The healing touch of yellow

Before summer sets in, I want to post these pictures I clicked at a city park recently. Spring time yellow. I found myself gazing at the yellow all around me for a long time. The eyes felt warmed, the heart too. I was thinking how sometime back I had got interested in color therapy and had dabbled in it for a while before mundane concerns in life took over.

Saints and spiritually evolved souls have been depicted in print with a halo around their heads and bodies since as long as we can go back in time. Have you wondered what this halo, or glow, or light is all about.... this is the aura.... and, all of us have an aura which is nothing but the energy field around us or our own unique resonance. Sometimes we "catch" the resonance of others and experience telepathy with the person. But most of our eyes are not trained to "see" the aura, yet a lot of us can feel it. This is why sometimes we say we “feel” at ease being around with some people and at other times we are not able to trust some, despite the absense of tangible reason! Therefore, the energy field or aura is an informer of our internal states. The spiritually evolved souls with hours of meditation, have mastered the technique to read and interpret the energy fields of others.

I started with spring time yellow and digressed to the aura, you may be thinking. Not quite, because sitting at the city park with yellow all around me and thinking of color therapy and especially the therapeutic/healing powers of the yellow color, I was also thinking about the significance of the color yellow in our auras. Here I must mention that our auras are made up of the seven rainbow colors and their different hues. The colors change hues depending on our internal states. Now, I am no expert at interpreting auras or anywhere near to it, but I can try. Color yellow in the aura signifies spiritual energy and awakening in the person – its various hues signify various stages of awakening and inspiration. Spiritual people are fundamentally warm, genuinely friendly, non-materialistic, happy and content, compassionate, generous, wisdom seeking types, peace seeking types, and intuitive. If the color yellow signifies spiritual awakening and inner peace, it is no wonder then why we feel our spirits soar on a warm, sunny-yellow day and perhaps this is the same reason that the yellow all around me in the park made me feel so much at peace.

While aura readers assess the aura to diagnose a physical or psychological condition, color therapists provide guidance on how various colors in different ways can cure the cause of the condition. For example, the color yellow is used to treat chronic depression. A color therapist/healer will counsel the person with depression on how to use yellow in his/her life to full advantage in order to increase self-esteem, courage, and optimism. The person may be advised to go on a yellow diet or drink water in which the energies of yellow have been tapped. This is very easy and can be done at home by covering a glass bottle filled with water with orange cellophane paper and leaving it in under the sun. The therapist may advice using more of the color on one’s person as in apparels and accessories. The therapy may also include transferring the goodness of yellow crystals. Sometimes it is advised to have one part of an entire room painted yellow. Last here but this is not the end, a person with chronic depression may be guided to meditate on the color yellow. As in, the healer may ask the person to close the eyes and imagine being enveloped in yellow light. This is called visualization or channeling which is done to tap and source the universal energies within oneself.

Ordinarily, yellow can be worn in apparels and accessories when you want to feel bright and cheery. I have worn yellow to uplift my mood at times, and I wonder whether you have, too :-)

Mad Dogs and a White woman

The title of my post is inspired by the title of the autobiography of Crystal Rogers. The autobiography is called – Mad Dogs and an Englishwoman. On one of my tours around the city, I saw this extraordinary sight for which I couldn’t find a more apt caption – Mad Dogs and a White woman:


I took this shot from hundreds of meters away with a zoom lens which is why the images are not as sharp as I would have liked them to be. Clicking pictures from close quarters may have made the trio conscious of a stranger. Also, my behavior would have been outright intrusive, so I decided to intrude from meters away.... what to do, the temptation was too much.... !

When I passed by the trio and was within earshot, I heard the lady humming. The melody, in a flash transported me back to my Class V school room where we learnt Wordsworth’s – The Solitary Reaper. The sense of melancholy in the lady’s tune was akin to the sense I got from the poem two decades back! It would be charitable to say that I was “amazed”. It was more than that, I do not have the appropriate words. Like connecting to a forgotton thread.

I am sure the lady was not English (I have reasons to think she was from Israel), so I think it is fair to call her the “white woman”. The dogs are “mad” because I think all dogs are mad. To my mind, dogs are one of the craziest creations of Nature. Crazy, coz they are capable of snuggling up to you even if you have shouted at them. Crazy, coz they are capable of protecting you even if you have been mean to them. Crazy, coz they are capable of dropping their egos and apologizing first. And, crazy coz they are capable of listening unconditionally to your melancholic strains....

Pakistan, fond memories

When I read or hear about one more evidence pointing towards the turmoil in Pakistan, it reminds me of my visit to the country in 2004. I feel so sorry that evidence has begun to come at a rapid pace. The memories of my visit leap up in my consciousness and I so much wish that the present was just a nightmare.

I had the opportunity to visit Pakistan for a month in 2004 of which I stayed mostly in Muree and a week or so between Islamabad, Rawalpindi, and Lahore. Muree, a charming hill resort, a little more than an hour drive from Islamabad has given me the gift of friendship of some lovely people from Pakistan. I have sat on its soil and watched the sun rise and depart behind the mountains for days together. Walking in the woods of Muree I would think – how do I call this leaf fallen on the ground a “Pakistani leaf” or the pine tree yonder a “Pakistani pine tree”. Silly thoughts. But the boundaries were muddled in my head.

Pakistan and Bangladesh have always been fabled lands in my mindscape. Perhaps because we were One at one time until a bloody separation tore us apart. I was not born at that time as me but I am sure something somewhere has remained from a past lifetime to make me feel the bond. The details of my stay in Pakistan come back vividly. I cannot forget the shopkeepers in Lahore who declined money in exchange of the purchases I made. I was a “mehmaan” they said. They had left behind their families in India, they told me – members of the family who could not cross over to the other side at the time of partition. Some had left behind their property, land, everything. I had come from the land they were forced to abandon. Perhaps I represented nostalgia for them, a remembrance of the good times, of togetherness with their own. I cannot forget the roadside vendor selling pistachios on the streets of Muree who insisted that I keep the packet I had picked up as a gift from him. I cannot forget the gentleman behind the counter at the Islamabad airport who waived off tariff on my extra luggage with a smile. I also cannot forget the hospitality of the Pakistani people – of the many at whose homes I stayed. Driving down the manicured streets of Islamabad or shopping in the narrow lanes of Lahore or smelling the wondrous mountain air in Muree, I remember the feeling of gay abandon – boundaries, there were none. After the visit, I never believed any jingoism against Pakistan.

Now, I worry about my friends there. I wonder whether they still feel safe in those sensuous Islamabadi-style shalwar-kurtas that showed off those lovely feminine ankles. I wonder whether they are still able to drive down anytime they wished to the gorgeous ice cream parlors in Islamabad. I wonder whether they feel safe in the work they do to empower their country people. When they don’t write for a long time, I wonder about their access rights to the internet.

With the Pakistani government doing little to help the 26/11 probes, with the shocking news of the Taliban taking over the Swat valley, with the bombs going off in the towns and cities ever so frequently, with the murder of every voice that dares to dissent, and now with the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team, my heart sinks. I wish the trees and the mountains in the countryside where the militants hide would speak up. I wish they would not stand there mute watching those men prepare themselves for doom. Silly thoughts. Has the weight of negative karmas become so great that balance has tilted in favor of devastation and violence? I wonder whether I can ever go back to Pakistan and feel the gay abandon all over again. I wish people will not hate Pakistan in these terrible times. I really wish the trees would speak up.