Entertain - Perceptible - Colors

Green, the color of nature, harmony, and liberation

Part 6 — The Color of Growth, Balance, and Health

The next step on the “scale” of increasing the frequency of light (500–570 nm), the positioning and color of the chakras, the spiritual “advance” is represented by green.

From the point of view of psychological studies (Luscher’s theories and not only) more or less controversial about the “adherence” to green, of a relative human impact of green, but the characteristics of green are also represented by:

1. Harmony and naturalness: Green is a calm and harmonious color that can create a sense of peace and relaxation, often associated with a native naturalness, with a conceptual compatibility with nature, flora, and fauna.

2. Balance and Health: It is a color associated with emotional balance and stability, and is even used to suggest these perceptions, perceptions compatible with health, well-being, and healing.

3. Safety and calm: It can evoke feelings of safety and protection, being a calm and relaxing color that attracts feelings of peace and can reduce stress and anxiety.

4. Growth and Prosperity: It is a color associated with growth, prosperity, and renewal, even abundance and success, and is often used to stimulate these perceptions.

The Anahata chakra, also known as the heart chakra, is the fourth chakra in the human energy system, being in the center of the chest, in the heart area, perceived as having green, having the assigned element of air, its symbol being the six-pointed star, the invoked mantra being Yam.

Main qualities:

Love: Anahata is associated with unconditional love, compassion, and forgiveness, born from the shared vibration of nature.

Empathy: Governs the ability to connect with others on an emotional level, especially resulting in emotional stability.

Peace: Influences the feeling of inner peace and harmony, conditioned by departure from the inner level.

Healing: Stimulates emotional and spiritual healing, especially in conditions of balance, with harmony starting from the individual level and extending to the environment.

Unity: Helps you feel connected to everything around you, naturally, in a harmony that attracts the safety and calm of nature’s prosperity.

When the Anahata chakra is balanced:

You feel full of love and compassion for yourself and others.
You can forgive and let go of resentment.
You feel peaceful and harmonious.
You can heal yourself emotionally and spiritually.
You feel connected to everything around you.

When the Anahata chakra is unbalanced:

You feel isolated and disconnected from others.
You have difficulty forgiving and letting go of resentment.
You feel angry and frustrated.
You are prone to depression and anxiety.
You feel disconnected from your higher self.

Methods of balancing the Anahata chakra:

Meditation: Especially focused on practicing compassion for a wide connection with Anahata.

Yoga: Practicing poses that focus on relaxing and balancing the heart, including relieving emotional pressures.

Positive Affirmations: Focus on developing perceptions of calmness and balance and practicing techniques for designing efforts related to well-being and health.

Spending time in nature: It is essential because Anahata connects quickly and effectively with any lively natural setting, especially if harmony with nature is interwoven with breathing exercises and listening to relaxing music.

Interpretation of the “preference” for green

Green is the color of earth’s fertility and suggests growth, expansion, birth, and balance. The richness of the green fields suggests liveliness and fullness (saturation), the green indicating the places where life has penetrated.

Dark green is associated with maturity, just as light green is associated with rebirth, youth, and growth.

The negative aspects of color are associated with envy and jealousy.

Located between blue and yellow, green results from their chromatic interferences that consider the negative aspects of these colors and accumulate them quite negatively).

In addition, it can be remembered that green enters with red in a symbolic game of alternations that develop dual, complementary characteristics like the rose that always blooms among the green leaves that will hide the thorns.

Personalities who prefer green are particularly inclined to development, to progress.

Regardless of their position, they want to collaborate, help, etc. to be able to have maximum chances of achieving the objectives even if this always has “behind” a persistent desire for possessiveness (that’s why it is necessary to “receive” encouragement and/or recognition, being constantly looking for signs that indicate their failure or the wrong action).

They are also helped by a natural sense of observation that makes them excellent counselors, fine psychologists, etc. In addition, they are good listeners and reliable people who often care about other people’s secrets more than their own.

It represents firmness and resistance to change, the more he is preferred “developing” persistence, possessiveness, and selfishness. In addition, he is a person inclined towards accumulation, regardless of the utility of purchases, out of the simple desire to have, to be sure that everything will go towards his development.

These people have a need for recognition, a need to impress, constantly keeping in mind to avoid the specter of disappointments and disillusions.

