5 minute read
The Naked Shaman / The Mentalist / Over the Rainbow
The Naked Shaman
Colour Therapy for the Holidays
By Joti Gore
The holidays can be a joyous time of celebrating family, friends and Christ, or a tumultuous cacophony of emotions like sadness, grief and despair. There are many ways to shift from the challenges of darkness to a positive experience through the holidays. Community events, music, exercise, yoga, meditation, nature and alternative therapies are some of the ways to do more than cope through the holidays.
One alternative therapy is chromotherapy, often known as colour therapy. Colour therapy is considered a pseudoscience because it has not been peer-reviewed.
However, it is believed that colour can have a profound impact on how we feel, think, express ourselves and interact. Colour is a form of frequency and frequency is generally measured in Hertz, which are units of cycles per second. Colour is the frequency of visible light, and it ranges from 430 trillion Hertz (which is red) to 750 trillion Hertz (which is violet). Waves can also go beyond and below those frequencies, but they’re not visible to the human eye.
As a non-invasive modality, the colour of walls, sheets, workspace and clothing can affect us emotionally, physically, mentally, psychosocially and energetically. According to evidencebased Complementary and Alternative Medicine, in The Canon of Medicine, Avicenna, the Persian father of modern medicine from the Islamic Golden Age, wrote that colour is an observable symptom of disease. He also developed a chart that related colour to the temperature and physical condition of the body. His view was that red moved the blood, blue or white cooled it and yellow reduced muscular pain and inflammation.
Just before the turn of the century, American Civil War General, Augustus Pleasonton, led his own experiments and published The Influence Of The Blue Ray Of The Sunlight And Of The Blue Color Of The Sky. It showed how the colour blue can improve the growth of crops and livestock and can help heal diseases in humans. These experiments led to scientists Dr Seth Pancoast and Edwin Dwight Babbitt to conduct experiments and to write Blue and Red Light; or, Light and Its Rays as Medicine.
Dinshah Ghadiali, author of 1933’s The Spectro Chromemetry Encyclopaedia, a work on colour therapy, stated that he had discovered why and how the different coloured rays have various therapeutic effects on organisms.
He believed that colours represent chemical potencies in higher octaves of vibration and, for each organism and system of the body, there is a particular colour that stimulates and another that inhibits the work of that organ or system.
In yoga and Ayurvedic medicine, it is believed that the body has seven energy centres called chakras or wheels situated along the spine. Each of these energy centres has a colour that correlate to specific emotions and areas of the physical body.
To read the whole article go to www.supernalmagazineaustralia.com.au/past-iissues/
The Mentalist
Fortress of Solitude
Jason D. Varga
I decided for this month’s column, I would do something a little different. I find that many of my clients at the moment are having issues with anxiety, at all levels, mild to chronic, so I thought that I would transcribe here one of the meditations that I teach people to anchor a trigger that they can use to gain a calm, clear, state – anytime, anywhere. I call this ‘grounding in the inner sanctum.’
You can consider the inner sanctum as your fortress of solitude, a place that symbolically represents facets of your unconscious mind. You don’t need to contemplate why each image represents what it does, as the symbology is tucked away in our collective unconscious, just allow yourself to experience without over analysing. As the Zen Buddhists would say; “To do, without doing.”
Once you read this through, visualise it in as much vibrant detail as you can. Also, you will be visualising yourself performing the Qi Gong exercise of Parting Waves, you can follow these movements with the accompanying pictures.
Practice this visualisation for twenty-one days, as twentyone days is the optimal amount of time for your mind to accept a new behaviour system. Once completed, you will have anchored the physical movement, the trigger of the exercise (Parting Waves from Qi Gong), to the emotional state of being calm and relaxed. This will mean that at any point or time when needed, you willbe able to use your trigger to remove anxiety, confusion andfrustration, within a few seconds.
Understanding that the subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between what is real and what is imagined is the key. When there is a conflict between the conscious and subconscious, the subconscious will always win. So the longer you imagine something, the more you create your own reality.
To start the process, sit back in a comfy chair and make sure you will not be disturbed for about fifteen minutes.
To read the whole article go to www.supernalmagazineaustralia.com.au/past-iissues/
Over the Rainbow
LGBTQIA+ Terms of Reference
by Celeste de Vis
Recently, I received feedback about my use of terms from previous columns that some readers were not aware of or found confusing. This article should answer some of your questions.
Before joining the LGBTQIA+ (Rainbow community) I knew very little about it. I came across so many terms that I had never heard of or used before. I literally spent hours online familiarising myself with them. The process was akin to learning a new language, and sometimes, unfortunately, I learnt the hard way. Regardless, I try very hard to respect everyone, and a simple apology is reasonable if we unintentionally offend another person.
The following are some examples and explanations of LGBTQIA+ terminology that some people may be less familiar with.
What does LGBTQIA+ mean?
This acronym sums up a small representation of the community of folk who are L (lesbian), G (gay), B (bisexual), T (transgender), Q (queer), I (intersex), A (asexual), and + (representative of the other gender and sexually diverse folk who are living on our planet: Me, for example. I am a member of the + category, as I am pansexual.)
Cisgender /a cisgender person/ - adjective
The term cisgender is apparently a word that readers have not heard, or are unfamiliar with. Cisgender is a label that is used when describing one’s gender. It’s a term for people whose gender identity aligns with the person’s sex that they were assigned with at birth. Cisgendered people may or may not be sexually diverse: be it straight or gay.
Cis is Latin for ‘on the same side’, whereas Trans is Latin for ‘across, beyond’.
