What Colour is Trying to Tell You
Written by Kath Roberts, Coach, Colour Teacher & Author
Kath is a systems coach and international teacher of colour therapy. She unlocks innate potential in individuals and groups by bringing together what we know, who we are, and then ultimately what we do. Recognising that brilliance isn't just in our heads, but emerges from the integration of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual intelligence.
You don't choose colour. Not really. You might think you do, selecting a paint shade for the living room, reaching for that particular top on a morning when everything else feels wrong, finding yourself inexplicably drawn to the turquoise bottle on a shelf. But if you slow down and pay attention, you'll notice something more interesting than preference. You'll notice that colour is choosing you, reflecting back something that is alive in your system, something your conscious mind may not yet have words for.
This is not a new idea. Many ancient cultures understood colour as a carrier of meaning, a force with its own frequency, a bridge between the visible and the invisible. What is new, and what makes this genuinely exciting, is that modern neuroscience is beginning to confirm, in measurable terms, what those traditions always knew: colour is not decoration. It is communication.
The science of colour and the brain
Colour begins as light: wavelengths of electromagnetic energy hitting the retina and being converted into electrical signals that travel through the brain's visual pathways. But what happens next is far more complex and fascinating than simple perception.
Research by Gilles Vandewalle and colleagues at the University of Liège used fMRI to examine brain responses to brief exposures to monochromatic light during a working memory task. In one study of 15 participants, blue light (473 nanometres), compared with green light, increased activity in the left hippocampus, right amygdala, and left thalamus at light onset. During the task, blue light, compared with violet light, increased activity in the left middle frontal gyrus, left thalamus, and brainstem. These findings show that wavelength can modulate brain activity. They do not establish that personal colour preferences have fixed emotional meanings or reveal a person's psychological state.
Further studies using EEG have detected measurable differences in brain activity in response to colour stimuli within milliseconds. This shows that visual processing begins rapidly, but it does not show that colour preferences reveal unconscious preoccupations. Your nervous system begins processing colour before you form a conscious opinion about what you are seeing. The body, as we explored in an earlier article, Why Your Body Knows Before Your Mind Does, always knows first.
Within the Colour Mirrors approach, your attraction to certain colours and your aversion to others are interpreted as carrying information. Real information. About your current state, your unconscious preoccupations, the themes that are alive in your system right now.
Colour as a mirror
The Colour Mirrors system, developed by Melissie Jolly, offers an interpretive approach to colour. Rather than assigning fixed meanings to colours, it treats colour as a living mirror, a reflection of what is present in the person selecting it, at this moment, in this chapter of their life.
When a client selects their bottles from the Colour Mirrors range, they are not making aesthetic choices. They are responding from somewhere beneath the thinking mind. The bottles they are drawn toward may reflect the qualities, gifts, and themes they are actively living or actively longing for. The bottles they instinctively avoid may hold exactly what they are most resistant to seeing.
And the most revealing bottles of all are often the ones that provoke a strong, visceral reaction, not attraction or repulsion exactly, but something more charged. A discomfort that has information in it. A pull that feels almost uncomfortable in its intensity.
In my experience of working with colour over many years, the bottle a client reaches for first is rarely random. It is almost always pointing directly at the heart of what they most need to understand.
The colours we avoid
If you want to understand yourself, don't just notice what you love. Notice what you cannot stand.
We all have colours we find difficult, shades we dismiss as ugly, garish, or simply 'not for me'. These responses feel entirely personal and entirely reasonable. They may also be doorways.
A client who cannot bear yellow, the colour of the solar plexus, of personal power, of the bright, unapologetic self, may be someone who learned early that being too visible was dangerous. Someone who diminished their light to stay safe in a system that couldn't hold it.
A client who recoils from red, the colour of the root, of the physical, of vitality and the right to be here, fully, in a body, in a life, may be someone who has spent years floating above their own existence, more comfortable in the world of ideas than in the full-blooded reality of being alive.
