Keep your eyes closed and then open them. You will find colors are everywhere, visible to your eyes. There is a subtle but phenomenal connection between colors and human emotions. Numerous studies have been conducted on colors and their impact on the human mind.
You must have often heard this question: ‘What is your favorite color?’ If you instantly say, for example, blue. Why? Have you ever asked yourself? What makes you love this particular color? What does it say about your mental and emotional state?
What is Color?
A color is simply light wave travelling through pace. This wave is made of different wavelengths and frequencies, which together form the electro-magnetic spectrum, the energy visible to the human eye. Color therapy uses this visible spectrum of light and the energy of the colors contained in it.
Each color has its own particular wavelength and frequency. For example, red has the longest wavelength and slowest vibration, whereas violet has the shortest wavelength and the highest vibration. No wonder that each color affect a viewer differently.
The colors of Holi festival brings to mind the significance of colors in our life. A life without colors is like a flower without its aroma. Colors play an essential role in shaping our perceptions, experiences, views and outlook on everything around us.
Colors and Chakras
Red: Color of vibrancy and life force, red is the most intense color of all. It represents the ground, passion, righteous anger, the base, and blood (life force). It calls for attention, survival and guides us through change. It signals danger and warns us to pay attention or be alert. It indicates our life energy and connection with Earth.
Orange: It is the color of vitality and strengths. Considered as the mix of red and yellow, Orange is associated with gentleness, stillness and wisdom. It represents a developmental phase after our base (represented by red) is made stronger, pointing to steady growth with lighter pleasures (yellow) and pains (red) along the way.
Yellow: All the dark elements flee the moment sun shines waking up the bees! Yellow is the epitome of light (sun), total awareness about your growth and maturity and optimism. It is the color of Solar Plexus Chakra, the center of all your energies.
Green: It feels so amazing when you walk bare-footed on the grass and the dew-laden blades of grass touch the underneath of your feet, calming your mind (mental), body (physical), heart (emotional) and soul (spiritual) altogether! It is the color of love and compassion for everything around you and these two qualities are innately existent in all the living beings.
Blue: When you look up in the sky, all you see is its endless vastness. Anything vast and beyond our mental speculation is made of this color like sky, oceans etc. Blue is all-inclusive, being even one of the element colors of fire (others being yellow and orange). Spiritual personalities like Shiva and Krishna are blue because of their being absolutely all-inclusive. Buddhists call Blue as the color of pure, calm, tranquil and serene mind.
Indigo: Considered as royal blue, Indigo color represents deeper and inner knowledge. It is the color of Third Eye Chakra inside which lie the patterns of your thoughts. Once you know these patterns, you get insight and clarity of thoughts. It helps you connect everything you experience with a larger picture. As the thoughts become clear, the covering of illusions unfolds, making you experience wholeness and sense of tranquility and wisdom.
Violet: That bliss you experience with no reason is rare to have. It is the color of absolute bliss when you are above pleasures and pains. It denotes the purity of mind, body and soul and connects you with the Cosmos, which is beyond mundane affairs around you.
Let go
White: White is not a color in a real sense. Absence of other colors means white color. Cosmically, white contains all the seven colors in their brightest luminosity. It splits into many colours which are nothing but the seven colors with lower brightness of white. From a spiritual standpoint, white is the absence of other colors, meaning one is away from colorful material life and treads the path of Light (spirituality).
This tells us that we should enjoy life and all its colours but not get trapped in any of them. Ultimately, it is the mingling of all the colours that leads to the white colour of purity. Similarly, we must learn to live and let go with joyful abandon. Enjoy the festival of colors. Rangpanchami is the season of letting go and attaining purity and fulfilment.