In gratitude they will create a particularly pleasant, soothing, peaceful environment around them, becoming what is called a loyal friend, happy, caring, and trustworthy.

The less pleasant the green, the more the ego is hit and the more the person is humiliated by resistance or failure to progress, giving birth to a tendency to live life “carried by the wave”, type of surrender/ giving up or other similar feelings.

As a result of these behaviors, the person in question is particularly critical, sarcastic, and recalcitrant.

Modern marketing specialists have concluded that green is the most peaceful color of all, a color without joy, sadness, passion, which does not demand anything.

In a more plastic expression, it is the color which, included in a society of colors, is the equivalent of the bourgeoisie, a still, satisfied world that calculates its effort and counts its money.

It is the oscillation between night and day, germination and putrefaction, the pendulum stopped at the zero point of the balance, the green peace of neutrality, the balance of justice, etc.

But they also specify that it is about pure green, which any addition, no matter how small of pigment, takes out of its neutrality to bring it back into the agitation of society.

Thus, a yellow cramp gives it an active power, a sunny aspect, if blue dominates green, it becomes serious and full of thoughts, white induces a dominance of carelessness while black induces a dominance of calm, etc.

Equidistant between heavenly blue and infernal red, two inaccessible and absolute colors, forming the famous “trio” red — green — blue on which it is said that the whole “chromatic world” is built, green becomes an average, mediating value, between warm and cold, between up and down, between living and dead, becoming a soothing, refreshing, natural, human color.

Thus, every spring, after winter has shown man how lonely and precarious he is, revealing and freezing the earth that carries him, which gives him the chance of life, he puts on a new, green, hope-giving garment, returning fertile and nourishing, full of the warmth of life and the sun that will sustain it.

Real associations can be created by considering the departure of the aggressive, punishing factors of winter (the disappearance of ice, snow, killing winds) and the arrival of the fertilizing, life-giving and hope-giving rains.

The “cultural-historical” interpretation (the starting point of the considerations)

The most well-known symbolism of green is the one related to the association with the vegetal kingdom in full reassertion, of regenerating and lustral waters, to which baptism owes its symbolic meaning, green becoming like awakening to life, the initiation of consciousness.

Vishnu, bearer of the world, is represented in the form of a green-faced tortoise, the Indian goddess of philosophical matter, born from a sea of milk, having a green body, like the Aphrodite of Phidias.

Neptune wears a green robe like sea water, or a pale green like that in which the Nereids and everything related to the sea gods are depicted (the animals sacrificed to them wearing sea green headbands).

As a result, the rivers were characters with hair of the same color and the nymphs who take their name from water (Nympha Lympha) are usually depicted also wearing green clothes.

It is not by chance that green is the color of water as red is the color of fire, and therefore man has always instinctively felt the relations between these two colors as analogous to those between his essence and existence.

Green is also associated with lightning. Thus, in China, it corresponds to the trigram “Chen” which is the shaking (of manifestation and nature during spring), thunder, sign of the rise of yang or symbolic correspondent of the wood element.

It is the color of hope, power, longevity (but also sourness/bitterness). It is the color of immortality, universally symbolized by green branches.

Life in its evolution starts from red and opens into green, the Bambara, Dogona and Mossi populations consider green as a secondary color, born from red.

These considerations are also found in the representations of the complementarity of the sexes, where the man fertilizes the woman, where the woman nourishes the man, where red is a virile, masculine color and green is a welcoming, feminine color.

In Chinese thought these considerations are found in the formulations of yin and yang, the first virile, impulsive, centrifugal, and red, the second feminine, reflexive, centripetal and green, the balance between them constituting the secret of the balance between man and nature.

Compared to the Eastern dialectic, our (Western) societies based on the cult of the virile principle, have always paid attention to the creative spark, regardless of its origin.

As an example, we can mention the Spanish “chispa”, the foundation of an entire ethic, which instead determines the awakening of Oedipal complexes, of the cult of maternal refuge.

Thus, son and in love, the man returns after a gallop, towards his Mum as towards an oasis, a haven of peace, refreshing and comforting. That is why there is also a therapeutic of green, based consciously or not on “regressum ad uterum” (return in the womb).

Thus, in the Middle Ages, green was also the color of doctors’ robes (either due to previous considerations or due to the fact that they were assimilated with medicinal herbs), a color that has been replaced nowadays by dark red which, intuitively, expressed faith in the mysterious quality of medical art, green remaining the color of pharmacists/the apothecaries who prepare medicines, a fact speculated by pharmaceutical advertising which knew how to renew an old belief by giving a mythical, panacea value to words like vitamins or chlorophyll.

