Do You See Colors When You Meditate?

For many practitioners of Kundalini Yoga, the answer is Yes.

In fact, one of the most frequent question that come up in our Kundalini Yoga Teacher Training courses is:

“What does it mean when I see colors in my meditation?”

The answer may surprise you.

The presence of any color during meditation primarily indicates you are becoming more focused, sensitive, and aware, so seeing colors is good. You are beginning to experience a reality that transcends the ordinary five senses.

Yet, since we do not have the vocabulary or extensive experiences in this new transcendent consciousness of meditation and yoga, we try to impose a conventional and sensory reality around that experience so we can “understand” it.

In other words, we interpret this extrasensory reality of meditation with the sensory tools we already have – such as having colors, images, sounds, and even smells.

As such, this means the colors that you see in meditation often depend upon your own association of these colors with past experiences, feelings, and knowledge about these colors.

For example, the color red is associated by different people as being about excitement, danger, anger, activity, or, if you are a knowledgeable practitioner of yoga, the first chakra.

The problem identifying what these colors mean in meditation or, even more problematical, in having other people tell you what they mean, is that we all are interpreting these colors based upon our own personal or someone else’s imposed system that may not have anything to do with the reality of your transcendent experience.

The Science and Mystery of Transcendent Experiences - MagellanTV

This seems to be especially true when people try to use colors as indicating chakras.

Inherently, chakras do not have colors. They are beyond sensory description. Even the original yogic texts describe chakras as being like smoke or gray, and not the rainbow model of chakra colors that is now predominant.

The rainbow chakra model (red is first chakra, orange is second chakra, etc.) that yoga practitioners often used is only about 45 years old when Christopher Hills linked the chakras to these colors in his book Nuclear Evolution (1977).

While the rainbow colors of the chakras can be helpful, it is an imposed system that limits our personal discovery of them.

And while it is nice to think that if you are seeing green, your heart chakra is opening, what do these colors mean in meditation?

Can we diagnose them? Can we categorize them?

Yes, we can. The mind is so creatively clever, it will certainly offer you all sorts of answers, or equally willing to be satisfied by someone else’s clever answers.

The problem is that once we have an answer, we may miss what is really being communicated to us during the meditation.

Meditation is not about getting the right answers but asking the right questions.

But if you would like an answer to what do colors mean you see them when you meditate:

You are becoming more successful in your meditation. Keep up.

And eventually the colors will go away.