Good morning beautiful people!

I’ve been doing a lot of teaching about Burdened Purple lately, so this is the colour I’ll share today. Purple is an aura colour that can tend to make us over-serious if we have too much of it in our aura. An excess is usually characterised by very dark purple colours. While the right amount of purple makes us responsible, spiritual, deep, intuitive, reflective and so on, an excess tends to adversely affect the belly chakra, effectively crippling the free expression of our spontaneous and playful inner child.

You can think of each colour as representing a personality type, an inner self (a part of your personality) or a set of learned and habitual behaviours. Burdened Purple, like all aura colours, expresses itself in many possible ways.

When we have very small amounts of this colour in an otherwise bright and vibrant aura, Burdened Purple can help us to become more responsible, organised, efficient, sensible, and grown-up. This colour appears in the aura when we are taking another step into the seriousness and sobriety of the adult world. It can also appear when our romantic inner child has been woken up to some realities and is becoming more level-headed (but hopefully not jaded and disillusioned).

This can be a tricky colour to keep in balance though. More than a pinch, and you can find yourself struggling with the following:

*Perfectionism. This part of us has very high, often unrelenting or unrealistic standards. The up side to this is that they apply themselves diligently to whatever they do, and can achieve incredible things as a result of their high standards. The down side is that this fastidious attention to detail can make this part of us a bit neurotic and controlling. It’s difficult to work with others when you can’t trust them to have the same standards you do, and it can be difficult to complete things or produce finished works when you are so intensely anxious about it being ‘perfect’. This can cripple the career and potential of people who would otherwise be prolific in their contributions to the world around them. Perfectionism, when managed carefully and kept under control, can be useful but if it takes over, it can wreak havoc on your life.

*Being a stickler for the rules. The dark purple part of our aura is an anxious part of our personality that manages this anxiety by trying to control everything, hence the obsession with rules and regulations. I’m sure you can see how this ties in with perfectionism too! Being good or ‘perfect’ in our behaviour though, is only part of the picture here: the main issue is using rigid adherence to a set of rules and routines in order to reduce the likelihood of anything unexpected happening. This part of our personality doesn’t like surprises! Unfortunately, this excessive need for control can see us being intolerant and impatience with both ourselves and others. Our self-talk can become highly critical and negative under the influence of this colour. We expect too much from ourselves. If we then start expecting too much from others, we tip over into another dark purple colour called Defensive Purple, and stop trusting people altogether.

*Being over-responsible. Hence the name for this colour; “Burdened Purple”. This part of our personality will happily play the martyr by taking on everyone else’s stuff and making it our responsibility. For some, there can be an almost perpetually guilty undertone to this aura-frequency, as though everything that happens or doesn’t happen in the world around us is somehow our fault and our responsibility to fix. Another pattern I’ve seen in people is that while they manage not to take on the burdens of others fairly well, they refuse to let anyone help them with their own burdens. And then there are the ones who somehow manage to turn everything in their life into a burden whilst refusing to do anything constructive to change this and complaining about their lot in life to everyone who will listen (people tend to avoid them after a while).

*Being the hero for others while not trusting others to be the heroic. For example, we might not trust them to be their own hero, or to be our hero. There is always a proud side to the darker purple colours…. an ego aspect that can be hard to see and own. The shadow side of the hero archetype can express itself in many ways. “I should be perfect” “I should be able to do it all myself” “I have to be strong for everyone else” can all sound like noble sentiments, but there is a definitely a lack of humility underlying each one of these beliefs. In reality, there is probably a lot going on here to do with the need for control and not trusting other people. We might not trust others to look after themselves, so we do it for them. We might not trust that other people are as strong as we are, so we lock ourselves into a Rock-of-Gilbraltar role until our health collapses and we wonder why. We might not trust others to do as good a job as we will, because the mere thought of imperfection makes us feel inadequate and anxious, so we do it all ourselves in order to maintain control.

