Red and Green - The Journey to the Center of the Heart

If I should pinpoint the time it began, when that thick blanket of fog and ensuing exhaustion and lethargy descended over my life, I would say it was last October.  I remember because October is usually my absolute favourite time of year, with its’ earthy witchy-ness, changing colours and crunchy leaves it’s the perfect time of year for my inner Celtic pagan goddess and usually a time of great peace for me, but this year, there were no carved pumpkin candle lanterns burning brightly outside my door and all I really recall of the Autumn is the notion of being forced unwillingly into a cosmic boot camp of relentless energies fired by two eclipses and a multitude of powerful solar flares fully intent on  illuminating  all and any still stuck fragments of the ancient core wounding I have carried with me for eons & eons, and demanding that it all be brought up for understanding, forgiveness and release.

I say still stuck  fragments, because I feel like I have been doing this stuff for a life time, many lifetimes come to that!  All year I had been bombarded by material about releasing ‘stuff’. “Let go” “don’t cling to the old” “move on”…and I had tried…I mean really tried as best as I knew how to make changes, to do the ‘letting goes’ and make ready to leap into the New Earth, but with the best will in the world and although I really and truly desperately wanted to make the cut, I had no idea HOW to do it. Everyone one spoke about “letting go” but no detailed instruction manual was forthcoming.....

My typical day ended with me collapsing into bed before 9pm, too soul sick, lethargic and exhausted to do chores, write emails or even find some decent clothes for the following day. I toyed with the idea of going to my GP for a diagnosis of stress and depression, as my thoughts felt as though they had congealed inside my head and the comfort of sleep was all I cared for. Yet I did not feel as though I was depressed, it was more of an acute awareness that I was precariously close to the edge of a very fine line and at any moment I would mistakenly step over and all hell would break loose. The thing is, there is a part of me that desperately wants to do it, wants to step over that forbidden line and let myself tumble free fall into “whatever will be will be”. Possibly into that New Earth!

So here I stood (and had for quite some time…years even, lifetimes possibly) on the edge of ‘something’… frozen like a deer in the headlights, terrified to jump in, to make a wrong choice, afraid to move ahead and clinging desperately to ‘stories’  about me that were long past their sell by date.

I was stuck and I was literally clinging for dear life to a crumbling old world.

By now though the ‘stuckness’ had become unbearable and it was moving me closer to a dangerous place of numbness. Stuckness for me is nothing new, in fact it has been a way of life for me, many lifetimes I am told, and in fact I learned recently that I am addicted to being stuck and disempowered! Hmmm.

I tried to think positively, I tried to focus on love.  I re-read my favourite self -help books. I didn’t watch news or read the papers, I tried accepting and consciously letting myself just be in the ‘stuckness’ without guilt or resistance and I visualized golden light flowing through my body dissolving any restrictive etheric chords -  and partly it worked, but not completely . We are in unchartered times and many of the old solutions no longer work. I was still stuck in an invisible prison and I had no idea how to get out. 

Often, in an attempt to make sense of what is happening in my life, I turn to the language of colour and search for answers amongst the subtle energies of the colour rays.  Colour is a language I instinctively understand and it is through the whispering of the colours that I access the 'knowingness’ behind the madness of whichever scenario is playing out in my life. But this time, engulfed as I was  in my own stories I was oblivious to the frequency of specific colours weaving themselves seamlessly into the scenario in perfect support, as if by magical design, just when the final straw (that broke the camel) was about to topple.

As if in a parallel universe, the colour rays seemed to be taking matters into their own hands, and by mistake (or by universal design) I had managed to order two sets of Colour Mirror chakra bottles. By the time I realized this, I had already received notification from the post office that my bottles had arrived and I was too disconnected and exhausted at that point to even conceive of sending them back (and somewhere still aware enough to realize that for some reason I was ‘meant’ to have two sets)

When I went to collect my bottles, which had been packed in a number of smaller individual packages, one of the packages was missing. I waited, but as time passed and the missing package didn’t arrive, I finally pulled myself together and contacted the post office.  My package, they told me, was in a post parcel collection locker in my local village and I could collect it using a ticket with a barcode on the back (which they had seemingly sent to me). This however proved impossible as the scanner refused to recognize the code and the locker door no matter how often I kicked it would not click open. I called the emergency number on the ticket “sorry you are calling out of office hours”…  you know how it goes!  By now irritation was definitely rumbling….

