Color Therapy
The use of color as a therapy has a long history. The ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks built healing temples of light and color (Edwin, 1942). The use of color became deeply embedded in Chinese and Indian medicine, and it remains an integral part of Ayurvedic medicine. In India, practitioners of Ayurveda, now the oldest health-care system in the world, taught that specific colors corresponded with each of the seven chakras, the energy centers that represent organs, emotions, and aspects of the spirit. Today Ayurvedic medicine continues to use color to treat a wide range of mental and physical imbalances (Edwin, 1878; Dinshah, 1920). In addition, the visible color spectrum is used in traditional Chinese philosophy and science. It is exactly the same as the Western visible spectrum (Sarah and Lin, 1994). According to Patricia Sloane from The Visual Nature of Color (1987), response to color symbolism is a response to color preconception, and it is a predetermined response based on literary and psychological ideas about color itself. In part, humans feel impelled to create symbols — and to impute symbolic connotations to color — because humans cannot help allowing feelings and emotions, literary, psychological and intellectual preconceptions, from interfering with the direct perception of the physical world.
In Europe and the U.S., interest in the therapeutic use of color developed during the second half of the 19th century. In 1933, a definitive work on color therapy called The Spectro-Chrometry Encyclopedia was written by an Indian scientist Dinshah Ghadiali. This was a landmark publication and laid the foundation for most of modern color therapy. Then in 1942, Dr. Edwin Babbitt published The Principles of Light and Color, in which he recommended various techniques for the use of color in healing. For example, in this publication he describes his principles of Rainbow Healing via solarized water and reaches the conclusion that water becomes medicated by the seven colored rays of light from the sun. Nowadays, some people even use his principles by drinking this solarized water. Also, Babbitt lists healing colors for many ailments using the fundamentals of the thermal, neutral and electrical colors. Thermal colors of red, orange and yellow are exciting and raise blood pressure; electrical colors of blue, indigo and violet lower blood pressure; the neutral color green has stabilizing effects on the entire human system
Jane Duncan, artist in residence at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, said about color therapy: “I wanted to use color to achieve a dynamic environment for the patients in the hydrotherapy room, to encourage them to move and exercise. I also wanted them to feel cheerful” (BBC News, January, 2002).
According to researchers at Leeds University, the colors Ms. Duncan used in her mural in the hydrotherapy room were exactly the kind of colors they found make people feel dynamic and positive. Dr. James Nobbs, from the Color Chemistry Department at Leeds University, said: “Until now, how people responded emotionally to color was the domain of artists and designers who could not substantiate their claims in scientific terms”. Dr. Nobbs and his colleagues at Leeds University have been working with scientists at the Kyoto Institute of Technology, Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, to create what they call color emotion scales, which are “a total of 214 color samples that were evaluated on 12 emotion variables by subjects from seven different region groups in the psychophysical experiment” (BBC news, 2002, p. 1-9).
Color therapy is a technique of restoring balance by means of applying color for psychosomatic purposes. This was a popular method of cure even in ancient times. Especially, the particular color that could help dementia patients to relax is a type of meditation promoting color (Klotsche, 1993). For example, during Brush Calligraphy practices, only a mono black color is used because of the fact that black is actually a protective color. It can be used to calm and ground extremely sensitive people. Black is a color often shrouded in confusion. Many individuals shy away from black or using black, especially when using Color Therapy. It activates the feminine or magnetic energies of the body, strengthening them. It should be used sparingly, for too much black can cause depression or aggravate emotional and mental conditions. Black is most effective when used in conjunction with white, which balances the polarities of an individual. It can activate the level of the subconscious and can put life in its proper perspective. A body that has a black aura is usually a body without life. The light is gone from the body. Also, black contains the entire color spectrum. It is just not visible to the human eye and will encourage dementia patients to follow the natural tendency of their own relaxation.
