Colour therapy: improve your wellbeing
Brighten up your life
Harnessing the power of mood-boosting colours is a great way to improve wellbeing, especially in the winter months when dour black and greys creep into both our days and our wardrobes.
“Colour therapy works on many levels,” says Justyna Bilski, an energetic healer and colour therapist. “Each chakra is associated with a particular colour, as is each organ, and we have colours in our auric field.
“Each chakra is also associated with different feelings and emotions, so it is very important to keep our chakras and energetic bodies in balance.”
There are seven chakras in the non-physical body that are considered to be the most important: the base chakra (red), the sacral chakra (orange), the solar plexus (yellow), the heart (green), the throat (blue), the third eye or forehead (indigo) and the crown (violet).
These chakras are meant to provide channels through which your life force can move, meaning that each chakra and its associated colour can be wielded for the benefit of your own spiritual energy: “Blue, for example, is the colour of the throat chakra and it can be a useful colour to wear if you are going into an interaction or meeting where you need to speak your truth,” Bilski says.
Benefits of colour therapy
In this way, colour can be used for not only mental but also physical benefits. “There are simple meditation and visualisation techniques that can be used to bring colour healing to our physical, emotional and energetic bodies, and these can be very effective,” Bilski explains. “A simple exercise is to relax your body, focus on your breathing and to picture a colour that you may need, then breathe in that colour, see it surround your body and maybe even penetrate your physical body – you can choose a specific colour or work your way through the colours of the rainbow and visualise each colour energising your body and chakras.”
For those who don’t subscribe to energetic spirituality, the simplest experience of colour therapy is how colours impact on your emotions. “Colours can also have an impact on our mood and emotions by interacting with our nervous system, acting as a subtle cue for physical and emotional responses,” Bilski says. This is generally associated with their perception as either hot or cold, and as moist or dry. Hotter colours tend to foster feelings of energy or ferocity, cooler colours of calm or even melancholy. “As we move into winter, people tend to wear darker colours but this can actually bring your mood down,” says Bilski.
“As the days are darker, we want to bring lightness, vibrancy and warmth into our clothes and surroundings rather than more darkness and greyness.”
Other than what you choose to wear, you can apply colour therapy to your life in many equally simple ways. You might choose to accessorise with it, to decorate your home or office with it, or burn coloured candles. According to Bilski, you can even absorb the benefits of colours in what you eat and drink. “One can be very creative in the use of colour,” she says. “You can add colour to your bath, wrap yourself with a bright blanket or add it to food…the list is endless.”