On the Monday I again called the post office, they couldn’t explain why the scanner would not accept my ticket, but reassured me that the package would be taken to the post office and I could collect it there in a few days. It never arrived - and finally it was returned to England ‘uncollected’. 

Oddly (or not) in that missing package was the red/coral chakra bottle C1.

C1. Base Chakra (Coral / Red) 

The missing bottles had definitely grabbed my attention, raised a red flag so to speak, and something began to stir. As I contemplated the missing bottle situation, the energies of red and coral began to whisper to me in a language my soul could understand. The red I am ‘hearing’ however is not the dynamic, passionate, mountain moving, fire engine red of action and creation, but instead it is the underbelly of red that has started to rumble. The underbelly is the opposite of the dynamic, passionate red, it is the lethargy, the stuckness and the slow simmering of unexpressed anger, whilst the coral energy, unable to find its flow, expresses as isolation and victimhood.

At this point I am sufficiently roused from my lethargy to realise I need help, and I make the decision to work with one of the Colour Mirror bottles. My immediate thought is to use the red oils for energy, but I am unable or unwilling at this point to deal with the issues I may unearth in the depth of red and coral energies, so I decide to use the green/turquoise chakra bottle C4, my logic being that since I now had two of them, I could afford to use one of them, and green seemed to fit the bill of what I was looking for. It was very much a head decision. I was feeling miserable, victimized and unhappy (at work and in life) and knowing that both green and turquoise were heart frequencies I decided a bit of love might be useful.

Now in retrospect I can see the perfection of using green and turquoise (and of course there really are no coincidences) and anyways the red and coral chakra bottle (C1) was back in England out of reach for now, biding its time before announcing its part in the drama and letting its partner (and compliment on the colour wheel) comfort me and clear the way.

Green was perfect, gentle and subtle, comforting and expansive. I could breathe again

and I was regaining my will to live.  At the time it appeared that nothing much happened, I was still stuck and exhausted, but somewhere, like the underground shoot of a spring crocus, something was stirring. The ice was melting and things were gently beginning to flow.

For me, green is the colour of freedom, of justice and of personal space. Green opens for expansion and new direction and the green/turquoise chakra bottle was doing exactly what was needed - clearing a space. I mean honestly, green literally cleared a space in the midst of all that ‘stuckness’ so that something new could begin to sprout, whilst the turquoise energy gently melted the blockages and opened for the flow.

And new it was, and rather surprising for someone who had been a lifelong keeper of the peace. For what started to flow was a stream of pent up anger and frustration, as all of a sudden and for the first time ever, I became deeply political and vocal with it. Wherever I looked, all I would see was the injustice in the world - and justice is of course also a green issue. Turquoise is the humanitarian, connecting the heart and throat, allowing feelings to finally be expressed.

In the words of Anais Nin - We see others not as THEY are, but as WE are.

Green was proving to be my most very perfect mirror!

Somewhere in the back of my logical mind I am vaguely aware of the colour magic being played out and realise that in order to make use of the new space now opened up for me, I must be ready to step forward into that space, to fully commit to the path of the green and turquoise without fear and hesitation. In other words, in order to walk ‘true green/turquoise’  I need to navigate ‘true red/coral’ and all that it might bring up for me.

I hesitate, after all the devil we know and all that, but I can feel the red energy calling to me and now, with my package finally arrived, I am in possession of a second red/coral chakra bottle which has decided to leak all over the packaging, thus giving me little option really other than to bath in it, and let the messages contained in the precious red and coral oils seep deeply into the cells of my body to work magic.  I know this will be the beginning of something new and can feel the momentum building.

I bathed in the sumptuous red oil, let it pour over my body and massaged it into my skin as I contemplated the energies of the red ray. I tried to listen to the whisperings of the red energy, intellectually looking for answers, but the red energy, the ray that relates to the physical, did not whisper back this time, instead it decided to show me its wisdom through bodily sensations.

Every time I tuned in, I would feel this inner wave of frustration rise up through my body and until it reached the area of my heart. Then it would get stuck, backed up into the dam of all the other hard packed emotional debris stored in the chest area, and the pain would sweep out from my heart area to the left shoulder and down through my left arm. There it would remain stuck, and it was the same procedure every time.

