Color Is the Language of Experience

From the moment you arrived, you were already in a process you had no say in whether you wanted to be part of. You didn’t choose your name. You didn’t choose your family history. You had no vote in the infinitesimal variables that set your life in motion, or any of the backstories you would inherit. But here you are, moving through—part of a cycle of becoming and perishing, whether you like it or not.

As for me, I arrived in 1981 into a well-laid-out history. My parents had married in Willow City, North Dakota, in 1978, at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. In 2009, that same church held its final funeral for my one-hundred-year-old maternal grandmother before closing its doors for good.

Willow is the kind of sleepy, no-traffic-light town you’d expect to find in the Dakotalands. It barely exists on the map. Farms and grassland stretch in every direction over the native homelands of the Sioux, Assiniboine, Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa. Time holds more value than money, mostly because there isn’t much of it. Kitchen lights are still left on. The wintry cold bites and cuts, but no one complains. To proud Dakotans, there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. Besides, what would be the point of cursing what simply is?

My grandmother’s house, which she lovingly called her shack, was mint green. I loved that little shack. The rows of home-canned goods lining the musty garage. The smell of real food emanating from her stove. The sound of heat forcing its way through the vents in winter. The compost pile warming in the back yard, nearly ready to spread over the rows of cabbage. A true homestead built not for hobby, but for survival.

I’m nostalgic for that place. But to you? It would likely mean nothing. Just another house. Another structure in the middle of nowhere. A place without context. Without color.

To me, that house didn’t just hold my grandmother; it was where stories unfolded and relationships grew. And in return, it shaped me, coloring who I am today.

When I close my eyes, I can still see its color. I can feel the mint green as a welcoming hug. I can feel everything it once held: ritual, love, and presence. I know this because I feel.

Fifteen years after her funeral, I drove past her shack for the first time. I had become a husband and a father. 

Her house was still standing. The greenery around her home was overgrown, and her well-tended gardens were gone. The mint-green color was replaced by a distant, nondescript dark blue. The house structure looked the same, but it didn’t feel the same.

Goethe once called blue a “retreating color,” the kind that pulls away as you approach. That idea felt right. The house color hadn’t just changed; it had receded from me.

That’s when I felt a deep impression: Color isn’t just how something appears; it’s also how it lands. Color doesn’t simply show us where things are; it reveals how it feels to be near them. It makes the world feel close or far. Inviting or cold. Familiar or strange.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work in Phenomenology of Perception helps us understand this. He asserted that perception isn’t passive; it’s how we participate in the world. And color, he wrote, is not just surface; it’s how things appear to us as real. So when color disappears, it’s not only about sadness or mood but about how reality lands differently in the felt sense.

Merleau-Ponty called this reversibility, the idea that perception isn’t one-way. The seer and the seen are intertwined. It’s a relationship. So, when you look at a color, it doesn’t just sit there waiting for your interpretation. It meets you where you are experientially. It moves you, or it doesn’t. And if you feel indifferent, the color mirrors your indifference.

In other words, feelings, which color our experience, don’t just tell us what’s happening. They tell us how it matters. They don’t merely report on the color itself; they reveal the body’s experience in relation to it. Feelings reveal how it feels to be here in the experience. As Antonio Damasio wrote in Feeling & Knowing, “Feelings are interactive perceptions,” a reminder that our sensations are never just passive reflections but active exchanges with the world.

This realization momentarily confronted my naive way of experiencing the world. Colors, like feeling, like truth, like us, aren’t fixed. They are interactive and constantly evolving. 

***

Now imagine a world without color. 

What would be lost? 

What would be lost not only from experience but from being, feeling, and knowing? 

What would happen to your sense of aliveness if color disappeared?

Now pause. I want you to experience color not as something to label but as something to experience. 

Close your eyes, count to five, and then open them. Let your gaze be met by whatever color appears to speak to you. Once you are aware of what comes, sustain your gaze with this color. Notice its tone, its pull, and how it contrasts with the backdrop. Feel your connection to this color and how it lands within you. Notice how you don’t just experience color from the outside. Sense how it touches you within as well. 

Now notice how color is everywhere. 

Whatever color seemed to speak to you, ask yourself: What is it about that color? Is it a preferred color? Did it invite warmth? A sense of calm? Does it remind me of something, some feeling? 

Artist Paul Cézanne once said that color is the place where the brain and the universe meet. He was onto something. Color doesn’t need a name to be real. It simply is everywhere. Dark blue. Mint green. We don’t question either color’s reality or its belonging. We don’t ask them to justify their tone or explain their contrast. We let them be what they are.