We must not forget the modern man’s desire to be in the middle of nature or, in an established expression “se mettre au vert” (to go out to the green grass, to rest, in the fields, in the country) born from hypertension / the stress due to city life, which expresses the need for a periodic return to a natural environment that transformed the country/field into a substitute for Muma, green becoming the color of states of tranquility, of peace, of Heaven, of childhood presence at the mother’s breast .

Enveloping, calming, refreshing, tonic, green is glorified in the religious monuments erected by our ancestors in the desert, in arid areas, being perceived as hope or theogonal virtues.

If for Christians green has lost this important “appreciation”, for Islam, whose traditions were created like mirages, above the hostile and burning immensity of deserts and steppes, the “flag” of faith, of Islam, has the color green, becoming also the emblem of salvation, the symbol of all the great riches, material and spiritual, the first of which is the family (green was the mantle of the Messenger of God/ Allah, in the shelter of which his direct descendants — Fatima, His daughter, Ali, His son-in-law, and those two of their children, Hassan and Hussein — came to hide in moments of danger — that is why they were also called “the four under the cloak” — who became the “four pillars” on which Mohammed built his community.

In this way, green is the color of the Prophet and knowledge in Islam, the saints also being dressed in green.

Like this story is the story of Khidr, Khisr or Al Khadir, also called the Green Man, which is mentioned by the nomads always after they have said their last prayer.

Khisr is the patron of travelers and embodies heavenly pronia, just as he is the mediator who reconciles extremes and resolves fundamental antagonisms to ensure human development.

Tradition says that he would have built his home at the edge of the world, where the two oceans meet, the heavenly and the earthly, this representing the measure of human order, the equidistance between Up and Down.

The one who meets Khisr does not have to ask him questions, it is only necessary to obey his advice, no matter how strange it may seem to him (because Khisr shows the way of truth which may seem absurd most of the time).

This history is found in many other peoples (of course in particularized forms, regardless of who “discovered” it). It is said by some that he was the son of Adam, the first of the prophets, according to others he was born in a cave (“vagina of the earth”) after which he dedicated his life to God/Allah, sometimes he is confused with Saint George and more often with Saint Elijah (which reinforces the kinship of green with red, water with fire).

Of course, all of them also had important “functions” in terms of helping sailors, patronizing them.

In India, this character is revered as Khawadja Khidr, being depicted riding a fish and being the deity of rivers, “ruling” both water and vegetation.

Another similarity of green to red color association is also found in Europe. The wonderful properties of green go as far as to believe that this color hides a secret, that it symbolizes a deep knowledge of things and destiny that end up mastering primitive, instinctive starts.

The origin of the word “sinople” which designates green in heraldry has a controversial origin, but which starts from the color red.

The word “sinople” comes from late Latin, sinopis, which first designated the red earth of Sinope, before inexplicably acquiring the meaning of green.

The reason the anonymous “coders” of the language of heraldry (heraldry) made this “overlap” is the ubiquity of the birth of green from red (or vice versa).

There are even “superimpositions” that interpret that the mysterious virtue of green comes from the fact that it contains red, just as, to borrow the language of the Hermetics and alchemists, the fertility of any work comes from the fact that the principle of burning (warm and virile principle) animates the wet, cold, feminine principle.

These considerations can also be found in the mythology that states that the green deities of renewal hibernate in the Inferno where the chthonian red regenerates them (the case of Persephone the green who appears on earth in the spring and in the autumn returns to the inferno, to which she is linked by the fact that she ate a pomegranate seed that became her heart, her red interior, attesting to considerations related to the fact that a fragment of the inner fire of the earth conditions all regeneration).

That is why they are green on the outside and red on the inside and their empire extends over the two worlds.

The Aztec myth of the goddess Xochiquetzal, abducted like Persephone and taken to the Underworld in winter, bears a disturbing analogy to Greek myth. For the Aztecs, she disappears in the Garden of the West, that is, in the Land of the Dead, and reappears in the spring, when she watches over the birth of flowers. In the manuscripts it is recognized by the headgear consisting of a double plume with green feathers (omoquetzalli).

