Feeling Colors
Existence is Not Black and White
Transmission
We speak about feelings that arise as we pass through stages in life. And we speak about time. We mark occasions with stored memories and traumas, too. We use these things as both guardrails and plot points in our movement and growth, from our beginning to our end.
I’m thinking about colors today and how they, too, can mark stages and struggles that accompany our existence.
Attending a recent healing retreat for the smallest of trauma survivors ages one-day-old to six-years-old, therapeutic activities had to be scaled in such a way as to allow for the gentle flow of feelings without those feelings becoming overwhelming. No one wanted to push any young person into shutdown mode, although some arrived that way initially.
Cognitively, there may be a large difference between how a five-year-old speaks about their traumatic experience(s) and how a fifty-year-old speaks about their traumatic experience(s). We know that language isn’t always the best tool to get to the heart of what a person may be feeling.
We gauge the social, emotional, and mental health of humans based on a linear growth line that trends upward, meaning as humans grow they are receiving more information from the world around them and we like to assume that their brain has the capacity to hold that information, allowing them to vocalize it when necessary.
We do offer that while growth isn’t linear and at times we will have setbacks, we also keep holding on to the notion that because we are grown-ups, we somehow have grown a better way to process the things that have happened to us, through our expanded vocabulary, and the length of time we’ve spent on the planet.
Having worked specifically with the nervous system for many years on my own, knowing it is more in control than we’ve ever really thought about, I recognize that age has no bearing on how we process traumas. You can meet an eighty-year-old who is stuck in a pattern that was established as a preschooler, while you can meet a sixteen-year-old with the grace of an eighty-year-old. Age makes no difference in how we process trauma.
At this retreat, we used color as a way to give a voice to what we may be feeling. There were bottles that sand was funneled into that represented the stages of feelings we may be experiencing. And there were colored pom poms that were put into plastic containers filled with glitter and baby oil, again to illustrate what we might be feeling when we don’t have the words.
Paint and markers were spread out along big sheets of paper too. All the colors were assigned feelings, and the kids chose the colors they were feeling in the past, and what they were feeling now.
Color gives us an indicator of who we are in this moment, more than even words can. We are able when we spend time working within, to understand and align with what the colors mean without ever giving voice to them.
Color can offer temperature. It can offer lightness. It can offer shadow.
Color has this way of being nebulous. It morphs, and changes, and flows. Pooling in spots where you submerge to rest and reflect. Sometimes you feel like you are drowning in nothingness, lost, drifting.
I call this the bog. A place that may appear as stagnant and dark.
Yet, life is always flowing, always being born, always dying, always being reborn, so even here, although imperceptible to us, things are moving within us.
We simply don’t have the words to express what it is that is bubbling up all around us, all of the time.
The bog for me is always blue. It appears in shades, ombre-like, all around me. If I close my eyes I can see it all clearly. I float in a fetal position, aware, but also unaware of the transformations in this liminal space. I’ve been here before. It has taken me forever to learn that this is a place of restoration, reflection and re-incarnation. It is a slow place.
When I find myself in this bog of blues, I know it means change is more obviously coming. Be it with the direction of my life, or the decisions I make, things will be altered once I come out of this space.
I’ve also learned that nothing can be forced. Even change takes time. Again the image of a glacier, scouring the landscape as it moves, over the course of eons, comes to mind. Internal change can be slow too.
Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash
Illumination
I am now in a red zone.
I’ve moved from the bog, which feels like a long slumber even though the world and I moved along, my internal growth stilled to shallow breaths. Some of the most intense feelings I’ve been carrying with me all of my life were muted, numbed in such a way as to allow me the ability to begin to feel other things and aspects of myself that had been buried beneath the rubble of a life not even half-lived.
The red doesn’t enter slowly. And it doesn’t carry with it the patience and surrender that the previous bog space did. Instead, I’ve arrived here with a reminder that I know who I am. I have always known who I am. While outside forces had sought to change me, and change my path, this new red zone is reacquainting me with who I was at the very beginning and it asks for a standing of my ground, an ownership of who I am meant to be irregardless of all the mind-numbing things happening in the world all around me.
In someways it feels rather like re-emerging from the womb of creation only this time with much more information. Discovering lost pages in the Book of Me.
Red fires the imagination and the heart. It reconnects all the wires that the nervous system had to cut in order to keep everything running at bare minimum.
Bare minimum is the state at which I have spent nearly fifty years. That’s not to say there haven’t been moments of joy, there have been, but I could not embrace them fully because of all the walls that had been built to protect the soul of who I am.
I have been running on empty for so long that numb feeling seemed normal.
The treacherous thing about feelings is you never know their full extent when you cannot go deeper into them, but they are laying waste to your own landscape when you don’t move fully into them.
When we live in a deeply fearful or angry state, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the end, or the end of the world, living in a denial of sorts, of all that we have shoved down so we don’t feel the need to process anything, we live in a state of being frozen in time. Yes, things still grow, time still moves, but internally, we remain stuck in our habits and our thinking. Remaining frozen is a protection mechanism. It preserves us so we don’t break.
It also ensures that the patterns, some very harmful to our own growth, continue.
We were never meant to remain unchanged, and so, once we finally get to a place within ourselves where we can hear the truest story of us, sung in our cells, we re-assimilate beneath the surface layers, becoming who we were always meant to be.
Think of a kaleidoscope and how all the colors merge and morph and change. Think of all that beauty of things colliding. Think of the multiverses that exist and how the stars and galaxies are bursting with colors from the energies of creation.