Years and years (life time upon lifetime) of anger and frustration stuffed into that area of my chest, shoulder and arm. No wonder I suffer from a selection of ailments on the left side of my body.  Boy was this energy stuck, it was so stuck it was physically visible and although I had previously made the connection between my physical ailments (frozen shoulder, extreme shoulder pain, weak left arm ) and my emotional state, I had not connected the anger to a blocked dam of emotions in my heart center. This was a chilling realisation, I am after all a self-confessed lightworker, an empath, the fixer, the giver, I could not have a blocked heart center, and yet… often I would note a flickering sense of helpless guilt, a tinge of jealousy or a stab of resentment or irritation as I tried to please the world. The truth is, not being there for me was such a way of life, that despite my therapist training and my awareness of the importance of this issue for others, it had never consciously occurred to me that being kind to me, was important too. In fact I suppose I thought I was kind to me. I knew the jargon, had read the books. My body was telling me otherwise.

Could my heart chakra really be blocked? I couldn’t believe it, yet I knew, with that sense of inner ‘knowing’ that it was so.

What I could hide from me, I could not hide from the mirror I found in the colour rays.  Immediately, they got straight to work on my stuffed rage and my blocked heart center. They worked gently and subtly, there was no rush or explosion, just a slow dissolving of another layer. It was not going to be a quick fix. The green energies had only started to peel the onion. They provided space for expansion, shone a bright light on my denial of the truth, they revealed my jealousy and my broken heart and they offered a way to gently restore the balance and return me to love.  Alongside the green, the turquoise energies gently re-opened the flow of my life force, providing freedom for the backed up red energy that had cut me off from really living. The anger that had for so long separated me from source was finally being addressed.

I knew I had been stuck before as I had been given a reading some years ago that had resonated so completely. It was a life as a native Indian woman where my young son had been taken to participate in a traditional water ritual and been immersed in water and had drowned. In that lifetime I remained stuck in unresolved grief and never learned to live again.

A second lifetime had been given to me as a peasant woman, working long days in the fields to feed 6 children. My boy of around 11 had taken ill with a fever and died, as I had neither time nor means to look after him.

And so the stories build upon each other and in this lifetime my only son, to whom (I felt as though) I have given my all, had rekindled that excruciating pain of loss and grief, helplessness and abandonment when at 16 he chose to live with his father in the city. I remember thinking that I was over reacting, but couldn’t explain the uncontrollable sense of desperation and grief that racked my body as I sobbed as though my heart would break. Yet even then, somewhere within that grief, I sensed the perfection of his gift to me - the opportunity in this lifetime, to let go of the irrational pain and fear of losing my child and to release the stored guilt and the anger of this 'abandonment' embedded in my cells.

I could forgive him, forgive me, and understand that the suffocating control of my current ‘smother mothering’ tactics is my futile attempt to make up for the results of lives past, and is part of the very reason he feels compelled to ‘abandon’ me this time around too. He won’t - ultimately I know that. Not if I crack the code as it were, and ‘let go’ of this old stored pain keeping me stuck in a repeat pattern life after life.  

Logically I know this is just a story, but it is helpful for focusing my attention and reminding me of what I have to do - release this compulsion to control his every move masked in motherly love. Ouch!

As the red energy continued to unearth hidden pockets of anger, dislodging stuckness and additional soul stories, I thought of the shy child I had been, the invisible girl, the wild young woman looking for love , the friend, the colleague, the mother …  I thought of my own mother and my grandmother, both strong women. Remarkable women, with deeply knowing eyes and an innate sense of authority and power, and yet… they had never truly owned their power and had spent their lives, doing for others, martyred and stuck. Lives filled with disappointment, unspoken grief and abandonment.

As I pondered the ‘stuckness’ of the women in our family, I saw before me a line of women, ‘my women’, my ancestors, stretching back into eternity, and I realized that their stories, were my stories, that I carried in my cellular memory their unresolved conflicts, their pain and their lessons, and that  I could no longer carry all of these stories on my back. I needed to let them go.

I realized too that a relationship with a specific female in my life, a woman who was causing me no end of trouble was part of the jigsaw to the unlocking of the imprisoned inner power. I hated her, she was, controlling, selfish, manipulative, heartless, afraid.... she was… my mirror! Oh GOD NO, she can’t be! She is - I AM - I am everyone and everything. I contain the darkness and the light. (Aha moment)!

