Painting a Rainbow Life

Rainbow Life

By Sandy Penny

Back in 1993, I did an interview with psychologist Nancy White who has a wholistic therapy center in Houston, Texas. She has a light machine that is supposed to affect your mood and your ability to handle stress. Combining light therapy and psychoanalysis, she has been quite successful in treating alcoholics, drug abusers, and depression--garnering a much lower recidivism rate than most programs.

Nancy allowed me to experience the light machine during our interview. I sat in a chair with a hood over my head while a special type of light was strobed into my eyes to be absorbed by my brain. I also wore earphones, and music and miscellaneous sounds—including ocean waves, helicopters, voices in a crowd, yelling, and soothing music—were played while the light blinked.

I watched, mesmerized, as colors swirled through my vision in a psychedelic rainbow spiral. I began to wonder what kind of light source could change colors that way. Was it a more sophisticated spinning color wheel like those we used on metal Christmas trees? Was it projecting some kind of a movie? When I asked her about it, she blew my mind when she said, “There is only one color being strobed, white light. The colors you see are a response to the sounds you hear through the earphones and are generated by your own inner prism.” I could barely wrap my mind around the concept, and I have spent a great deal of time considering the ramifications.

We say that we color our lives with our perceptions, but this dynamic is so much more real and powerful than we realize. Our feelings change the way we experience an event. Have you noticed that when you’re stressed and in a hurry, it seems like every traffic light is red, every slow driver is on the road in front of you, and people demonstrate the rudest behaviors? But, when you’re in a great mood, you just seem to sail along, choosing all the right streets to avoid traffic snarls and finding the perfect front door parking space. So, is that a reality or a perception influenced by your mood? Do you actually affect traffic, or do you just notice something different? And, how interactive is it if you’re conscious of your reactions? Can you choose to have a better life just by refusing to let it upset you? If so, what a powerful tool.

In the late 1970s, I wrote about biofeedback experiments conducted by Baylor Medical School in the Houston Medical Center. I was allowed to observe several patients who had issues with blood pressure, fast heart rate and other measurable physical problems. The biofeedback machine was set to emit a faster, high-pitched tone when the blood pressure was high or the heart rate too fast. The patient’s goal was to lower their blood pressure or heart rate, and as it lowered, the biofeedback machine emitted a slower and lower tone, so you could measure your progress by the changing pitch. And of course, the lower pitch was less annoying.

How amazing that people could change a physical response by merely knowing that it was too high. They were instructed to simply breathe and imagine it going down. It worked. And, out of that study came another result: once a patient could easily lower their physical stats by listening to the tone change, the researchers set the tone to the lower tone to begin with, and without even thinking about it, the physical stats immediately lowered themselves—Pavlov’s new dog. The interactive training of the body was complete. At the time, this was a radical and revolutionary finding. It gave us the understanding that we respond to outside influences, and that we ultimately have control over those responses.

Today, it’s common knowledge that we have more control over our bodies and lives than we give ourselves credit for. So, why do we let our lives get so out of control? Why do we let things bother us so much that we stress out and make ourselves sick? Perhaps it has to do with personal responsibility. If we acknowledge that we are in control of our lives and our joy, then we have no one to blame for our unhappiness except ourselves. But, I prefer the term “response ability,” the ability to respond to the circumstances of our lives in a positive and joyful way.

Yes, life is our own personal rainbow, and it’s up to us to paint it beautifully.