Can coloured lights heal?

What's your favourite colour? Now ask yourself why you love it so much. Perhaps there's no definite answer -- the colour makes you feel good and you simply enjoy surrounding yourself with it. Now consider this: What if you surround yourself with this shade (or group of colours) because on some level, it makes you feel healthy? 

Colour light therapy is a practice that taps into the healing powers of colour and light by using shades of coloured light to treat virtually any ailment, from physical pain and disease to emotional issues and learning disorders. The practice is simple -- a coloured light either shines on your ailing body part or bathes your entire body to treat deeper physical or emotional problems, all while you lie peacefully still and relaxed.

Before dismissing the idea that lights can heal, consider that colour light therapy -- or phototherapy -- is commonly used to treat newborn infants with jaundice. The babies are bathed in a blue light and this wavelength is proven to fight bilirubin, the brownish-yellow substance that builds up in the body. The Canadian Paediatric Society supports phototherapy as "an effective therapeutic intervention that decreases bilirubin concentrations." They also note that "the infant receiving phototherapy should have as much skin as possible exposed to the lights." (www.cps.ca)

What does colour light therapy treat?
Cathy Gordichuk is a certified colour therapist and educator based in Alberta. She says people who come to her for colour light therapy "seek other ways of healing when traditional medicine has not helped." Many of her clients suffer with chronic pain such as migraines, rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia.

Michel Green, a self-described workaholic from Alberta, seeks colour light therapy when she feels overworked and run down. She says the different shades prescribed by Gordichuk help her to manage her driven personality. "Coral or orange helps energize and bring me vitality; blue or violet helps me relax enough to ease my buzzing mind," she explains.

Gordichuk also cautions there are negative effects of coloured light. "Red is not for people with anger issues and blue is not for people with depression -- orange or peach is more suited for the depressed," she explains.

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What happens in a colour light therapy session?
If you're new to colour light therapy, you'd begin a session with Gordichuk by looking at a "True Colour Wheel" (click here for image) to determine your relationship with certain colours and the treatment needed. Depending on the condition, Gordichuk then chooses an appropriate therapeutic shade of light, using principles from the "SpectroChrome Wheel" (see it here).

Either lying on her massage table or sitting in a chair, you're then bathed in a healing colour or it's only applied to a specific body part, depending on the condition. You relax and soak in the colour for under an hour, the total time depending on you. "Your body will tell you when you've had enough," she explains.

According to typical colour light therapy practice, your body receives light information through both the skin and the eyes. Inside your brain, the hypothalamus -- a small section responsible for regulating hormones, the nervous system, blood pressure, equilibrium and a host of other bodily functions -- interprets all this light information, which then triggers responses in your body.

How to select a colour light therapist
When choosing a colour light therapist, Gordichuk recommends asking them where they got their training and how long they trained for. Ask them what associations they belong to, if any, and get them to explain their colour light therapy process before you go to a session.

In everyday life, Gordichuk challenges people to look at their emotional reaction to colour. "Look in your closet, even -- what's in the back of your closet? Something you bought on a whim? Maybe it's a colour you needed that day. Does it still give you the same response?" she asks. "If there's a colour that makes you feel good, go with it. Colour and light is everywhere, so let's use it!"

To read more about Cathy Gordichuk's practice or her School of Vibrational Studies, visit www.colourenergetics.com.

For a list of colours and their healing properties, click here!

Books on colour therapy