I’ve attended a lot of youth football games, and I’m used to seeing the aftereffects: pulled muscles, strains, and pain. My oldest son, however, didn’t see the worst coming until he played his first tackle football game.  
“Mom,” he complained, rubbing his shoulder. “Isn’t there something that can just get the red out?”
Little did my son know that from a subtle energy perspective, he was spot-on. The color of pain—as well as inflammation, irritation, and annoyance—is red. Science is now discovering that every color of light produces an effect.1 Pink is calming, as is blue; orange stimulates feelings and yellow stimulates our minds.
In energy work, every ailment, emotion, and throbbing headache can be described as a color. This is because everything is made of energy—physical and subtle—or information that vibrates. Vibrations described as “red” have a different frequency and effect than those comparable to “blue.” Red excites and blue calms. Because of this fact, if we can literally “get the red out” of a painful part of the body, and insert a more soothing hue, we can help restore comfort.
Changing Colors
When working with a client, you’re probably not in a position to pull out a fabric swatch or recommend a wardrobe change. While your client might love a prescription for a trip to Tahiti—there are amazing healing colors over there—they probably have to tough out their healing at home. Fortunately, the use of subtle energy enables the delivery of healing colors—and pain relief—no matter your client’s familiarity with the topic, or budget, for that matter.
The importance of providing pain relief or pain management, a branch of medicine called algiatry, is inherent to the body therapy field. According to a national consumer survey commissioned by Associated Bodywork & Massage Professionals, 66 percent of people who had a massage in 2012 did so for pain relief or muscle soreness, 76 percent of massage clients agreed that massage is effective for relieving acute pain, and 80.3 percent said it is effective in managing chronic pain.2 The question isn’t if clients desire or typically receive more comfort; it’s how to best serve the myriad of individuals who might each have a different reason for their pain.
Persistent Pain
Pain can result from illness, injury, pregnancy, surgery, tension, trauma, and even treatment for disease. What truly cripples people is chronic pain—pain that lasts more than six months. Currently, more than 100 million Americans have chronic pain,3 often as a result of arthritis, autoimmune disorders, headaches, injury, nerve damage, or shingles. Back problems are also a major source of pain, affecting more than 80 percent of all adults.4 Neither can we ignore depression. Studies show that the emotions surrounding depression, including sadness and anger, can create or increase chronic pain. Coincidentally, one side effect of pain can be depression.
Despite decades of research, chronic pain remains notoriously hard to control. All traditional treatments, including prescription drugs, only help about 60 percent of individuals with pain, and then only temporarily. As a body therapist, you are on the front line to meet people’s pain-relief needs. That’s a big job.
A New Frontier
The subtle delivery of light can become one of your key pain-relief methods. It meets all the requirements for a “mini-miracle” technique. Light is free. It is always available. And in the form of various colors, each of which yields specific effects, light can be delivered subtly.
Light therapy, sometimes called color therapy, chromotherapy, or colorology, has been used around the world and across time for healing purposes. Color healing was a well-accepted practice in ancient China, Egypt, Greece, and India.
Today, there are several hundred articles published in reputable journals on the beneficial applications of light to improve biological health. Light can be used to dislodge stuck memories, improve the immune system, assist with wound healing, and more. Light is also a complex medicine. For instance, research showed that the color of a pill can alter its effects, but the shift can be dependent on culture and gender. An Italian study showed that blue placebos for insomnia sufferers helped women but had the opposite effect on men.5 And for our purposes, color can stimulate pain or help relieve it.6
Rather than work with direct or visible light, a subtle energy practitioner employs subtle energy, which is also called intuitive, psychic, or spiritual energy, directed through intention. The premise is that by shifting subtle energy, you can alter physical matter quicker and more powerfully than by using physical implements alone. As a body therapist, your subtle tools are your hands, mind, and spirit. Your goal is to eliminate or reduce the colors or vibrations that are causing a deviation from the body’s natural harmonic, and incorporate hues or vibrations that will restore this harmonic.
The Power of Color
What colors accomplish what goals? Researchers have found that warm colors, such as red and orange, are arousing. They increase blood pressure, decrease depressive moods, increase respiration rate, and create inflammation. Cool colors decrease hypertension, alleviate muscle spasms, relieve insomnia, and can be as effective as a tranquilizer in decreasing tension.
Bright, white, full-spectrum light is used in treatments for addiction, anorexia, bulimia, cancer, insomnia, jet lag, seasonal affective disorder, and the effects of shift work, as well as to reduce overall consumption levels of medication. Blue light is effective in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and pain conditions of all sorts. It is also being used to heal injured tissue (including burns), prevent scar tissue, and ease lung conditions. Its opposite—red light—is used for constipation and certain types of wounds. Red also provides an immediate burst of energy, while pink light suppresses hostility, aggressiveness, and anxiety. Pink is often cancelled out by yellow, which is so stimulating that experts suggest a relationship between violent street crime and sodium yellow street lighting.7
Other healing colors include indigo to stabilize; turquoise to disinfect and relax; brown to ground and reconstruct; grey to neutralize; gold to empower; silver to deflect negativity; and black to absorb negativity or dark energies. (After using black to soak up toxicity, surround the resulting package in white light and send it to the heavens.)
Putting Color Into Practice
How do you use this color knowledge in subtle ways while performing body therapies? The core approach is to eliminate the negative colors and add enhancing colors. Know, however, that it’s more important to add the correct energy than to find the aberrant energy. Good energy can push out bad energy. The following steps will help you accomplish your goals.
 