In Aztec thought, green and red are also symbolized by chalchihulti, green precious stones that adorn the skirt of the goddess of waters, and by chalchihuatil or precious water, the name given to the blood gushing from the heart of the victim sacrificed by the priests of the sun every day on the altar of the star of the day to feed his fight against the darkness of the night and ensure his regeneration.

The same complementarity of green with red is found in traditions related to love deities.

Aphrodite, sprung from the foam of the sea, wavers between the calls of two virile principles: her husband Hephaestus, the Chthonian fire, and her lover Ares, the Uranian fire.

Furthermore, on the day when Hephaestus catches the two Ibonians in each other’s arms, it is Poseidon, God of the waters, who intervenes on Aphrodite’s behalf.

It can be remembered here that the painter Van Gogh strongly felt the connection between red and green saying: “I wanted to express with red and green the terrible human passions”.

Such traditions are also found in the ancient Egyptians where the green Osiris was cut up and thrown into the Nile from where he will revive thanks to the magical virtues of the red Isis.

He is a great initiate because he knows the mystery of death and rebirth, and therefore he simultaneously presides over the springtime renewal on earth and, underground, the judgment of souls.

That is why they feared green-eyed cats and punished with death anyone who killed this animal, and hence the alchemists believed that the green light of the emerald penetrated the greatest mysteries (being the papal stone).

From here, green comes to have an inverted valorization, the green of spring buds coming to be opposed to the green of mold and rot, there being a green of death just as there was a green of death.

The greenness of the skin on the patient’s face is opposed by the green apple, the green crocodile opens its animal but living mouth wide and offers the fetid green of the gate of hell, the green emerald as a symbol of papal power is also the representative of Lucifer, etc. reaching up to contemporary considerations related to green men on Mars or other life-or-death planets.

In Europe, green is first a beneficial color acquiring a mythical value, of green pastures, of the verdant heavens of love, it is like the youth of the world, or the eternal youth promised to the chosen ones, etc.

Erin the Green was, before it became the name of Ireland, that of the Isle of the Blessed in the Celtic world.

German mystics associate green with white to qualify the Epiphany and the Christian virtues, the justice represented by green completing the righteousness of white.

Green, in heraldry, has the same natural/pastoral origin “al” meaning forests, meadows, fields and vegetation, i.e. politeness, love, joy and abundance.

Archbishops (even bishops) wear a green hat on their coat of arms, with crossed green cords, evoking the fat pastures where the wise shepherds of Christendom take their “sheep” to graze, becoming the symbol of the good doctrine of these prelates.

The painters of the Middle Ages painted the cross in green, as an instrument of the regeneration of mankind ensured by the sacrifice of Jesus.

In Byzantium, green was symbolized by the monogram of Jesus the Redeemer, formed by the two consonants of the word green.

Previously, green is the color of dragon’s blood (also found in Chinese populations) like the Grail, the emerald or green crystal vessel (jade), which contains the blood of God incarnate, in which the notions of love and sacrifice melt, conditions of regeneration expressed through the bright green of the vessel where dusk and dawn, death and rebirth mingle, balancing.

Practical interpretation — neuromarketing

From a neuromarketing perspective, green is a natural and calm color, often associated with:

Nature: Evokes feelings of calm, peace, and harmony.
Growth: Symbolizes growth, prosperity, and abundance.
Health: It is associated with health, well-being, and healing.
Prosperity: Evokes feelings of optimism and hope.
Balance: Symbolizes balance, harmony, and stability.
Psychologically, recommended for use in marketing reasons, green can reduce stress and anxiety, create a feeling or atmosphere of calm and relaxation, stimulate concentration and creativity, improve mood, and reduce fatigue, and inspire confidence and security.

It is additionally recommended for promoting products and services related to nature, health and well-being, evoking feelings of optimism and hope, but also to attract attention and create a strong visual impact (especially more intense shades).

But although green has many positive connotations, it is important to use it sparingly, too much green can be boring and monotonous.

The logos of many health care, organic products, financial companies, and charities use green, and health and organic stores often use green to create a relaxing and natural atmosphere.

Green is also frequently used in marketing campaigns to evoke feelings of calm, safety, and optimism.

Merticaru Dorin Nicolae

Note: Images are created by me, Merticaru Dorin Nicolae, using Microsoft Bing Image Creator.

Dorin, Merticaru (02.14, 2002 - 2024)