A client who avoids pink, the colour of love received, of self-worth, of the softness that comes when we know we are enough, may be someone who finds receiving almost unbearable, who gives endlessly and deflects every attempt to be seen and cherished in return.
None of this is a diagnosis. It is inquiry. An invitation to curiosity. The colour doesn't tell you who you are. It invites you to look at what you might be carrying.
The colours we cannot get enough of
Equally revealing are the colours that feel like coming home. The ones you surround yourself with. The ones you reach for again and again, in your clothes, your home, the objects you choose to keep close.
These colours are not simply pleasing to you. They are feeding something. Reflecting something. Often, they are showing you the qualities you are most actively cultivating, or the frequencies you are most hungry for, the things your soul is reaching toward even when your mind hasn't caught up.
Someone deeply drawn to green, particularly the rich, settled greens of old growth woodland, is often someone in a profound process of healing. Returning to themselves. Finding their roots again after a long time away from what is true. Green, in colour therapy as in nature, is the colour of the heart, of growth that comes from the inside out, steady and unhurried as a tree.
Someone magnetised by deep violet or gold is often someone whose spiritual life is central, even if they have no language for it yet. Someone whose gifts extend beyond the conventional, who senses more than they can explain, and who is beginning, tentatively, or boldly, to trust that.
Someone who keeps returning to orange, the colour of creativity and joy and the sheer delight of being alive, is often someone in the early stages of remembering what play feels like. Recovering something that was educated or conditioned out of them, the spontaneous, expressive, alive version of themselves that got quieter over the years of becoming responsible and sensible.
Colour and the systemic field
In the previous article, we explored how family systems carry patterns, loyalties, and unresolved stories across generations. Colour therapy intersects with this systemic understanding in ways that consistently astonish me.
When a client selects a bottle and we begin to explore what it is reflecting, we very often find ourselves entering territory that is not simply personal. A colour that speaks of exclusion may be pointing to an ancestor who was cut off from the family. A colour that speaks of unresolved grief may be carrying a loss that predates the client by a generation or two. A colour that speaks of the longing to be seen may be echoing someone else's silenced voice. The field knows. The body knows. Colour gives it a language precise enough to work with.
This is why I often find that a single colour session can open conversations and seismic shifts that months of more conventional coaching have not touched. Not because colour is magic, though it can certainly feel that way. But because it bypasses the defending, explaining, rationalising mind and speaks directly to the part of a person that already knows what is true. The soul oversees choosing!
A simple colour inquiry
You don't need a set of Colour Mirrors bottles to begin exploring your relationship with colour. Start simply.
Look around the space you are in right now. What colours are present? Which ones feel nourishing, and which ones feel deadening? Which ones are absent, and does their absence tell you anything?
Then think about the colours you are wearing most often at the moment. Not what you 'should' wear or what suits you in a conventional sense. What are you actually reaching for? What does that colour carry for you?
And if you could add one colour to your life right now, one you are not currently surrounded by but feel drawn toward, what would it be? What does that colour mean to you? What quality of it are you hungry for?
These are not trivial questions. Colour is one of the most immediate and honest languages available to us. It doesn't care about the story you tell yourself. It simply reflects what is true. The invitation is to start listening.
Ready to work with colour?
Whether through a one-to-one Colour Mirrors session, a Soul Path Reading, or a deeper coaching journey, working with colour is one of the most direct routes I know to the truth of who you are, beneath the roles, the conditioning, and the stories you have been carrying.
Your colours are already talking. The question is whether you are ready to hear what they are saying. Explore all ways to work with me here.
Read more from Kath Roberts
Kath Roberts, Coach, Colour Teacher & Author
Kath Roberts is an international colour therapist, systems coach, and author who bridges the business world with the metaphysical to facilitate profound transformation. With over 37 years of work experience across leadership, sales, and consultancy with a focus on cultivating talent, she uses colour, systemic coaching, and nature-based practices to help conscious leaders and creative entrepreneurs align with their soul's purpose. She creates space and the appropriate structure so transformation moves from the inside out with ease and grace.