Color is a phenomenological experience. Meaning … it isn’t contained in objects but evolves through relationship: between light, surface, and you who sees and receives. And in turn, you are touched back.

For example, red looks soft at sunset but harsh under fluorescent lights. It’s not just what you see, but how and where you see it.

Consider the last time you watched a sunset. You didn’t need the exact names of the colors to experience or feel them. The names of the hues didn’t make the oranges, reds, or purples any more real. If anything, trying to name them might have pulled you out of experiencing and being with the moment. 

It’s not that precise distinctions, or even the exact Pantone codes, don’t matter. They do. But it’s worth asking how important classification really is when the point of processing our lived experience is about being with the emergent sensations that arise from within our bodies, those moments when feeling and universe meet. 

When it comes to ourselves, who we think we are, or who we’re afraid we might be, we tend to compress the full spectrum of our being into a single color: worthy or unworthy, good or broken, pass or fail. We simplify ourselves into categories, then mistake the label for the truth.

This egoic flattening shows up elsewhere, too, whether in the stories we tell, conclusions we reach, or ways we cut ourselves off from what’s possible. We want one label or categorization to make it fit. One story to make it make sense. But the urge for finality and certainty compresses the very spectrum we’re meant to experience.

These narratives that are harsh or absolute don’t always bring us closer to truth or being human; their coloring stalls us. They offer a form of knowing that feels controlled, even righteous, but what they really do is confuse our relationship with being, feeling, and knowing. 

Colored statements like “I’m fine” or “It wasn’t that bad” may not be outright lies, but they aren’t the whole truth, either. They’re defenses, partial truths that shield us from the discomfort of what lies compressed beneath them.

As somatic therapist Peter Levine reminds us:

“If healing is what you want, your first step is to be open to the possibility that literal truth is not the most important consideration. The conviction that it really happened, the fear that it may have happened, the subtle searching for evidence that it did happen, can all get in your way as you try to hear what the felt sense wants to tell you. ... If healing is what you want, it doesn’t matter whether you know the concrete truth.”

To be clear, we’re not banishing the mind or the brilliance of inquiry and problem-solving. They have a place. And we’re not asking you to abandon the truth. Quite the opposite: we’re asking you to approach yourself differently, not as something to nail down or prove, but as something to experience. That’s how the integration of any of life’s experiences happens: not through control, but through presence and contact. Integration isn’t a tidy summation; it’s a deepening relationship with what’s becoming.

Still, the questions linger: Aren’t labels useful? Don’t we need to know what we’re looking at?

Yes. Labels do help, and precision absolutely has its place, such as in science, in surgery, and in opening your parachute.

But remember, our focus is centered around the processing and integration of the non-ordinary states of consciousness that one experiences during and after psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions that might initially resist labels and meaning-making. 

The invitation here is to decenter the mind’s need for resolution so it doesn’t crowd out the felt truths your body knows how to process on its own.

Why Color?

There’s no such thing as a neutral color. Neutral colors as experiences don’t exist. I’m not talking about the beige or gray color palettes offered by paint companies. I’m talking about feelings again. Neutral color doesn’t exist, similar to how neutral laughter or non-moving wind doesn’t exist.

Color is fundamental to our existence. And yet, days can go by when we rarely notice it or how much it shapes the way we feel.

If you are lucky enough to see color, you know how much it makes us feel. We assign moral value through color, such as in the colors of a country’s flag, or how we grieve, celebrate, and remember in color. 

We never see color by itself; we see it in contrast. Red means something because of what’s around it. The red that feels comforting during a sunset might feel aggressive on a warning sign. Blue next to yellow might feel playful. Blue next to gray might feel lonely.

This contrast is how perception works. 

It’s shaped by the one who’s looking. A warm sunset. A cold hospital room. A calming green forest after rain. Even in our most grounded moments, we are participating in, and coloring, what we perceive. 

And when color goes missing, something in us does too.

All this matters because when we recognize that perception—like color—is relational and alive, we stop treating our experiences as fixed truths or personal defects. Instead, we see them as dynamic interactions between our history, our body, and the world around us. This shift is essential for healing: it means that the way things feel now isn’t the way they have to stay. As we process, our capacity to sense, feel, and receive the full spectrum of experience gradually returns, one shade at a time.

