How Do Flower Colors, Essences and the Chakras Fit Together
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A Panel Discussion with Deborah Bier, Donna Cunningham, and Joyce Mason
Vibration's editors Deborah Bier and Donna Cunningham met in our online classroom recently for a discussion with Frequent Contributor Joyce Mason to exchange viewpoints on how color and flower essences can be used as healing tools. The discussion could not help but include the consideration of the chakras, a series of energy wheels in the aura that relate to important issues like self-esteem (the third or solar plexus chakra) and fears around survival (the first or root chakra). If you are not familiar with the chakras and the colors associated with them, you may wish to begin by reading Joyce's earlier article on that subject, which considers flowers of different colors for the different chakras.
Deborah: Since color is vibration and essences are vibrational, I am certain that color has SOME effect on the action of flower essences. Still, since flowers of the same species can come in different colors, I think the more powerful underlying theme is the flower itself, with some variation due to color. However, I've always been uncomfortable about mechanical attribution of flower color to each chakra and the specific meaning of each color being so clearly defined. I have strong feelings that such associations can limit our growth.
I have been feeling for well over a decade that, as we evolve energetically as a species, the arrangement, location, functioning, and meaning of the chakras are changing, too, and that this process is now happening rapidly in many cases. The chakra system is ancient, and what is ancient may become less relevant as we move into the future. I feel we need to leave a lot of room and have few assumptions about what this is going to look like. If we insist that yellow flowers ALWAYS refer to the 3rd chakra, then we are going to be missing a lot of understanding. And, since intention strongly affects the activity of flower essences, then a limiting intention can limit the user's response to them.
Donna: I guess I'm our dedicated "Believer" that different colors have different and specific effects, while Deborah is our dedicated "Skeptic." I studied at a mystery school where we worked intensively with light, and each color was meant to apply to certain emotions. We weren't using light bulbs or color fabrics, but instead our mental focus and intention directed the color into the aura and chakras. The color seemed to set off a healing crisis around those issues.
For instance, cobalt blue was for wisdom/clearing out fear, and working with blue there resulted in an upsurge of fears rising to the surface to be released. The healing work involved using that week's color in all the chakras, and different issues would come up, depending on the chakra. I taught color meditations to healing clients for years after that, coordinating them with essences to help the emotions or issues. The combination of color and essence was a strong catalyst, and that's why I'm not ready to dismiss the correlations. I think the intention of the color is the point, different than just wearing a color or having the room painted that color. Intention is everything.
Joyce: Intention of color. I love that! How about an example of one essence that stands out in this healing method?
Donna: Well, deep cobalt blue meditations did seem to stir up old fears due to past traumas, and so the essence I used would often be Star of Bethlehem. But you see, Star of Bethlehem is a white flower, not a blue one. I never did choose essences based on the flower's color, just essences that pertained to the emotions we were working on.
Joyce: If everything is vibration, I see color as a hint of the frequency of a flower. So, maybe color and many of the ways we look at things are just entry points to the cosmic conversation.
Deborah: I'm getting a fairly clear picture that each of the colors exists in each of the chakras...perhaps that has to do with the way all parts of our energetic system are connected to all other parts. I can see the colors in an aura if that's my intention. But the colors don't follow a code that I can see...it's more a personal interpretation. If we are moving into an age of group consciousness and group mind (which I think we are) then the location of all the colors in all the chakras could be a manifestation of that connectivity.
Check It Out for Yourself
Below are links to many of our previous single essence portraits grouped by color. Check them out and see what you think about the connection between flower color, flower essences and the chakras.
Donna: In the work we did, any chakra could react to any color, and a full healing would require using that color in all the chakras. Using cobalt blue in each chakra would bring up
different fears, depending on the chakra. In the heart, for instance, it would be the fear of loss of love or of rejection; in the throat, the fear of speaking your truth; in the crown, perhaps the fear of looking at a new idea or seeing clearly. Each chakra has its own issues. And in working on healing a traumatic event, I would have each chakra tell the story of the event. Their issues were quite different, and so were their versions of the event. Separate chakras might be holding on to an emotion or a wounding for entirely different reasons and to learn entirely different lessons.
Joyce: I like that! Chakra drama, like Astrodrama or psychodrama. Sort of sounds like trying to reintegrate the color in all the chakras. Certainly I don't think we react to things one chakra at a time, but isolating each chakra's reaction would be a step toward integration.
Deborah: As long as we don't keep each chakra isolated, otherwise it's a step toward DISintegration. And, if each chakra holds all the colors, then a chakra that is off-hue will answer to the right essence -- perhaps of the right color of flower ‹ and change its shade back to pure.
