How to Release Emotional Blocks With Color

A world with no color feels dull and expressionless. If you look around you right now and imagine everything with no color, how would it feel? It would feel as if your surroundings stopped talking to you. Color speaks to you. It talks to something deep within your soul, it helps you understand your emotional blocks.

Color and emotions are deeply connected. This is because the parts of the brain that process emotions are the same ones in charge of helping you see color.

I’ve been working with color for over eight years. In that time, I’ve found three major ways to use color:

• Visualize it. Through visualization of colors, you can instantly reach your nervous system and release emotional and energetic blocks, tension, and stress. See the exercise below for an example.

• Surround yourself with it. Use color in your spaces for continued release and energetic balancing. You can use colorful decor elements, flowers, lights, or art pieces, whichever communicates color to you.

• Eat it. Fruits and vegetables absorb color energy from the sun. The colors of plants in nature help us understand what they offer us, from nutrients to danger. For example, blueberries have been proven to help with insomnia; the color energy frequencies of dark blues and indigos do that.

[Read: “3 Practices to Regulate Your Energy.”]

Exercise for Releasing Emotional Blocks With Color

Releasing emotional blocks with color is one of the simplest and most effective tools out there.

We store in our bodies many of the emotions that we don’t want to express. This exercise helps you release emotional blockages.

1. Tune into your body. Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed for at least the next 20 minutes.
2. Use your breath to bring yourself into the present moment. Notice how your body is breathing.
3. Allow your attention to roam over your body. Where are you holding tension, heaviness, or icky feelings in your body? Sometimes it’s one location. Other times it’s a few places, and that’s okay.
4. Starting with the location that speaks to you first, ask the feeling, “What are you?” Identify a name for the feeling in each part of your body. Anger in your arm, overwhelm in your feet, sadness in your palms.
5. Using your breath as you connect with these uncomfortable emotions, release the color with every exhale. See this color leaving your body as you exhale.
6. Use the list of emotions below as a general guide for your visualization practice.

Anger: Visualize pulling an orange light into your body from the ground. With every inhale and exhaling through your mouth, see the anger slowly leave your body.

Anxiety: Deepen your breaths and visualize a creamy powder blue or lavender, whichever feels more soothing to you. With every inhale, see that color as a balm soothing that part of your body.

Overwhelm: Visualize a beautiful circle of soothing red all around you, creating space between you and the things that overwhelm you. Notice which burdens disappear and ask yourself how you can let go of those that remain.

[Try: “18 Affirmations for When You’re Overwhelmed.”]

Sadness: Use the visual of a yellow sun growing in the center of your body. With every inhale, allow it to grow bigger.

Loneliness: Take a few deep breaths into your heart. Begin visualizing a cluster of pink stars surrounding you and entering your body from all directions, uplifting you with kindness and love.

End all of these visualizations with a beam of gold light entering your body from the sky to balance and heal your entire body.

As you work with emotion-color connections, allow your intuition to guide you on which colors you need and how you will use them.

Want more on color therapy? Read: “Colored Light Therapy for Anxiety” and “6 Tips to Support Change With Color Therapy.”