Colour Light Therapy Georg Schad, Ringwood, February 2015 1. History 2. Physical set up 3. Today’s use of colours; psychological properties of colours; and Chromo therapy 4. Some Indications by Rudolf Steiner 5. The Colour Affects System 6. Our Approach, Coordination of Colours, Movements, Music and Speech: Areas that we address 7. A Therapy Sample 8. Where this particular colour light therapy is practiced History Colours have been used at all times in human cultures, both for body paints as well as for painting of images and of sculptures. What kind of colours depended on what was available for the people involved. Yet as cultures developed, more deliberate and careful applications became possible. Still today, the use of colours, some from plants, stone and some from metal, amaze visitors when seeing the ancient and highly developed Egyptian culture. What the colours meant to them may be hidden from us, but must have been important to them. Nor can we know that the colours were to accompany a deceased person for a specific purpose; nor when colours were used in a therapeutic way for the living. But one may 1 assume that when mankind was younger, colours made a deep impression on the beholder. When young, I was very impressed by an older friend who had seen a small booklet with pages of various colours, and that this was as important for Buddhists, so he said, as the Bible is for us. Gold as a colour re-emerged in the early Christian culture when the background of pictures was in gold, denoting the presence of the spiritual world. This became a time-honoured tradition for the icon painters to this day, but eventually in our Middle European Culture the blue sky appeared instead of gold as the background, together with laws of the three dimensional. Yet a great sensitivity to what colours expressed was felt for centuries. Eventually even black appeared as a background as for the pictures of angels by Guariento in Padua (1370), and later by Rembrandt. The amazing use of coloured glass in churches and cathedrals such as Chartres, or in Fairford in Gloucestershire, where the daylight shines through the images, heralded a new experience of what colours could express. When in 1957, I first experienced the Colour Light Therapy, it was located in a small hut-like chapel of Heathcot House, part of the Camphill Rudolf Steiner Schools near Aberdeen, Scotland. (see picture below) Beautiful coloured shadows were cast by at least two eurythmists on to a screen in front of children, which was of gauze-like material, and one could actually recognise the persons involved. Behind them were coloured windows through which the day light was carefully controlled with shutters on the outside. These dance-like movements were accompanied by lyre music or by a spinet. The sessions were designed for children with severe cerebral palsy and many were present in their specially designed wooden wheelchairs in the dark part of the room. It was pointed out to me at the time, that the sessions had a very relaxing effect on the children, many of whom were over sensitive to bright lights and sudden noises. This small class of children in the picture below were not the children for whom this therapy was devised, but the building behind them was the first used for the Colour Light Therapy in 1948.1 1 Karl König, The Superintendent’s Report 31.1.1947 - 31.7.1949, page 11. (The author has a copy.) 2 The shutters to control the colours are clearly visible. When Heathcot Estate was returned to its owners, the Colour Light Therapy stopped and eventually re-emerged years later in the Camphill School of Beaver Run in America, to which the creator of this impulse, Carlo Pietzner, a very able artist from Vienna, had emigrated. From around 1940 a colour light treatment was devised by Michael Wilson and Fried Geuter in the “Sunfield Children’s Home” in Clent, near Stourbridge. This was in the school hall with colours projected on to the stage, for large groups of children with learning difficulties. In around 1950, there were two households with blind and partially sighted children in the Camphill Schools in Aberdeen. A quite unique treatment had been devised for them. But this was with electric light. At the beginning of the 1960s Dr. Peter Engel, resident Medical Officer at the Camphill Rudolf Steiner Schools in Aberdeen, devised a colour light treatment with alternating red and blue lights in a certain rhythmic pattern, that were electrically operated, to engage the metabolic system as well as the central nervous-system. I was involved with this for a short time in the Sheiling School at Thornbury in the late 1960s. A 3 further study was initiated by Dr. Diana Pauli ‘The Sunfield Colour Impact Project’2 with a specially designed ‘Colour Impact Room’ with stage flood-lights, at the Sunfield Children’s home, Clent, 1999. Her special contribution is that she included some of Steiner’s ideas of the three-fold human soul of thinking, feeling and willing. Physical set up of our Colour Light Room It took a variety of attempts to get the physical layout right. The 7 coloured windows are facing North for indirect light and starting 1 meter up from the floor, and be 1.1/2m tall and about 50cm wide each. (see photograph below) The colours (gels) are interchangeable so that the sequence can be changed. We have blinds that can change the light input for each window, they are able to operate silently and from the back of the room, and are able to shut out all stray light. The screen: the larger the better! Ours is 6 m wide and 3 m high from the floor. It is in one piece, is pulled tight, and is made of 100% polyester, as colours reflect well. It is 2.1/2 m from the coloured windows to allow space of movement for a eurythmist. The room: needs to be large enough to hold a group of up to 20, yet be intimate enough for individual treatment. Any additional windows are completely covered with blackout during the sessions. We have one main entrance at the back, a side door leading up to a gallery for making music and for the person to operate the blinds of the coloured windows. We have a very efficient under floor heating, and the height of the room (approximately 6m.) is helpful re ventilation etc. Our entrance lobby with curtains is very helpful, as the eyes can adjust to a slightly less bright environment, and where some peace can be maintained, before and after a session. Besides the fact, that the children leave their coats and shoes in the entrance, we had made special ‘colour light garments’ which the children wore for the sessions. But in recent times we have been unable to give the garments to the children as many were too disturbed and difficult, and would have torn them. But we did notice a difference when they were able to wear them. 2Dr. Diana Pauli “Contact Through Colour”, by Special Children (173) June/July 2006 4 The north facing colour light room in Ringwood, the screen is hidden to the left. The present Colour Light Room at the Sheiling School, Ringwood, was designed for that original therapy, and sits at the heart of the therapy building, with its seven windows facing North, for indirect light. The windows with coloured gels can easily be rearranged. The screen separates the onlooker from the therapist who is behind the screen. The eurythmist is not visible when standing by the window, but her shadow becomes visible on stepping forward towards the screen. The colours make this screen luminous which is a desired effect, and even on a dull or rainy day the therapies continue uninterrupted. The shadow becomes a multi-coloured image, and it can be further enhanced when allowance is made for a little daylight to be included. This can enhance what is being seen with the additional complementary colours. A total black-out of all other windows in the room is a must, and hopefully, silence in the rest of the building is being observed. The colours are being controlled from a balcony above and behind the participants, and from where also the music is being played, or a verse is spoken. 5 Today’s use of colours Already Goethe, the German poet, made many scientific experiments with light and with colours. 3 During the last century the influence of colours on living beings has been studied and used widely in medicine and psychology. What in the past was the artists’ domain in our European culture, has now become much used in all fields of life and of commerce. Colours are used for advertising, be it in print or with images and with flashing lights, and traffic lights being used everywhere today. Young children are given crude colours to fill in ready drawn images. In farming, the red lights in hen houses are used to raise the egg production. In medicine both ultra violet and infrared have been used for many decades. Likewise blue light is used widely for the new-born with jaundice, when their liver cannot yet metabolise the mother’s milk, and their Bilirubin levels are too high4. 3 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, M.I.T. Press, March 1970. SBN 262 570 21 1 4 Photograph taken from the internet. 6 Blue light is also to be installed in an underground station in Tokyo where there were too many suicides.5 Today blue light is used in dentistry for polymerization of light cure resin based composites for fillings.