HEALING WITH COLOUR

Colour is not just a visual code:  It's energies affect us in more ways than we think!

Picture the headline: "Scientist invents new colour".  Can you image what that new colour would look like?  Give it a try.  Is it a kind of purpley-orange, or a browny-yellow?

Whatever you see, it won't be a colour you havent seen before. Thats because the human eye is bound by the spectrum of the rainbow, so it's impossible to see new colours.

However, some critters have the upper hand when it comes to colour.  The bumble bee didnt just get the gift of flight and the funky fuzzy coat.  It also got to see what humans cannot. - ultra violet.

During the evolutionary process flowers developed ultra violet landing strips that guide insects to their pollen stashes.  Picture a party full of ravers waving their glow sticks in the air and your somewhere close to a bee's vision.

But most animals have greyscale vision.  The phrase 'like red rag to a bull' is actually meaningless:  bulls are colourblind, so the rag could be any colour and the beast would still charge.  It actually charges at the flag because of the movememnt (and probably because the guy in the sparkly suit waving the flag just stabbed it repeatedly in the back).

But there is one creature with the ability to sense colours in a mind-blowing way: the human.  Yep, we may be limited to seeing certain colours but we're not limited to how we sense them.  For example, some people with a condition called synaesthesia can hear yellow and visualise words as rainbows.

The eyes take in colour and bounce it around our brains, where it gets processed into blocks of visual hues.  But for some people that information gets bounced to the wrong place, so smells, tastes and colours get muddled up.  In it's most common form certain notes of music can trigger colour visuals, but every synaesthete has different perceptions - it may sound like Sasame street, but when they see the alphabet, even if the letters are printed in black and white, they may see a beautiful array of technicolour letters in front of their eyes.

Although the rest of us dont experience such psychedelic landscapes, colour still has effects on us that we don't realise.  Some claim it can be used to heal the sick.  The ancient Egyptians used to put patients in solarium-style rooms filled with coloured light in an attempt to cure them.  In chinese medicine each body part is given a different colour.  Today many holistic practitioners base their entire professions around colour and it's mystical powers.

Chromatherapy for instance, is offered as a method to cure various ailments.  Apparently, sitting in a room full of green light can cure a cough, while bathing in indigo could help you kick your 20 a day habit.  Scientific tests have proved blue light can help jaundice patients recover more quickly, so perhaps there could be something in using colour as a medicine.
So, what exactly is this mysterious force that colour has?  Put simply, light is transmitted at different rates - hence the spectrum you see when light shines through a prism - and therefore has different energies.  For example, violet has a shorter wavelength than red, making it more powerful, so it gives off more energy.

"Colour is actually electromagnetic energy and is more powerful than microwaves, tv and radio waves", says Angela Wright, who runs an agency that assists corporations in colouring everything from logos to uniforms.  "But colour affects us both physiologically and psychologically".

This may explain why Wright thinks it's possible to sense colour with your eyes closed.  She regularly plays a game, where she gives her students two different coloured pieces of card.  The cards are identical in size and weight - the only difference is the colour.  She claims that the blindfolded players can tell the difference between the different coloured cards just by touching them.

So you can sense it with your eyes closed, cure some ills with it and some people can hear songs in it.  Your everyday vision is filled with a glorious palette of psychedelic energies.  Who needs to see a new colour anyway ?

EAT MORE RAINBOWS!

Legend suggests that a pot of gold can be found at the end of each rainbow. That treasure can be cashed in to preserve your good health and ward off future dis-ease.  Society considers that which is white, to be pure...

Such a belief can be deceptive. By shining white light through a prism, one is instantly blessed with the hidden beauty and complex nature of our universe. A pure white beam of light reveals its inner essence of beautiful rays of the rainbow.

Most people can name the seven visible colors of the rainbow's spectrum. Violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. Of course, there are two other colors, often forgotten, but always present, ultraviolet and infrared.

Animals and insects feel these colours. Plants sense them too.  Whilst we lack the same receptors and are blind to their existence, our handicap cannot negate their influence.  The ultra's and infra's of plants are magical substances indeed!  They include plant chemicals, or phyto chemicals, such as isflavones and bioflavonoids.  Science teaches us that plants protect themselves from attach with their own secretions and chemicals messengers.  Vegetables repel insects who would eat them, and blossoms atract other insects with a perform so that their pollens can be spread and their species self-propogate.  Plants protect themselves from too much heat, or cold, or wind, or too much moisture, maintaining their own good health with their specialized hormones.  Plants can cure their own sicknesses and cancers by secreting and bathing themselves in these enchanted essences.

When we eat the plants, we are similarly protected. Modern science has confirmed the centuries-old traditions and lore from cultures that refined the sacred techniques of using foods as medicine. We have often heard that "an apple a day keeps the doctor away..

Such wisdom!

Today's Perfect Rainbow: 

Eat foods of colour. The perfect colour can be found right in the middle of our rainbow, the color green.

Eat green for Wellness:  

In the 1980s, scientists first began to explore how phytochemicals prevent cancers. A great amount of emphasis was placed upon the fruits and vegetables that contain vibrant colors. The best known of these wonder drugs was recognized as beta carotene. That's what gives carrots their bright orange hue.

In the 1990s, scientists at the University of Minnesota (Steinmetz, et. al.) categorized different groups of fruits and vegetables demonstrating life giving, disease fighting qualities. In doing so, they defined some of those magic colors, and the phytochemicals so contained within those pigments..

The violet, indigo and blues of the plant kingdom include phenols and dithiolthiolnines contained in eggplant, cruciferous vegetables, grapes, plums, and grains.

Eat onions and shallots, leeks, scallions and garlic. for cancer-fighting alliums. Those green leafy vegetables contain flavonoids, and inositol is found in beans. Green fruits and veggies contain phenols, and plant sterols, protease inhibitors and saponins.

Yellow limonines contained in citrus fruit and squash have also been identified as cancer fighters, as have the orange carotines in carrots, and my all-time favorite vitamin pill, the cantaloupe. Balancing out the rainbow's spectrum would be the red phenols in peppers, radishes, and tomatoes..

Tens of thousands of unique substances have been identified, and there are still plant hormones and enzymes yet to be discovered..

Remarkably, the one plant containing the greatest amount of these wonderful phytochemicals is the soybean. The tiny soybean contains coumarins, flavonoids, inositol, isoflavones, lignans, phenols, plant sterols, protease inhibitors, saponins, and Omega 3 and Omega 6 oils.. 

So, on new year's eve, visit your local produce store and treat yourself and family to a rainbow. Make this a daily tradition never to be broken.

Robert Cohen,  http://soulveggie.blogs.com