The Red & Green Riddle
Traffic lights say red is stop & green is go — but spiritual teachings tell us something different.
Red at a traffic light tells us to stop — to not move; Green tells us to go — to take action.
But in spiritual teachings we are taught the opposite.
Red is associated with the root chakra — it speaks to our personal vitality & authority.
As an energy, red is movement that grounds us to the earth — a force that assists us in feeling more secure, via the seeking of independence & becoming less attached to the tribes ideations.
There is a transition we go through in life from childlike dependency (natural process — we need loads of help as infants & children) to seeking of personal authority, as a means to secure ourselves in life, without the steady assistance of authority figures like our parents or siblings tending to us or telling us how it is.
Red is the individuation process — it represents the need to separate from being mothered externally in order to begin the journey towards actualizing our potential. It’s a spirit backed separation (action) from the tribe, from being mothered (maybe smothered), as a means to stand steadily with our feet on the ground, without another human constant tending to us.
Because of the separation element, it is traumatic to various degrees of intensity, which is dependant on an individuals experience, which is based upon the soul’s plan.
Red naturally represents some sort of movement. It is initiatory, natural energy. Leadership, attainment of a goal, drive in order to attain the soul’s desire for independence in this life — independence from conditioning.
I think of it as figuring out the recipe for the type of soup that truly feeds your soul & chopping up the basic ingredients.
Taking the lead in order to do what we need to do, to be independent & secure on earth. It’s a force leading us toward stability. It’s impulse and drive.
Red means fire. Add a lot of air and it’ll really take off — or go out. But we feel a desire to actualize something associated with our own personal will. This is the impulse we feel to take action on our soul’s desires.
Green means staying in one place to nurture and grow something. It’s calm, non-movement as a means to help a natural process take place. It’s a belly with a baby in it — and the baby isn’t always a human being. It can be a project that we feel we are meant to give birth to in this life, as the soul intends.
Because the individuation process associated with red can be traumatic, green comes in handy. Green is nurturance of the growth process — restoration of the body, mind and soul. It’s understanding & honouring that peace and contentment helps the creationary process along. How staying in one place is productive and supports the work.
If red is accessing the recipe for the soup that truly feeds your soul, and chopping up the ingredients, then green is the energy that lovingly tends to and creates the soup.
You need to sit still and tend to the soup cooking on the stove.
The soul wants us to use the red energies of individuation to develop something, through the green energy processes of Wu Wei — living in accordance with the natural course of the universe.
Here we stabilize by staying still, honouring the potential of natural processes of restoration. How growth and abundance happen through soothing ourselves, being reliably calm and balanced — within ourselves. And how that creates our external experiences.
So working on something isn’t strong armed — if you are aligned with the guiding force of spirit, then what you are creating, naturally grows.
It’s not that you don’t have to apply yourself via tending to the development process in some way — but like a baby growing in the belly, you don’t have to invasively interfere with what is being created. You don’t need to use witchcraft or ceremony. You can rely upon natural, less forced processes associated with soothing of the body & nervous system. And then the messages naturally come through, speaking to what your contribution to the process must be.
You feed the baby well while it grows, avoid toxins as best you can, and consider how to create the optimal inner environment for the baby to develop in — compassion, reliably nurturing, calm & soothing state.
You also tend to the outer world, too — what kind of environment should the baby have to transition into when it is ready to leave the belly? How do you sustain it’s life when it’s externalized from you? How do you ensure your creative projects/processes longevity? What energy do they need to live?
If you are full of fear of how the baby will turn out, how it will be received by the world, believing it won’t have what it needs to be sustained out there, that everyone will think badly of it — the baby will be jittery and rigid and develop an edge that isn’t receptive to the flow of life. It may think it needs to strong arm life, and try to force its will upon the earth.
The end result will be imbalance. Strong arming a process with fear as a catalyst will not work, and will impact the outcome of the creation.
Green is about work, but more so how things work when we stop trying to exert so much force upon natural processes.
Green is staying still in one place to nurture what we feel compelled to create. Things grow better when you nurture them.
You can’t grow something if you’re always on the run — chasing desires, driven by fear. At some point, we have to sit still in reverence for the process of growth, in order for what’s growing to last.
Straight up, you need to be able to sit still, radiating nurturance and soothing energies in order for what you want to grow to turn out well.
That includes you.