Joyce: To me, flowers are the visual spectrum like sound has an aural spectrum. Because of that, the essences tune our out-of-tune vibrations into harmony. Essences are vibrational remedies, after all, and the colors vibrate to a certain range of feeling. The flowers' colors are maybe visual clues of what we need. Music is vibration too. Different senses, sight and sound, all helping us toward harmony. I think of colors as having frequencies like a radio band, and if you find the right one for you, there's no static.
Donna: Well, my experience with light work is that every chakra can hold the full range of emotions, and having the full range of emotions, can respond to the full range of color healing, and the full range of essences.
Joyce: We all react so emotionally to a flower's color, even if we don't know a thing about flower essences. Anyway, I love the idea of the essences helping tune us up to wholeness, like finding our perfect color blend. I just keep thinking more mundanely how we all respond to flowers so emotionally, including their color. Color is clearly healing, so flower colors must be giving some signal that they've got what you need. It's all a balancing act.
Deborah: My instinct is that different color flowers do vibrate to different harmonics of a particular theme, for instance, red yarrow vs. yellow yarrow, vs. white yarrow, like you wrote about in one of your articles, Joyce.
Joyce: I conducted an experiment today that would seem to prove that the chakra color connection only works sometimes, and particularly when distinguishing varieties of the same flower (like the various yarrows or monkeyflowers). "Everyone" knows the 2nd chakra color is orange, and the second chakra is the sexual chakra. If this were true all the time, we ought to find a bouquet of orange flowers in the FES Repertory under the category of sexuality. Ha! The flowers in the Repertory for that category span the rainbow from white to purple ... which probably also proves I chose too complex an issue to test this theory. Sexuality is so complicated that many of the flowers are white to deal with the opposite issue of purity, purification, and finding one's comfort zone in-between.
However, this might be a key to the entire issue. Few strong emotional issues are simple and straightforward, and few of them can be limited to just one chakra. For example, Bleeding Heart may be for a broken heart/4th chakra, but there are also survival and loss issues that are pretty root/1st chakra (you feel like you're going to die from the loss). I'm thinking there are cosmic hints in the color that can speak to what the flower is used for, but the cosmos -- and people -- are complicated! But then if it weren't, there would be no mystery ... a world I wouldn't want to live in!
Donna: One point is that the flowers have all been hybridized so much that they are losing their original colors. For instance, irises exist in about 50 different colors rather than just the two or three they started out with. Many essence makers prefer to work with wildflowers or very old non-hybridized versions for that same reason, that the healing intention of the plant, if you will, is clearer then.
Deborah: Yes, so the colors in many flowers may be "artificial" in some ways...diluting their meaning. It's like when we try to skip over our evolutionary past, we lose our energy, too. When we try to be too "modern" and forget we are animals, we lose ourselves.
Donna: So perhaps it is the "intent" of the plant deva -- the plant angels or fairies or however you may perceive them -- that determines the vibrational healing force of the planet. Perhaps it is the need a particular plant was created to meet -- eons ago -- that is strongest in terms of an essence's healing properties, stronger than the color they were bred to become.
Deborah: Rather than pick an essence because it's a certain color, when we pick an essence that is correct and helpful, we can look back and see what the color is and what it means to us. For the beginner who is enamored of having an easy system to follow, we need to warn them off choosing an essence by color. It's entirely human to create systems of meaning and understanding. The simpler they are, the more attractive they appear because they seem to explain everything. Personally, I subscribe to a highly Mystery-filled view of the Universe. How we each embrace the unknown or the unknowable will vary from person-to-person and culture-to-culture. But how we embrace change in our long-cherished belief systems is a measure of our ability to move forward into Grace.
Joyce: Maybe heaven truly is the rainbow, and the colors of flowers just give us a bit back till we can rejoin the comfortable cosmic soup. Everything heavenly is in Technicolor and Panavision!
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I have been feeling for well over a decade that, as we evolve energetically as a species, the arrangement, location, functioning, and meaning of the chakras are changing, too, and that this process is now happening rapidly in many cases. The chakra system is ancient, and what is ancient may become less relevant as we move into the future. I feel we need to leave a lot of room and have few assumptions about what this is going to look like. If we insist that yellow flowers ALWAYS refer to the 3rd chakra, then we are going to be missing a lot of understanding. And, since 
Joyce: Intention of color. I love that! How about an example of one essence that stands out in this healing method?
Deborah: My instinct is that different color flowers do vibrate to different harmonics of a particular theme, for instance, red yarrow vs. yellow yarrow, vs. white yarrow, like you wrote about 
Donna: So perhaps it is the "intent" of the plant deva -- the plant angels or fairies or however you may perceive them -- that determines the vibrational healing force of the planet. Perhaps it is the need a particular plant was created to meet -- eons ago -- that is strongest in terms of an essence's healing properties, stronger than the color they were bred to become.