Our emotions are sending us messages all of the time. Often it can feel difficult and overwhelming to figure out what these messages are, or if we need to pay attention to them. The bigger the emotion, the more difficult it can be to figure out.

For generations, it has also been the norm to not build emotional literacy—being able to understand our emotions and express them productively. Living was a matter of survival, meaning our parents, grandparents, and ancestors needed to prioritize things like shelter, food, and water over building emotional literacy.

And, on top of all of this, as a society, we have categorized emotions as good or bad. For example, happy is good, angry is bad.

All of these factors have complicated our relationship with emotions.

Color Mending was created as a simple and gentle way for anyone to be able to start building emotional literacy. When we are emotionally literate, we’re able to:

• identify what emotion we’re feeling

• understand why we’re feeling the emotion

• proactively express the emotion

When you begin to build your emotional literacy you’ll experience a transformation. You’ll find that you’re able to be responsive to situations instead of being reactive. You’ll find that it’s easier to tap into your intuition, to understand how to make choices that align to your highest good. You’ll experience a deeper sense of peace with who you are, what you’re doing, and who you’re becoming. And, you’ll step into a growth mindset where you’ll view yourself as an evolution, leaving room for all the highs and lows of life.

And, yes! It’s really as simple as coloring anything you want to color on a blank piece of paper.

The goal of Color Mending is to color out an emotion onto a blank piece of paper. Why? Emotions are the way our subconscious delivers messages to us. We can uncover what that message is by looking at what colors and shapes we used:

• Colors represent emotional states (e.g. happy, sad, peaceful, mad, loving, jealous)

• Shapes represent what the emotion is a reflection of (e.g. triangles represent spirituality, circles represent how certain or complete something feels)

By combining the meaning of the color and shape you can identify what emotion you’re experiencing and understand what the emotion is trying to bring to your attention.

In the Color Mending ebook, there are 2 charts to help you begin to interpret your colorings. The first is a Color Chart. The second is a Common Shapes Chart.

These charts were developed by synthesizing data from art therapy, dream interpretations, and color therapy.

The Color Mending ebook is a comprehensive guide that gives you all of the information you need to guide yourself through a Color Mending process.

Chelsea is the creator of Color Mending. Here is her story:

By the time I was 26 I was suppressing emotions so much it felt like I was trying to hold 30 beach balls under water (in this metaphor, beach balls represent what emotions I was feeling). I was exhausted. My solution to find relief was to enroll myself into Meditation School.

In Meditation School I became certified in the Integrated Processing Technique (known as IPT). This entails guiding people through visualizations and asking people to pull out their emotional state into shapes and colors. We specifically focused what the colors meant. Each color has different meanings for heavy and light emotions. We used this information as a gut check to make sure that we were talking about what the person we were guiding needed to talk about.

The more I worked with people, the more I began to realize that if I took the information of the color and the shape and put them together, I could use this information as a guide. Using the information in this way helped the meditation (1) go deeper, and (2) accelerated healing.

Also during this time, I began hosting paint nights for friends and family. This is when I learned that you can paint out your emotional state - it didn’t have to be something you visualize. I began exploring coloring out emotions using different mediums with my clients. This is when I realized that if your intent is to color out your emotional state and to receive the messages your emotions are trying to bring to your attention, it didn’t matter what medium you used.

I also learned that coloring out your emotions is a solid way to build emotional literacy. For example, when I first started my meditation journey my emotional literacy was a 3 out of 10. I was able to identify if I was feeling a heavy or light emotion, and I was able to label the emotions happy, mad, and sad.

Using Color Mending I was able to learn how to label all of the emotions I was feeling. And I learned how to discover what messages my emotions bring to my attention.

Since 2016, I’ve helped hundreds of people do the same. And you can do the same too!