Pull back those curtains in your hotel room and feast your eyes! Literally. You’re in for some valuable colour therapy for your eyes, your brain and your body!

You see the ancient Pythagoreans, Greeks and Egyptians believed that the body could be fed through the eyes and there is proof that sunlight entering the eyes stimulates activity in the pituitary and pineal glands.

Sunlight, or white light is made up of all colours both visible and invisible and when these colours are separated using special equipment they can be used therapeutically. Colour is a wave length of radiant energy and this energy is measured in what scientists call “angstrom units”, each colour having it’s own “AU”.

Let’s take the colour red. When shone onto the body it penetrates the skin by 5/8". The colour red can stimulate the liver, orange the thyroid and mammary glands, yellow the pancreas, green the pituitary, blue the pineal gland and scarlet the sexual organs.

Night shift workers commonly experience a reduction of their red blood cells and hemoglobin because of sunlight deficiency. When exposed to sunlight, this condition reverses itself. Just think of what all the time spent under fluorescent lights and behind glass windows has done to our systems! Experts suggest that you expose as much of your bare skin to the sun as possible for short periods of time. Of course moderation and common sense must be your guidelines.

Psychiatrists Jung and Freud went further to say that colour has an “important neurophysiological effect on the mechnaism of man”. Each of us has a unique “inner colour scheme” with regard to our personalities and these are formed since birth, based on our life experiences. In order to feel good, equilibrium in these “inner colours” is imperative.

For example the colour blue can evoke feelings of security and quiet, it helps you to think clearly and logically. Green is the colour of nurturing and peacefulness and gives you a sense of belonging.

Sunlight is liberating and injects strength. Red is stimulating both sexually and intellectually. The Greeks used coloured healing rooms to treat their patients and the Eygptians used coloured jewelry as “carry around” therapy.

The “Luscher Colour Test” was developed in 1947. It is a test using the effect of colour as its basis. It measures the suitability of employees for jobs and was used in Germany to create safe and productive work environments in the Volkswagen car plants. Industrial accidents were reduced and employee attitude were improved simply by changing the colour of paint on the factory walls!

In 1961 the Nobel Prize was awarded to M. Calvin for his work in photosynthesis. His work concluded that plants trap the sun’s energy and change it to chemical energy. We eat the plants and we receive this energy. Believe it or not, eating sun ripened fruit is beneficial as it travels through our bodies not only nutritionally but based on the fruits colour energy!

Aesthetically pleasing to the eyes, gigantic, commercially grown foods are picked green and gassed on the way to the grocery store in order to ripen. While it may be easy to laugh at the local, miniature pineapples you get here, or the skins of mangos or papayas that look like they had a life berfore they got to your plate, think of it in terms of real sunlight. Something the commerically grown fruits and vegetables can only dream about!

Any hopes of getting your doctor to prescribe 10 days of aqua blue water, golden sunshine, lush green vegetation and a rainbow of beautiful flowers would probably be pushing it a bit as the medical establishment waits for further scientific encouragement on colour.

However, if you do happen to spot your doctor on one of the beaches, embarrassingly half dressed, and waving to you happily - chances are that the evidence was compelling, that “colour power” does make sense after all!

<B>Angela KEESSOONDYAL</B>