That’s us. That’s our insides. We are beautiful bands of light, illuminating the vessel we inhabit during our time here.
So, now, for me, there is red. And it is present in everything. From what I see in the world around me, to how I feel.
Red is not rage or anger for me, but rather passion, A passion for life and the reminder that I wasn’t meant to come through here and simply let life live me, but rather I’m supposed to live the life I have been given, fully and without hesitation.
Red offers inner strength. And the courage to pursue what sets my soul aflame.
Red is the remembrance of the heart, the most understudied, but perhaps the most important organ we have within us.
Red for me is the breath of life. And it speaks to me of taking full, deep breaths and holding them, and then allowing them to be released. With that release are all the remnants of the walls that I built to hold the outside world at bay and keep me safe.
Keeping me safe also meant never growing and life doesn’t work that way.
I recognize that I will lose those I love, but I cannot stop myself from loving just because I am afraid to feel the loss. If I do that, I stand to lose so much more.
Red reassures me that I will survive. Red is life itself.
Photo by Daniel R. on Unsplash
Transformation
Gold, purple, green, yellow are on the horizon. Each of them a friend I haven’t met yet, waiting for me to reach the place on my healing path where they will walk beside me. Sometimes, I see them in the sunsets and the sunrises, or in the aurora borealis that dances high above this beautiful planet.
They remind me that some of the most colorful rainbows appear only during the deepest, darkest storms.
I realize I am that rainbow and I contain all those colors and more. I am the energy and the light and somewhere, even in the darkest of times, even in the blackest nights, I am still pulsing with all of it. If I experience wonder and awe, it is that those feelings are being reflected back to me.
Could it be that when we are viewing such gifts from our own worlds, the ones that leave us speechless, it is that Creation is showing us its own wonder and awe of us? Could it be that Creation is enamored of us as we are of It? That it’s waiting for our rediscovery of who we really are meant to be?
Can we let go of the harmful and debilitating narrative that is always telling us to look away from our insides and instead focus on all the things that will never matter, such as the collecting of things, the belittling and subjugation of others, the bestowing of titles and the amassing of fortunes?
Does not the life all around us tell us every day that none of that really matters in order to live a life fully and with true purpose?
For me, stepping away from the corrosiveness of what it now means to be a human trying to exist in a world gone bonkers with greed, has meant embarking on a solo quest to a place no one else can journey with me.
It has meant asking for help from those that exist in unseen realms, as well as searching for the meaning in all of the lessons the more than human Others are teaching every day.
I am walking softer, hoping my footsteps are lighter on Mother Earth. I am offering myself as a talisman to Her, to see what she can mold and make of me, or perhaps unmold and unmake of me, to bring me into accordance with all Others.
I am releasing the heaviness of the world, the past traumas, the failures, and the judgement. Pushing off from the lands that require me to believe in negative aspects of a man-made world, and journeying toward a destination that only the stars can guide me to. I am trusting in those stars because they have been shining since the day I came through to here.
We continue to complain that the world no longer works for so many. And the current politics no longer represent the true nature or desires of the masses. So why not begin to build the world we want to live in, instead of suffer in the one we do not?
The colors are always there. Always speaking in a language older than time. In a way that we understand without knowing how. They lead us further into the darkness to do the deepest healing work, all the while reminding us that we are the light in that darkness, and it has always been thus.
All of the ancient knowledge that was here long before humanity reared its head and created a language, is still here. It’s waiting for us to return and reacquaint ourselves to what we know is the real truth of our being. We aren’t meant to live above all, as some insecure god-complex beings, but rather with humility and grace, in harmony with all.
Our troubles will continue until we each begin to do the work that takes from what we have been told and taught by those who always meant to manipulate, and pushes us toward what cannot be corrupted. A world with no hate, no destruction, no divisiveness. Our external systems have failed us. We no longer know what it means to be human being.
So, we need to shore up our internal systems, dust off our integral compasses, recalibrate our bearings, and refuse to continue down a path that only serves a few.
Humanity is recalculating. Are you ready to do your part?
The colors are always changing. There is no black and white. Judgements and divides are the tools of master manipulators that often we put into power. It is time we reclaim our colors, not those of a flag that the earth doesn’t recognize, but those within us that speak to such greater things as love and mercy.
I’ve spent so much time living within the grays of this world. The dull, drab feeling of what survival requires. To now see the brightness of what exists outside of complacency, fear and domestication, takes my breath away. I refuse to be put back in the cage. I refuse to believe we are all just meant to work until we die so a few can get rich. I believe this planet provides so much more than landscapes. It carries the wisdom of eons. It is our heartbeat.
We connect to it, to our deepest meaning through the colors.
I am in the red zone now. There is brightness and a sharpness, too, but again, I feel supported by something other than my own self as I keep moving. The red inspires confidence and lets me know that I am made of stronger things, and if I can believe, I will achieve, no matter what has held me back in the past.
Red says the past is the past and it is now time to embrace the future.
Think deeply. Silence all the noise conspiring to hold you back and in fear. Find moments of peace and breathe. Close your eyes and see what colors come. Watch how they shift and move. Is there a dominant one that seems larger?
Or what colors do you see in the world around you. Which ones keep appearing in the landscape, in the sky, in the Others that make themselves known?
How does that color make you feel? What can it teach you?
Being means opening. It’s blossoming and allowing for curiosity of the world beyond the one humans have made. Can you open to what the universe is trying to show you?
Wishing you an always colorful heart as you begin or continue your healing journey.
Peace.
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