Color Therapy

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(Part 1 of 1 l 2 )
Color Me Well

by Michael Braunstein

	Basic instinct to Higher Self Being but human is being but our basic selves. Who doesn't understand the base desires and the characteristics of the body that they align with. Consider lust, hunger, needs like food and procreation. Lower body needs, digestive organs, reproductive organs. Consider heartfelt emotions and higher-mindedness. What part of the body would you relate to them? Is it too much of a leap for one to understand that there are frequencies of energy involved here? Why do we literally align a position of forgiveness or acceptance with the term "take the high road?" Why do we describe a particularly hurtful or base action as a "low blow?" Like we said, this isn't rocket science here. Into this common-sense awareness comes the idea of aligning colors with various emotions and parts of the body and we describe a therapy used for thousands of years called color therapy. This is no secret to the most novice of interior decorators. Come on, ever hear colors described as "masculine" or "wifty?" Fast-food restaurants wanting a quick turnover are always painted an annoying orange or bright color; never a warm, inviting, "take your time" earth-tone. Colors affect us. Color therapists connect the dots on the canvas of wellness. Using ancient allusions of color connecting to various parts of the body, a color therapist would seek to enhance the proper flow of energy in a particular area or function.

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You don't have to be a rocket scientist to get this one. Even a child knows it. -- All of what appears to be solid matter, is anything but.

In the Disney children's book, Our Friend the Atom, the nature and make-up of substances is made simply clear. This is a book published in 1956. The idea of atoms was hardly common knowledge. The hoi polloi had really only been aware of atomic energy for about ten years; since two explosions half a world away from the USA. Only ten years after that, Disney was telling kids a new way to see the world. My hand wasn't solid, it told me. In fact, my entire body was not solid. It was made up of little atoms that were actually 99.999% empty space. The distance between an atom's nucleus and its electron was huge. Disney (or rather Dr. Heinz Haber, the physicist who wrote it with him,) told us that if the nucleus of an atom was only the size of a grape, the electron would be over 300 yards away; almost a quarter-mile! That's a lot of empty space.

But actually, it went on to explain, I wasn't really empty space. That space was filled with energy. It didn't take much, after reading Disney's book, to realize that what my body is made of is mostly energy. In fact, here in 1999, it's considered that the percentage is approaching totality. You see, in 1956, physicists thought that somewhere in the nucleus there was solid matter. What we have actually found is that the nucleus can also be broken down to smaller entities, namely quarks, leptons, gluons, mesons and a menagerie of smaller particles that are also separated by, you guessed it, energy. I have now saved you the enormous trouble of having to go through what I had to endure to find a copy of Our Friend the Atom.

Now in years past, all this information would not be a surprise to Democritus, Aristotle, Plato, or any of the ancient wise men of India or many other cultures, for that matter. It would be a surprise to your everyday common skeptic though. Can you imagine trying to tell some sod buster a hundred years ago that there are stranger things between Heaven and Earth than meet the eye? That his body was not actually solid but was made of energy? The task remains somewhat the same today. There are those who, failing to physically see or measure something, they doubt. Could it be that a skeptic's physical measuring capabilities simply have not caught up to reality? I mean, after all, a hundred years ago we were unable to measure cosmic rays. Does that mean they did not exist? No surprise, one of the meanings of the word doubt is "to fear." A closed mind simply cannot admit new thoughts. Pity.

SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW
So then, it takes very little "book l'arnin'" to see that we are energy. As part of the energy continuum, we have a basis of interaction then. All energy is related. There is an interplay between one pole and another. Energy adds to, subtracts from, cancels out, resonates with. There are characteristics to energy. They include amplitude, wavelength, frequency, phase, harmonic content, velocity and a few more that are more subtle. (These are just the ones that are Western physics. Wait till we catch up.) So since we are actually made up of energy, we too have those characteristics. Anything that affects the characteristics of our energy affects us.

So think of something along the energy spectrum. Microwaves. Affect us? Yep. Sound. Affect us? Yep. Electricity. Affect us? Yep. Ultraviolet light. Ever get sunburned? (That's a "Yep.") White (full spectrum) light. Ever heard of light therapy for seasonal affective disorder? Another "Yep." What we're getting at here is that energy has characteristics. We are essentially energy. We interact with the characteristics of energies. And we just listed some to show that energies affect us in dramatic and subtle ways. One of the energies that affect us is light.

Light, like all energy, has characteristics. Differences in the characteristics in light make the light appear different to us. Just as our ears only detect sound when it is within certain ranges, our eyes only detect light in the visible spectrum. If a sound is too high a frequency for us to hear, we don't notice it with our ears. But, this is important, that does not mean that the sound does not affect us. Ultra-high frequency sounds have been used to affect us in numbers of ways. Sub-sonic sounds have been used to kill test animals in an effort by the Department of Defense to develop weapons. Light waves have frequency too.

With sound, low frequency is called "bass." From our common experience, we know that low frequencies are perceived though not always heard. High frequency sound is called "treble." With light, we also have names for the frequencies of energy. Low frequency light is called "red." High frequency light is called "violet." Light that is lower than we can detect with our eyes is called infra-red. Light too high for us to see with our eyes is called (ta-da) ultra-violet. (G'duh.)

The seven basic colors are, in order, from low frequency to high, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Scuba divers and physics students use the mnemonic ROY-G-BIV to remember the roster of the spectrum. Nature provides us with another cheat-sheet which I prefer: the rainbow. Look at a rainbow anytime and you'll see that red is on the bottom, violet on top.

CHAKRA KHAN
Out of the ancient land of the Kublai Khan, the Sanskrit language gave to us the term chakra to denote "wheel". The term is applied to the areas of the body that are considered energy centers. By the strangest of coincidences, there are seven main ones. They number from the lowest, number one, at the floor of the torso, to the highest, at the crown of the head, seven. The colors that correspond are from lower frequency, red, to highest, violet. Just a couple chakras that you can dramatically experience by touching include the solar plexus or heart chakra and the throat chakra in that little cup that forms the interclavicular notch between the collarbones. Push your finger into either and you can feel that they differ from other parts of the body in the way they feel.

Color therapy makes use of the interplay and coordination of the frequencies and characteristics of light and applies it to the functions and processes of the associated chakra and any malady that is related.

Now that the connection is made clear, (for most of you,) we can, in the future, illuminate the relationship between light energy (color) and health (our energy). To recap, here is what has been said: We are affected by energy. Light is energy. Color denotes a particular energy level of light. The different levels of any energy affect us in different ways.

Be well.

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Michael Braunstein is Executive Director of Heartland Healing and certified by the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners in clinical hypnotherapy. He graduated from the Los Angeles Hypnotism Training Institute and was an instructor at the UCLA Extension University for 11 years.

Heartland Healing is devoted to the examination of various alternative forms of healing. It is provided as a source of information and not as medical advice. It is not meant as an endorsement of any particular therapy, either by the writer or by Heartland Healing Center, Inc.