reaching down into the ground. Red is on the visible spectrum, and it moves at a much lower speed of frequency.

When all is well, you feel grounded, stable. There is security and stillness. You feel like you belong, and you damn well deserve to belong. A key phrase might be, “I am.”

However, if your root chakra is imbalanced – as mine was as a child – you don’t feel stable, and the very thought of gravity is terrifying. You simply want to lift off, and get away from wherever you currently are — and I’m using the word loosely – planted.

It could also be over-stimulated, in which case you might become too content, too lethargic, too close to the ground. You might imbibe in too much red protein, and begin to vibrate at a lower frequency. You might become overweight, stagnant.

So red, this color associated with this root chakra, might be a major deterrent. It may stimulate your senses and simply be too overwhelming. It might activate you, and make you extremely jittery.

If you find that this is the case, and no other color bothers you — then you might want to actually work with the color red and not avoid it.

In small doses, of course, especially since it IS such a stimulating color.

Here are some suggestions for you to try:

Gather red flowers, red stones for decoration inside your abode. Place them in groups within your vision; don’t start with too much, but subtle differences your body systems will take alert towards. Continue to add to the piles you’ve chosen, until you realize you don’t notice them anymore.

Stone suggestions: ruby, garnet, bloodstone, red jasper. Flowers: roses, carnations.

Wear these slick, red glasses like the ones I offer to students during my Introduction to Color/Light Therapy classes — and FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS by not keeping them on too long. You are literally filtering in the red light into your retinas.

WEAR RED. This is probably the most simple to do, and your body systems will absorb the color. I have a tendency of wearing a red hoodie anytime I get sick — it’s like my body is absorbing the frequency to heal up more efficiently.

EAT RED. Grapes, apples, red meat if that’s your thing.

KNIT IN RED! (Like I’m currently doing, for my son’s Hallowe’en Spider-man costume!)

I think you get the idea.

To find out if you could use some color therapy in your life in regards to your chakras, a google search will pull up some chakra tests.

Here’s one I just took, which was super quick and easy.

And just so you know, it said my sacral chakra is off. Which is perfect, as our next chakra and color to look into will be… orange!

For further consideration regarding red color and/or light therapy, think of infrared lights, lasers. Think of how these treatments are already embedded into our society without second thought. More and more studies are being conducted regarding different colors and/or light therapy, beyond what we take for granted as normal. There are even studies that red light therapy helps with migraine headaches!

Let this series start your journey into color therapy! Read books, check out blogs, check out studies. You can even find a color therapist for more personal guidance. But above all, enjoy!

❤ This rich world of hues can be used as an added wonder into your daily life. ❤

I hope you enjoyed this little blurb about the color red… the next color in this series will be orange, so stay tuned!

Free 7-day Meditation Series

Why did I not know these people before now? Micah, who I’m desperately trying to get onboard with writing her own posts on this blog (can you feel it, friend?), sent a link to Lasater Yoga’s free 7-day Meditation series.

I guess I’ve been caught up with Reiki, or Cranial-Sacral Therapy, or other massage techniques. I really have only just begun to explore the WORLD of yoga (even though I have been practicing for over 20 years).

I foresee myself using these ladies for continuing education. Judith Laseter not only helped create Yoga Journal itself, she helped create the governing body of American yoga, and also trained directly under Iyengar… Google her! She seems pretty fascinating, and clearly is one of the reasons behind people like me wondering about yoga to begin with.

Her and her daughter just offered this free meditation course, with another live webinar coming up September 2, 2021. It appears you’ll be able to sign up for an intensive sometime after that, and I’m assuming all of these videos and audios will be available for a long time in the future.

The one-week program is designed around 3-5 minutes of video from the Guru and Daughter team, discussing a theme of the day. It is then followed by 5 minutes of briefly-guided audio-only meditation. I didn’t enjoy the fact that they used Dropbox to share their wealth, but the 10-minutes every night while my son read next to me (preparing for sleep) — well, my son and I both enjoyed it. A few times he joined in with me, or asked questions. (He’s only seven!)

What wonderful, simple suggestions for someone not new to meditation to try! Third eye at the back of the forehead? Nah, move that INTO THE BRAIN. (Chakras are connected to glands, right? What a novel sensation!)

Feel the movement of skin, the uplift of ribs as you focus on breath…wait, what?

My favorite from Day 7 —- notice the silence after a thought. Rather than struggling with thoughts when you’re trying not to think — focus on the SILENCE after that thought.

Yes!

Sign up here! No, I’m not getting any kickbacks, just sharing this quick daily slow down with you. Hope you enjoy it like I did.