The Art of Colour Therapy

Sunshine and Colour Therapy

Even in my adopted home of Vietnam, seasonal affective disorder is a thing.

In this tropical climate, where it’s sunshine and smiles 90% of the time, lethargy can suddenly cloak you in its heavy blanket until you can’t see any light.

In Hoi An, the weather’s cold, grey and oppressive, people are grim and I start losing my grip on newly reclaimed happiness. But early one January morning, I step onto the sand at An Bang beach and feel transformed. The morning air’s still cool but weak sunlight stretches its arms across our street. I pass the chickens in the unofficial rubbish dump which has materialised beside our house, pass the smiley old Cô eating her phở who asks me: “đi bơi?” – going swimming? (She asks the same question every morning without fail, no matter the weather, my attire or my mode of transport. I could sashay by her in a wedding dress and she’d ask the same thing. But it’s our only form of conversation, and I love it.)

Today, it’s a maybe. “Có lẽ”, I respond, and smile back. Already an improvement in my morning.

By the time I’ve walked across the dusty back road and up the sand dunes to gaze over the gold ribbon beneath, I feel renewed. Winter has left overnight. The still-deserted beach is bathed in a soft yellow glow. The waves – tumultuous and unswimmable just days before – rock their soft caps up to the shore; pretty white bonnets begging to be admired. I walk down the hard-packed sand, lighter with every step.

I only pass two people that morning – an older Western woman and a young Vietnamese man, both swinging their arms emphatically in the way people do when walking on the beach in the early hours here, right before burying themselves up to their necks in the sand, which apparently wards off aches and pains. We all grin at each other in unrestrained delight as if to say, “D’ya think anyone else knows yet?!”

The first day of a sunny spring and I remember exactly how it felt.

How could I have forgotten? The sun always brings me back. Nature is what nurtures me. It was something I had told myself to remember after a meditation retreat in Thai Plum Village. I noticed that every morning during our walking meditation, one of the lay people would stop and wave at the rising sun. I asked her about it and she said she didn’t miss a day.

“I say ‘Hello, sun!’ when I see it and ‘Goodbye, sun!’ when it goes away” she told me, eyes bright. I loved the idea and made a mental note to do the same every day when I left. (Which lasted, oh about three days.)

What is it about a yellow ball that’s so powerful?

There’s the Vitamin D, its warm energy and its shining light, literally brightening the world. But I think the colour yellow has a lot to do with it, too.

You see, these past few years, I’ve become a firm believer in colour therapy – especially in the power of wearing yellow. My wardrobe looks like it belongs to Big Bird, like it’s been dipped in butter. Yellow is my jam – and most days I’ll wear it in canary, mustard or buttercup. (But never something as subtle as eggshell.)

My own love of colour really came into being after I shaved my head.

I felt plain then, ugly and unfeminine – what was a bald chick to do?! So I distracted myself with colour. I became the male peacock, fluttering my plumes in a bid to be noticed some other way, or perhaps to make it seem like a choice, a costume I was trying on. But the more colours I wore, the brighter everything else became. And the better that costume fit.

I saw the smiles my colours generated, not just on my own face but on the faces of others, too. When I visited my father in hospital after a surgeon removed a foot of his cancerous colon, a lady in the lift told me I’d brightened her day. She’d been visiting her husband, she disclosed – also cancer – and the sight of me in my yellow turban headscarf, purple tunic and yellow Converse “cheered up the entire hospital”. Dad’s jolly nurse used to say “your father’s lucky, you know: he’s the only person here with a colour therapist visiting him every day!”

I wish I’d discovered colour therapy earlier. Like through the sinking years of depression, when I was colourblind for years. Nothing had colour, smell or taste. It was a sense of being senseless. Discovering yellow and the power of wearing a rainbow was like waking up to that golden morning in An Bang, sun-drenched in possibility and hope.

These days, if I wake up feeling down, or I’m anxious about my hair or anything else… I head straight for my yellow supply and dress myself in sunshine.

It sounds simplistic, I know, but it really does help me. Yellow’s the colour that shows me the way. That brings me closer to myself. I team my yellow clothes with heart-shaped sunglasses, the frames dressed in silver glitter, the sides fire-engine red (I think they’re meant for a five-year-old) and channel my inner Elton. On days when I’ve woken up feeling awful but have tried a little colour therapy, people have stopped me to tell me that I’m “a breath of fresh air”. That I’ve brightened their day…and as a result of these conversations, they’ve brightened mine. It’s a powerful thing and, as someone who has an incurable case of ‘sad resting face (sometimes ‘bitchy resting face’), these moments are particularly valuable!

And it’s really been here, in this yellow ’n’ blue-coated town of Hoi An, that I’ve truly embraced colour therapy: matching my clothes to it, even matching my bike, until driving through it feels like I’m in a film set and have already had my wardrobe fitting. In my mind, there’s no such thing as too much colour; subtlety isn’t in my vocabulary. Maybe it’s because I spent a decade living in darkness, at best a fuzzy grey. Trying to hide, to be invisible. No more.

Now I’m all about colour – my palate craves it, this pantone of pleasure.