Separate the Energy
I believe that up to 80 percent of most conditions are not caused by the afflicted person’s own energy. Sensitive people, in particular, absorb energy from other people, becoming toxic with others’ physical ailments, emotions, beliefs, and even memories. With this in mind, you can use your intuitive faculties to sense if a client’s pain is totally their own or not. If you sense that some of the pain is actually someone—or something—else’s, send this energy away by simply asking your higher guidance to help you by removing it for you.




Select the Needed Color
This can be done in a variety of ways. Use the color list on page 112, or find other research to guide your path. Follow your intuition, or that of the client’s. Ask her, “If you could select a color that would reduce your pain, what might it be?” Also, ask your higher power to provide insight or to directly provide the colors needed.

Deliver the Healing
There are several methods for subtle color healing:
• Through Your Hands. Most healers send energy through one hand, typically their dominant hand, and receive energy through the other hand. The challenge in using our body as a channel is that we are affected by the energy that runs through, or into, us. Because of this, I recommend that body therapists either flow the energy around, not through, their hands, or ask their higher power to deliver the correct colors and remove the unnecessary colors.
Know that your hands do not need to be set directly on an injured area. You can hold them above a site, or if pain is systemic, above the heart—the most potent electromagnetic organ in the body. Bring the heart into balance and the rest of the body follows.
• Visualization. Use your intuition to help you perceive the pain-causing colors and the hues that will restore balance. Picture your hands (or those of a spiritual helper) taking away the negative energy and inserting the positive. You can also engage your client and guide him to conduct this exercise.
• Tools and Implements. Some clients are kinesthetic and respond best to physicality. Brainstorm ways they can integrate the beneficial color into their lives, perhaps employing clothing, flowers, jewelry, pillows, or stones. Even drinking water out of a colored bottle has been shown to affect health.
In the end, remember that all of life is color—colors in which to dance, play, and sing. As John Ruskin, the Victorian artist, writer, and philanthropist, wrote: “The purest and most thoughtful of minds are those which love color the most.”

Notes
1. T. Samina, Y. Azeemi, and S. Mohsin Raza, “A Critical Analysis of Chromotherapy and Its Scientific Revolution,” Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2 (2005): accessed December 2013, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1297510/; Spiritual.com, A. Fares, “Color Therapy Then & Now—Part 2,” accessed December 2013, www.spiritual.com.au/2011/07/color-therapy-then-now-2/; Coalition for Health Environments Research, Ruth Brent Tofle, et al., “Color in Healthcare Environments, A Research Report,” accessed December 2013, www.healthdesign.org/sites/default/files/color_in_hc_environ.pdf.
2. Associated Bodywork & Massage Professionals, “ABMP’s National Consumer Survey,” conducted by Harstad Strategic Research, January 2013.
3. The American Academy of Pain Medicine, “AAPM Facts and Figures on Pain,” accessed December 2013,     www.painmed.org/patientcenter/facts_on_pain.aspx.
4. Healthline, “Back Pain 101,” accessed December 2013, www.healthline.com/health/back-pain.
5. Daniel E. Moerman, “The Meaning Response: Thinking About Placebos,” Pain Practice 6, no. 4, accessed December 2013, www.academia.edu/4469272/EDITORIAL_The_Meaning_Response_Thinking_about_Placebos.
6. S. F. McDonald, “Effect of Visible Light Waves on Arthritis Pain: A Controlled Study,” International Journal of Biosocial Research 3, no. 2 (1982): 49–54; Rodrigo Noseda et al., “A Neural Mechanism for Exacerbation of Headaches by Light,” Nature Neuroscience 13 (2010): accessed December 2013,     www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v13/n2/full/nn.2475.html.
7. Theo Gimbel, Healing Through Colour, (England: The C. W. Daniel Company, Ltd., 1980): 93, 99; A. G. Schauss, “Tranquilizing Effect of Color Reduces Aggressive Behavior and Potential Violence,” Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, 8, no. 4 (1979): 218–21.  

Cyndi Dale is an internationally renowned author, speaker, and intuitive consultant. Her books include the bestselling The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy (Sounds True, 2009), The Complete Book of Chakra Healing (Llewellyn Publications, 2009), and Advanced Chakra Healing (Crossing Press, 2005). To learn more about Dale and her products, services, and classes, please visit www.cyndidale.com.

Sidebar:
Color Effects
Blue: Cooling, astringent, and calming. Safest color for any inflammatory condition.
Green: Adds harmony, balance, and natural healing. It’s a safe color for both physical and emotional pain relief.  
Orange: Energizes emotions and accesses creativity. Can be used to unblock repressed memories.
Purple: Transformative. Aids with anxiety, melancholy, and addictions. Alleviates stress.
Red: Stimulates and emboldens. Strengthens anger, movement, and warmth; don’t use on inflammation or if someone is angry.
White: Brings perfect balance. Can be used on most pain conditions, but you might need to dim for serious pain.
Yellow: Strengthens nerves and mind. Can highlight the beliefs supporting painful conditions. Don’t use if hostility is present.

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