1. Perception as ParticipationColor is neither in the object nor in the eye alone. Rather, it emerges through relationship, light, material, attention, and context.
2. Contrast and DifferentiationWithout color, the world tends toward monotony. Color introduces contrast, the precondition for meaning. Contrast structures experience, and value arises through their intensification.
3. Embodiment and AffectColor is not only seen; it is felt. It discloses the world as inherently affective, not merely cognitive.
4. World-DisclosureTo perceive color is to experience a world already imbued with significance.

Like language, color communicates: it signals, evokes, and shapes understanding. When we see the golden flare of dawn, the somber blue of twilight, or the tender green of spring, we are spoken to by existence itself.

What Is Phenomenology?

You don’t need a philosophy degree to understand phenomenology. You’ve already lived it.

Phenomenology is the study of experience—not as data, not as brain states, but as felt life. It asks: What is it like to be you, here, right now? Not in theory, but in your body. In your breath. In the rhythm of how the world touches you and how you touch it back.

Edmund Husserl, considered the founding father of phenomenology, called it a “return to the things themselves”—an attempt to notice reality before we explain it away. Maurice Merleau-Ponty took this further, insisting that experience isn’t something that happens in you, like a movie playing in the mind. It’s something you participate in. You are not a mind attached to a body. You are a lived body. You feel from somewhere. You perceive from within the world, not outside it.

This way of seeing isn’t just philosophical; it has real implications for how we heal. This distinction matters, especially when it comes to trauma and healing with the use of psychedelics.

Because if you’ve done a high-dose journey or a deep somatic dive, you already know: insight alone is not integration. You can understand your trauma completely and still be stuck inside it. Why? Because trauma doesn’t live in your ideas; it lives in your perception, how your body meets the world, what it braces against, and what it allows in.

Phenomenology helps us track our perceptions. It invites us to slow down and listen, not just to what we think but to how we encounter. It’s not about getting to the bottom of your story; it’s about staying with the moment your story tightens or breaks open.

Psychedelics can momentarily disrupt the default settings of consciousness. They can soften the grip of personal narrative. But the process of integration—the part that happens after the peak—is about learning to perceive again. To restore contrast. To sense what’s true before you name it.

That’s phenomenology in action. 

How to Approach Yourself Like a Phenomenologist (or Like a Color)

If we take seriously the idea that we are lived phenomena, then being aware of what colors our lives, and what colors are missing, opens up a very different relationship to healing. Phenomenology invites us to meet experience as it is, without rushing to interpret, manage, or solve it. And when we approach ourselves in this way, we begin to notice not just what’s happening, but how it’s happening.

You’re not a static self; you’re a shifting event shaped by the light you’re in and what you’re standing next to.

Here are five ways to begin to notice the color of our lives:

1. We Emerge Through Contrast

Just like color needs contrast to be seen, we come to know ourselves not in isolation but in relation. You don’t know warmth until you’ve felt cold. You don’t recognize calm until you’ve met chaos. Who you are isn’t a fixed identity; it’s something that appears through the contrasts life offers. Healing, then, isn’t about reaching a final state. It’s about restoring the conditions that allow contrast to reappear so we can perceive ourselves again.

2. Context Matters

Color changes depending on the light, surface, and surroundings. So do we. Who you are in a loving relationship is different from who you are in survival mode. Approaching yourself phenomenologically means asking: What is this reaction responding to? Instead of labeling or pathologizing experience, we begin to see it as responsive, contingent, and emergent.

3. You Are Not Contained; You Show Up in Relationship

Just like color isn’t in the object, your sense of self doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It arises in tone of voice, eye contact, silence, conflict, and touch. The right conditions reveal you, not invent a new you.

4. You Shift Depending on the Light

Your experience of grief at 3 a.m. in a hospital room is not the same as your experience of grief with a friend sitting with you by a campfire. A phenomenological approach allows for these shifts without demanding consistency. Instead of asking, “Is this true?” we might ask: “What is this experience showing me right now?”

5. You’re Not a Problem to Solve

You don’t solve color. You perceive it. You let it move you. Likewise, the self is not a puzzle to fix or decode; it’s an unfolding to witness. An atmosphere to inhabit. Approaching yourself phenomenologically means listening without rushing to explain. It means being with yourself like you would be with a sunset: open-eyed, curious, and receptive.

In that sense, these practices are more than techniques. They are invitations to return to a fuller spectrum of experience. This book isn’t only about color in a literal sense; it’s a way to learn how to perceive again after perception has collapsed.

Because color doesn’t begin or end. It evolves.

So do you.