Colors affect moods and emotions. Color therapy uses this sensitivity to color to identify and correct any imbalances in the body's internal energy patterns that might lead to emotional or physical ill health. Therapists believe that each organ and body system has its own characteristic vibrational energy, and disorders can be healed by applying color of the corresponding vibrational energy, either to the whole body or to the organ concerned.

For example, the red spectrum affects our physical energies. It is stimulating and warming. Blues are cooling and cleansing, affecting our spiritual energies. The yellow shades serve to bridge them, affecting our mental energies. The three colors together provide opportunities for healing our body, mind, and spirit.

The effects of color on our moods, health, and way of thinking have been studied by scientists for years. Your preference for one color over another may be related to the way that color makes you feel.

Colors are visible light energy of certain wavelengths. Photoreceptors in the retina, called cones, translate this energy into colors. The retina contains three kinds of cones: one for blue, one for green, and one for red. We perceive other colors by combining these colors.

When the energy of color enters our bodies, it stimulates the pituitary and pineal glands. This in turn affects the production of certain hormones, which in turn affect a variety of physiological processes. This explains why color has been found to have such a direct influence on our thoughts, moods, and behavior-an influence that many experts believe is distinctly separate from psychological and cultural factors. Color seems to have an effect even on blind people, who are thought to sense color as a result of energy vibrations created within the body.

In 1942, the Russian scientists have demonstrated that red light stimulates the sympathetic nervous system , while white and blue light stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. Other experiments revealed that certain colors stimulate hormone production, while other colors inhibit it.

Specific colors can also have an effect on specific diseases. Symptoms of acute eruptive diseases such as smallpox and measles were relieved when patients were put in a room with red windows. Melancholiacs also recovered after a few hours in such rooms. Pain and depression  was found to respond well to therapy using flashing bright lights and colored lights. These treatments have been shown to alter neurochemical production in the brain and this may account for their positive effects. Scientists now believe that the brain has specific responses to different frequencies of flashing light and the different frequencies of various colors. They point out that sleep problems can often be cured in one day by this method. Mood alteration takes a little longer - about one to two weeks of treatments.

Photostimulation with flashing opaque white or violet lights was found to induce relaxation, reducing stress and chronic pain. Use of photostimulation, or brain wave synchronization, to assist relaxation and the induction of hypnosis had been around since 1948. It has been used with the EEG (electroencephalogram) as an adjunct to the diagnosis of epilepsy.

Light is often described as the medicine of the future. It is an important therapeutic medium that profoundly affects our life.

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