A kaleidoscope of fragmented thoughts and images flash through my head - I AM Kali,

Hecate, The Morrigan. I am all of the dark Goddesses. Loved and feared, hated and revered. I am the fallen woman, the witch, the prostitute - cast out, beaten, raped, tortured and burned. I feel the power of the rage welling up inside of me. I AM the the virgin, the mother, the healer, the lover. I AM the Magdalene, Aphrodite, Isis, Mother Mary… I am all of these, and I am not ashamed.

The rage is liberating, and for the first time in ages, I am not afraid.  Not helpless, not powerless, I am angry, and rightfully so. I take to Twitter and find a sense of belonging in the world of social justice. We are many angry people shouting about the state of the world and blaming the politicians (the patriarchy) for the mess. Gone is the love and light of yesterday as I feel myself drawn or perhaps sucked into a vortex of rage and dare I say... a budding sense of freedom.

On closer examination I can see this is the perfect mirror, reflecting back to me the anger I feel towards the helplessness I am  experiencing in my daily life. 

That night as I reread my favourite book for the millionth time 'Return to Love' by Marianne Williamson, and in perfect explanation of the feelings I was experiencing, this passage jumped out at me: 

“Several years ago I was at a cocktail party where I got into a very heated debate about American foreign policy. Later that night, I had a kind of waking dream. 

A gentleman appeared to me and said, "Excuse me, Miss Williamson, but we thought we should tell you: In the cosmic roll call, you are considered a hawk, not a dove”.

I was incensed. "No way," said indignantly. "I'm totally for peace. I'm a dove all the way”. "I'm afraid not," he said. "I'm looking on our charts, and it says very clearly right here: Marianne Williamson, warmonger. You're at war with Ronald Reagan, Caspar Weinberger, the CIA, in fact the entire American defense establishment. 

No I'm sorry. You are definitely a hawk."

I saw, of course, that he was right. I had just as many missiles 'in my head as Ronald Regan had in is. I thought it was wrong for him to judge communists, but it was okay for me to judge him.

Why? Because I was right, of course! I spent years as an angry left-winger before I realized that an angry generation can't bring peace. Everything we do is infused with the energy with which we do it. 

As Gandhi said. "We must be the change." What the ego doesn't want us to see is that the guns we need to get rid of first are the guns in our own heads.” (Marianne Williamson)

And little by little the pendulum begins to find the middle way. No longer stuck in the underbelly of red a new sense of purpose, freedom and courage is beginning to emerge.  Albeit slowly.

I realize that it is time to consider making the necessary changes in my personal life - no matter how scary!

I turn to face my ancestors and I ask for their forgiveness. I ask them to forgive those who have hurt them and ask them to forgive themselves. I forgive them, I forgive me. I tell them how much I love them and that I am sorry for their pain, and then I lay it down to rest, gently, respectfully.  I lay down the stories of these wonderful women. My stories! It is time to move beyond.

So many of the stories we carry are from yesteryear - and now a New Golden Earth awaits.

Briefly I ponder the notion that we (my lineage of great women) originate from far off galaxies and have wandered here like shocked star children stunned into silence and wrapped in fear as we absorbed the harshness of our new home. Perhaps we closed down our heart centers in order to protect ourselves!  Perhaps this is what happens to so many the starry ones! Perhaps these are the memories I carry in my cells! Or perhaps these are just my stories!

With so many questions, I return to my array of Colour Mirror bottles to seek for my most current reflection.  Where is my journey heading now?

Written by Lesley Tara McDonald

Pictures and Bottle meanings from the Colour Mirror system , relating to the colours referred to in this blog are linked below. http://www.colourmirrors.com/products/essential-oils-messages

C1. Base Chakra (Coral / Red)

This bottle is beneficial for chakra issues such as tiredness, backache and any under-energised condition, i.e. frigidity, impotence, ME, blood problems, multiple sclerosis. This bottle balances energies so that anger and frustration are calmed and issues to do with unrequited love and difficulty in relationships can be healed. It works with survival issues and shifts feelings of being a victim and patterns of martyrdom.

http://www.colourmirrors.com/products/essential-oils-messages

C4. Heart Chakra (Turquoise / Green) 

This bottle is beneficial for chest & heart conditions it helps when suffering from heartache and relationship difficulties. Useful when you need to express your feelings and get in touch with your heart.http://www.colourmirrors.com/products/essential-oils-messages