*Hidden shame. And of course, whenever there is excess pride, shame is hiding behind it. Pride is helpful to an extent: taking pride in our work and our standards ensures a good work-ethic. Taking some pride in our appearance stops us from walking about unkept and unwashed. But excess pride is usually compensating for some deeper hidden shame within the psyche or in some other part of our lives. And with this usually comes some feeling of not having control or feeling powerless in some way. Embracing the hero archetype is also an attempt to regain self-respect, perhaps because we lost if somewhere along the way, and respect from others, perhaps because we didn’t (or can’t) get it from someone important in lives (like a parent).

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So what can we do to remedy this colour and get it back in balance again? Here are some suggestions:

Embrace Humility

*You are not God, it isn’t all up to you to fix everything and/or save everyone. When you catch yourself taking responsibility for stuff that isn’t yours (like another person’s feelings or the natural consequences of a choice they made), hand this feeling over to God or the angels or whatever it is your believe in. Let other people have their own experiences and get on with living your own life.

*Stop expecting yourself be to perfect and allow yourself to be human. Forgive yourself for being ‘only human’ and therefore fallible. No one attains supposed perfection without practising a skill and making a gazillion mistakes along the way. Stop being afraid to make mistakes. Making mistakes and learning from them is how we learn. Making a mistake doesn’t mean that you are a mistake.

Reconnect with your Inner Child

*Shake off some of that over-serious, over-responsible mood by allowing yourself to regularly indulge in some fun, pleasure and play. It can help to examine what was role modelled for you by your caregivers in childhood. Did you have a parent who never knew how to relax and just be? Sometimes there are self-worth issues here that get handed down through the generations, where people don’t feel worthy of love and approval unless they ‘earn it’ by staying constantly busy and productive. Work on loving yourself for who you are, not for what you do.

*Recognise that wonderful solutions and experiences can arise by allowing some spontaneity and rest in life. Recreation is a beautiful word that could be re-written as ‘re-creation’, a pause for breath within which you literally recreate yourself anew. Burdened Purple is an old, heavy, rigid colour that can age us in so many ways. Stay supple in mind and body by staying connected with the natural creativity and revitalisation that comes from regular play and rest time.

Surrender to the Unknown and make friends with Uncertainty and Adventure.

*You don’t know/control everything, you can’t know/control everything and nor are you expected to. Instead of trying to control everything with rules and perfectionism, start to make friends with the Universe. Experiment with the belief that it’s entirely possible you life in a friendly universe full of benevolent forces that are supporting you. If you aren’t inclined to a spiritual perspective on life, try cultivating faith in your own ability to adapt to whatever life throws at you and balance this by practising the art of reaching out for, and accepting, help from others (i.e. trust and connection).

*Bust the habit of always expecting things to be difficult. Burdened Purple is the part of our aura that has a very bad habit of predicting the worst. This is the part of us that responds to disappointment by deciding not to have hope anymore: the theory here is that bracing for the worst will protect us from further disappointment. We can say “See, I told you so” and be right, rather than feeling shocked, let down and perhaps slightly humiliated. The problem with this approach is that if you go around looking for problems all the time, you will probably find them. Our negative expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies. And when you are always looking for shadows in the darkness you won’t be able the see the sparkles in the light, and you will miss out on some truly beautiful experiences that restore your faith in life and the value of a more positive outlook.

Bust your Guilt-Ridden Addiction to Rules and Self-Recrimination

*Go on a 1 week diet where you avoid saying or thinking the following:

“I should…”

“I should have…”

“I ought to…”

“I have to…”

And replace this with the following:

“I can…”

“I could…”

“I could have (done ____) but I didn’t…”

“I choose to….”

“I chose to”

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Many blessing to you all! Finally, the primary therapeutic colour for dark purple is bright orange! Let me know what you think, or if you have had any success with retraining your Burdened Purple aspects of self. I always remind my clients to value and appreciate this part of themselves: it’s about balancing ourselves, not making an entire part of our personality wrong and bad.

OM xx